Nor do the young readers realise how much they are being taught about Christianity, for God and Jesus are never mentioned, yet the books are suffused with Lewis’s theology; and Aslan, the Lion, is an alternative incarnation which teaches more about the incarnation than a lifetime of Sunday-school lessons.
Perhaps Lewis’s single greatest legacy is to be found at the very end of the seventh of the Narnia books, The Last Battle. Like no one else, he was able to write about heaven in a way that fills the reader with longing and a conviction that, yes, the unimaginable splendour must be something like this:
“And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and so beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after.
“But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now, at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
'My Dear Lucy, I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start… pic.twitter.com/TouRLEwJ8i
— Simon Knott (@SimoninSuffolk) November 29, 2023