I advise you to read this book, then wait for awhile and then read it again. For while it may not be Narnia, there is magic in it. Douglas Gresham, stepson of C. S. Lewis.
I took Gresham’s wise advice. I read Once Upon a Wardrobe by Patti Callahan, set it aside and reread it a month later. True magic emerged in the second reading because I knew the plot and could be alert for other gems.
It is as gentle a book as it can be when one of the main characters is an eight-year-old with an incurable heart defect. There are no villains in this book, only people doing the best that they can each day.
All George wants is to know where Narnia is. He asks Megs, his sister, a student at the college where C. S. Lewis teaches to ask the author of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. She does multiple times and each time, he tells her stories of his childhood.
Megs, a mathematician major, is frustrated by his stories, but George relishes each one as she retells them. He says, “How could I possibly sleep in the middle of a story? I was just…in the story. Which isn’t sleep at all, but something brighter and…”
All avid readers knows exactly where George is because we’ve been in that very spot in a story. Some movie goers may know the same sensation.
With the second reading, I found several threads running through this book. I ended up with a long list of great quotes.
First: the value of reading is an ongoing theme. “Do You choose these life changing books or do they choose you?”
Second: boredom. “It is only for lack of imagination that you are bored.”
Third: origin. “Can anyone - can you - say exactly how things are made up? How one of you physicists comes up with a new theory? How imagination rises to make meaning? When you have an idea, can you tell George or your friend exactly how you thought of it? Its genesis is very mysterious.”
Fourth: authorship. “Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills.”
I love this concept. Read a book, wait awhile, reread it. When we heed such advice, we make discoveries that we overlooked the first time around.
I learned this lesson early on when I received a copy of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott for my tenth birthday. I started reading that night and looked forward to each chance to continue reading. Thereafter, I reread the book each year for the next decade. It grew dearer with each reread. Since then, I’ve picked it up every few years to reread. These days, reading it for the umpteenth time is like visiting with old friends who are inclined to let me in on little secrets I failed to notice early on.
Gresham, the son of Lewis’s wife, Joy Davidson, developed a close relationship with his stepfather. And he became friends with best selling author Patti Callahan Henry as she researched the life of his mother for her book Becoming Mrs. C. S. Lewis, also an intriguing tale.
Both the novelist Callahan and the actor, biographer, film produce and executive record producer Gresham share an appreciation for Lewis, the British author and lay theologian who once said, “Sometimes fairy stories may say best what is to be said.”
Callahan echoes Lewis’s sentiment. “A myth tells the truth without facts.”
Once Upon a Wardrobe invites the reader to step childlike through that closet’s back wall into the world of imagination. Callahan writes, “And you’ve allowed me to see that we are enchanted not by being able to explain it all, but by its very mystery. That is - finally that is - enough.”
2022
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