Oh, I tried. I read The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe back when I was in highschool and it was okay. I also read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which I found tedious and The Magician's Nephew, which I remember as being sort of horrifying.
Clearly, I was an idiot.
I think the problem is that fantasy was a genre I was totally unfamilar with at that time. Although I grew up in a house packed to the gills with books, neither of my parents were interested in science fiction or fantasy. We had classics in English literature, American lit. Western Lit, children's lit., novels, histories, encyclopedias, sports, fables, philosophies, theology, books on saints, pilgrims, heroes, sports figures, American icons, you name it. We had no H.G. Wells (that I was aware of. It was a big house), H.P. Lovecraft or Isaac Asimov. King Arther was as close to fantasy as I got, until I was a junior in highschool and the animated movie The Lord of the Rings came out. There was nothing about that movie that I didn't love. The way it looked, they way it felt, the world it portrayed, the characters, the cultures, the story...
This was back in the olden days when you not only had to go to the theater to see a movie, once that movie left the theaters, it was gone from your life forever. (Kids today have no idea what hardship is.) I think my brother JP and I went to that movie six or seven times while we could, including at a drive in. We couldn't get enough. And as you might know, that movie only tells part of the story. We needed to know the rest!!
My Red Ryder Bee-bee gun was getting the full set of The Lord of the Rings for Christmas when I was a junior in high school. I sat in a wing back chair next to the fire place in the living room and read that story from beginning to end over the course of Christmas vacation. Best vacation ever. (sorry, Jay but our two week Honeymoon in Hawaii was only a close second. You married a nerd.) It didn't hurt that the house I grew up in, especially when it was all decked out for Christmas, was as close to Rivendell as I'll ever get.
So I think my problem with the Chronicles of Narnia is that I tried them right after this life altering event.
Visiting Narnia after full immersion in Middle Earth is like...
Imagine you'd never had sweets and someone gave you an entire box of Godiva chocolates...
and then you had an oreo cookie.
Oreos are great but in that context, you'd spit one out. Yes, you would!
The two stories are both 'fantasy', both feature magic, Dwarves and Elves, both authors intended to create Christian mythology along the lines of Norse Mythology but within those very wide parameters, are as different as chocolate and cheese.
Both of which are delicious, by the way.
Narnia was created for kids. It's sweet, charming, instructive and surprisingly funny. The first time I attempted to read them, I was too young and stupid for the humor, which is very dry. I was also too (for lack of a better word) traumatized by my recent stay in Middle Earth to be impressed by the stories themselves, and that's a huge mistake on my part. Like all great kids books, these ones tell layered, important stories in a very simple way.
Lewis is actually a much better story teller than Tolkien. He's more in the modern vein. Tolkien gets caught up in the language, which he loved, and is more like Dickens. Lewis is more along the lines of Hemingway or L'Amour: just tell us the story. This is what modern readers like. This is in no way to say that Tolkien isn't a great story teller. Lewis is just better. It's not his fault Tolkien came up with a far greater story to tell. This is in no way to say that The Chronicles of Narnia aren't great: they are. Oreos are fantastic.
So, at the urging of my son Zack, I finally sat down to read them from beginning to end.
They are ( to no surprise to the entire world) simply delightful.
Louis L'Amour once wrote that to be a successful writer of magazine fiction, one needs to grab the reader by the throat with the opening line and never let go.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader begins:
There was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
That's one of the funniest opening lines I've ever read.
Why did no one ever tell me these were funny?!
Last night, I finished The Magician's Nephew. It's so funny that you don't even realize you're being taught some major truths about human nature. When you can point out that most of us choose stupidity over wisdom and keep the lesson entertaining, you're performing very great magic. Lewis is a Great Magician.
The first three books were turned into movies about fifteen years ago and they're fun and gorgeous to look at. Unfortunatly, that's where they stopped and each book gets better. The Magician's Nephew would make a great movie! but no...Hollywood is too busy cranking out one indistinguishable super hero movie after another. (when you've lost me, you know you've made too darn many super hero movies.)
so yeah, now, as an old Grandma, I'm totally on board with The Chronicles of Narnia. They deserve to be the classics of children's literature that they are. Buy them, read them, pass them on to your kids and grandkids now; before they're cancelled by the ascendant evil in today's world.
But seriously, why didn't anyone ever tell me they were funny?