The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis.

By Alan Jacobs. HarperSanFrancisco, 368 pp., $25.95.

Into the Wardrobe: C. S. Lewis and the Narnia Chronicles.

By David C. Downing. Jossey-Bass, 256 pp., $19.95.

Revisiting Narnia: Fantasy, Myth and Religion in C. S. Lewis' Chronicles.

Edited by Shanna Caughey. BenBella Books, 240 pp., $14.95 paperback.

The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy.

Edited by Gregory Bassham and Jerry L. Walls. Open Court, 288 pp., $17.95 paperback.

GIVEN THE much anticipated release next month of the film version of C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, one might expect a glut of books on Lewis and Narnia. The books cited here suggest the many angles of vision and academic disciplines from which Lewis's work generally and the Chronicles in particular continue to receive serious attention.

It has for years been something of a mystery to me that Lewis's life is of so much interest to his readers; for, truth to tell, not a lot happened in the life. ("I like monotony," Lewis once told Time magazine.) Nonetheless, Alan Jacobs has given us another biography--which is certainly better than many already available, and which at several places helpfully corrects the pop psychology advanced a decade and a half ago in A. N. Wilson's eccentric biography.

There are places where Jacobs's work also seems flawed. His discussion of several theological points is more assured than nuanced, and any biographer today owes his readers some insight into claims of the late Kathryn Lindskoog that a few of Lewis's posthumously published essays and fragments are inauthentic (and, not to put too fine a point upon it, forgeries). One need not accept those claims, but one must help readers to understand them.

Although Jacobs treats the whole of Lewis's life and writing, his biography always keeps an eye on the Narnia stories. (Even biographers are allowed to pay some heed to publishers' marketing concerns.) The question animating his narrative is, as he puts it, "what sort of person wrote the Chronicles of Narnia?" The central theme of his answer turns on the tension (and eventual reconciliation) of reason and imagination in Lewis.

This is not a new insight--Corbin Carnell treated it more than 30 years ago in Bright Shadow of Reality, whose subtitle was the nicely phrased "C. S. Lewis and the Feeling Intellect," and David Downing also emphasizes it in his new book but Jacobs uses this narrative thread to good advantage in uncovering continuity in Lewis's life. And, of course, it is imagination above all that is on display in the creation of Narnia.

Why, one might wonder, did Lewis write these stories? One thesis, offered by more than one writer, rests on the claim that Lewis gave up entirely his interest in reasoned apologetics after a 1948 debate with Elizabeth Anscombe at a meeting of the Oxford Socratic Club. The claim--proffered by Wilson, for example--is that Anscombe's criticism of Lewis's argument in chapter 3 of Miracles was so devastating that Lewis's confidence in rational argument was thoroughly shaken, leading him to turn away from reason to a world of imagination. What there is to be said for this hypothesis Victor Reppert notes in a carefully argued essay (in The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy), even as he also notes the enormous flaws in it.

If not for this reason, then why did Lewis write the Chronicles? It might be best for us simply to appeal to the Muse, but there are other factors which deserve mention. Reppert notes, as does Downing, the possible influence and example of Lewis's friend J. R. R. Tolkien. Downing also calls attention to the images that had been incubating for years in Lewis's fertile imagination and that suddenly came to life in the Narnia stories, and Jacobs suggests that we should hardly be surprised when a writer with a long record of concern for moral education turns to writing stories for children.

Jacobs also helpfully reminds readers of what was actually happening in Lewis's life when he first began to write these stories. He was, for one thing, exhausted from his work and the demands of his everyday life, and when exhausted, Lewis had always turned for renewal to fantasy and romance. Why not write the sort of book he loved to read?

He was also, Jacobs notes, increasingly famous. With that fame, however, came the frustrations of being looked to by many as a kind of "answer man." And he must have remembered how he himself had come to faith--not simply be cause he had been convinced by argument but, in large measure, because the Christian faith struck him as a "myth" that had actually become "fact."

When Lewis did put pen to paper, the seven stories of the Chronicles were produced--even for a writer as fluent as Lewis--in an astonishingly rapid burst of creativity (with the publication of the first in 1950 and the seventh in 1956). There were a few false starts along the way--especially with respect to The Magician's Nephew--and readers interested in tracing the course of Narnia's creation will profit from Downing's discussion in Into the Wardrobe.