The Lion, the Witch and the Boardroom

A chronicle of Narnia, rebanding, money, morality and the battle for the legacy of CS Lewis

Nearly four decades after his death ­ he died on the same day as John F Kennedy ­ CS Lewis is as controversial as he was in life. In fact, Lewis (1898­1963) is one of those writers whose reputations depend quite as much on large numbers of people actively disliking them as on the approbation of their fans. A figure of near-Messianic status to devotees of his religious apologetics, a fixture of the children's best-seller lists since the first appearance of The Chronicles of Narnia back in the 1950s, he is still capable of inspiring the most fanatical hostility in readers who don't care for his books, his religious beliefs or the shock-waves set off by his famously rebarbative personality. His friend JRR Tolkien once versified the extreme reactions provoked by his own work: "The Lord of the Rings/ Is one of those things/ If you like it you do/ If you don't, then you boo." The same could be said of Lewis, Narnia, The Screwtape Letters and a long career in the role of what was once unkindly characterised as "Everyman's theologian".

The latest row ­ deriving, like much interest in Lewis, from the United States ­ has fairly innocuous origins. The Narnia stories, charming if conspicuously Christian allegories featuring a family of children who fetch up in a fantasy world ruled by a charismatic lion named Aslan, came out at the rate of one a year. The first, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) saw the Pevenseys arrive in Narnia through the piece of furniture of the title. The seventh and final volume, The Last Battle (1956), reassembled most of the sequence's characters for an apocalyptic ending of Narnian time. Now Lewis's US publishers, HarperCollins, are reported to have decided that there should be an eighth volume. The novel, its author as yet unidentified (names that have been mentioned include Diana Wynn Jones and Berlie Doherty), is due to be published some time in 2003. It will not constitute a sequel but, according to Simon Adley, director of the CS Lewis Estate, will "fill in the gaps" apparent in the existing work. As to the question of why this seven-volume sequence, continually in print for half a century, should suddenly need a coping stone, the estate, conscious of its position in the slipstream of Harry Potter, has professed itself worried by the lack of new products. "The whole children's market is geared towards anything new," Adley maintains. "You can only keep rejacketing something a certain number of times, and in the end you have to produce something new."

Perhaps you do. But how do you go about producing it? And how, much more important, do you preserve the integrity of what exists and ­ without sounding unduly sanctimonious ­ your duty to an author 40 years under the sod? Various US cultural law enforcement officers have already deduced that HarperCollins US and the Lewis estate are off in pursuit of what The New York Times has called "a discreet strategy to avoid direct links to the Christian imagery and theology that suffused the Narnia novels and inspired Lewis." In support of this theory, the NYT has offered up an internal memorandum from HarperCollins's San Francisco office, discussing a proposed public TV documentary about Lewis's life. "Obviously this is the biggie as far as the estate and our publishing interests are concerned," its anonymous author concluded. "We'll need to be able to give explicit assurance that no attempt will be made to correlate the stories to Christian imagery/theology."

A sceptic might wonder whether this doesn't sound like a version of Animal Farm where the pigs opt for a private/public partnership or a retelling of The Pilgrim's Progress where Christian emerges from Vanity Fair with a sheaf of hire-purchase agreements. In the end, the television deal fell through, but a suspicion remains that plans are in train to fillet Lewis's works, or at any rate future Lewis works, of their allegorical substance. HarperCollins has issued a statement terse even by the standards of publishers' statements. ("The goal of HarperCollins Publishers and the owners and managers of the CS Lewis Estate is to publish the works of CS Lewis to the broadest possible audience, and leave any interpretation of the works to the reader. The works of CS Lewis will continue to be published by HarperCollins as written by the author with no alteration.") Clearly, though, with a sequel pending, something, in some transatlantic boardroom, is up.

The spectacle of a literary estate moving with the times, attempting in however subtle a way to adapt its products to the demands of a capricious and ever-evolving marketplace, is by no means new. Agatha Christie's compendious oeuvre, for example, is currently being updated from its period grounding among the Lisle stockings and Bugatti racers. Even the cricketing references in PG Wodehouse's early school stories, I noticed, have been dragged into the post-war era. With someone of the stature of Lewis ­ a writer whose admirers are not so much fans as disciples ­ the stakes are that much higher. Whatever may be on the cards, from thematic obfuscation to "filling in the gaps", would matter less if Lewis himself weren't such a mighty presence in the world of 20th-century evangelical Christianity. Agatha Christie wrote detective novels. Lewis wanted to usher you into the presence of God.

To understand Lewis, and to measure some of the hurricane- strength gales that continue to blow around his reputation, it is necessary to know something of the literary- cum-emotional tradition from which he sprang. AN Wilson, whose 1991 biography offers the best introduction to the man and his work, marks him down as a romantic egotist in the Wordsworth mould ­ someone whose whole philosophical outlook, with its vast enthusiasms and antagonisms, was bound up with the question of himself.

An expatriate Ulsterman, he was elected a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1925 after a dazzling undergraduate career. His early academic forays were notable for an absolute hatred of any modern literary tendency. Joyce, Kafka, Eliot ­ all were simply beneath the notice of a man who felt more at home in the 16th century and who together with his arch-crony Tolkien conspired to have the English faculty exclude from the syllabus all literature written after 1832. Undergraduates who sympathised with the modern movement came in for similarly harsh treatment. John Betjeman, one of Lewis's first pupils, left a devastating portrait in his verse autobiography, Summoned by Bells, of the moment when Lewis declined to support a proposed examination retake. "I sought my tutor in his arid rooms/ Who told me 'You'd have only got a third.'"

To some of his pupils, Lewis was an inspiration. Even a sceptic such as Kingsley Amis thought him, like Tolkien, "big enough to be worth laughing at". Others ­ mostly gilded triflers from the Betjeman stable ­ simply loathed him. Following a religious conversion in his early thirties, Lewis took up apologetics. One of George Orwell's wartime "As I Please" columns, written for the left-wing weekly Tribune, contains a bruising attack on the "chummy little radio talks" that had realised The Screwtape Letters and Beyond Personality. Lewis's idea, Orwell suggested, was to persuade the suspicious reader or listener that one could still be a Christian and "a good chap". Lewis's works, he maintained, were prime examples of the "silly-clever religious book, which goes on the principle not of threatening the unbeliever with Hell, but of showing him up as an illogical ass, incapable of clear thought and unaware that everything he says has been said and refuted before."

And then came the Narnia books, with their winsome, clean-minded children, their (mostly) clear-cut moral oppositions, their situations drawn from the New Testament (Aslan's return from the dead, the lamb who greets the travellers at the end of the world in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader). Tolkien, who had spent 30 years fashioning the mythological universe behind the not-yet-published Lord of the Rings, was unimpressed by what he regarded as a hastily-written fantasy world by numbers.

Half a century later, The Chronicles of Narnia still produce extraordinarily mixed reactions, ranging from deep distrust of the allegorical add-ons to admiration for Lewis's ability to create a world in which children feel very much at home. Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, for example, thinks the Narnia sequence "terrific" and, by extension, "untouchable". AN Wilson reckons The Last Battle to be "absolutely superb" and maintains that any attempt to dilute Lewis's message for the secular modern audience would be "farcical... like rewriting Dante". On the other side of the library, though, the literary world is still swarming with Lewis-haters. Philip Pullman (whose bestselling fiction for the young is itself loaded with religious mythology), has accused him of "libelling life", while the novelist Philip Hensher has declared that anything would be better for a book-hungry child than something from the pen that produced The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

And yet, although the vein of his personality runs through everything that CS Lewis laid his hand on, the next book marketed under his name will not have been written by him. Rather like Virginia Andrews, whose novels go on appearing in the shops, without explanation, long after their author's death, Lewis has become not so much a writer as a brand. Branding has come late to the world of literature, but it has come with a vengeance. The point about a brand is that its audience has continually to be extended. The producer increases audience and brand awareness by offering a product that has maximum appeal ­ or, to put it another way, offers the least offence to the largest number of people. Heaven knows what a Muslim would make of the dark-skinned Calormenes, who live next door to Narnia and worship Aslan's rival deity "Tash", but no doubt this little difficulty has occurred to the executive in charge of the Middle-Eastern sales patch.

The drawback about Lewis from the point of view of "branding" is that allegory is central to what he does. Christianity is to Narnia what deprivation was to Philip Larkin. But there is also a much more fundamental point that anyone contemplating additions to the Narnian canon might usefully bear in mind. Books and their authors, it can not be too often repeated, have a life of their own.