Even if you don’t care for fantasy (and that’s me) it is inarguable that CS Lewis’s seven Narnia books grabbed millions of children when they were first published in the 1950s. And they still exert timeless magic. They’ve never been out of print. There have been countless spin-off TV versions, stage adaptations and films. People are still intrigued by Narnia. And that, inevitably perhaps, means curiosity about its creator.

Patti Callahan’s novel, published last year, is effectively a child-friendly biography of CS Lewis wrapped up in a fictional quest for information.

This is the thrust: Megs is a talented maths student who has just started at Somerville College, Oxford in the early 1950s when this would have been rare for a young woman. Back home in Worcester, her eight year old brother, George, is dying of a heart condition.  He wants to know “where Narnia comes from” so Megs sets off to find out. Lewis, is after all, an Oxford academic and she contrives a meeting with him and his brother Warnie, who cheerfully befriend her. Jack (CS Lewis’s name of choice) gradually tells her his life story which she packages up in the form of stories and relays to George who gradually comes to understand that narratives, such as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe don’t come from any one place. They are a complex melange of life’s experiences seasoned with lots and lots of imagination.  In Lewis’s case, that includes a lonely childhood of frequent illness in a room with a big wardrobe, finding the town of Narni on a map of Italy, attending a dreadful boarding school, front line service in the first world war, taking in evacuees in the second world war and converting from atheism to Christianity

The framing device is, perhaps, a bit clumsy and certainly sentimental but Callahan is very good on the significance of stories. Myths are full of truths. We use stories to explore and explain things we don’t understand including our own pasts. And Megs who initially sees fiction and mathematics are being polar opposites eventually realises that good mathematicians need to be imaginative and creative and that equations are just another form of story.

I thought at first that the account of Lewis’s time at Wynyard School was an absurdly over egged take on British boarding school life by an American author who had read too much Jane Eyre, David Copperfield and Tom Brown’s School Days. It seems I was wrong. A bit of research showed me that Lewis left diaries detailing just how cruel it really was. The headmaster ended up detained in a psychiatric hospital.

Nonetheless Callahan’s period detail is shaky in places. It is most unlikely for example, that Padraig’s father’s car would have had a radio at this date. And the notion of Megs, a deferential, quiet female student, walking into a pub on her own and buying a drink in the early fifties is laughable.  And occasionally I was irritated by weak writing, shoddily edited. How could anyone have allowed “… he found every book on Norse mythology he could find”  to stand?

The shifts from first to third person narration, although currently fashionable, are a bit odd too.

In general, though, this is a reasonably worthwhile take on a well worn subject. Thank you to the friend who drew my attention to it when she spotted me asserting my dislike of fantasy on Facebook.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

A few weeks ago I had lunch with a someone who used to be a colleague and has morphed into a friend. My friend is now in her late eighties and hailed originally from Chicago. When we repaired to her house for post-lunch coffee/tea, I noticed a big fat paperback on her garden table, her bookmark tucked in at about the half way point. “Have you read that?” she asked when she saw me looking. “It’s really good”. So I sat there on her patio and ordered it on my phone – partly out of politeness to her.

I have now read it and can confirm that it is the most riveting read I’ve enjoyed in a very long time. Although there’s nothing childish about the content, in some ways the whole experience reminded me of childhood because I kept sneaking off into corners to read just a few more pages and carrying on reading long after I should have been going something else. I could almost hear my father’s exasperated voice saying “For goodness sake, Susan, put that wretched book down and lay the table/ get ready to go out/come and talk to Grandma [or whatever]”.

Published in 2008 the book is a first person account of a woman whose husband became President of the USA in the early years of the 21^st century. We know that from the beginning because she is unravelling her life story retrospectively while dropping hints about her present life. The reader, of course, pants with curiosity and compulsively turns the pages, wanting to know how a woman whose origins are so ordinary ended up in the White House.

Alice grew up modestly in small town Winsconsin influenced by her feisty grandmother who moved in after the death of her father. Eventually – a dreadful accident nothwithstanding – she becomes a pretty contented elementary school librarian with a couple of relationships behind her. Then she meets Charlie Blackwell and, thereby forfeiting a long term friendship, falls in love with him.

Now Blackwell – son of the former state governor and with one of his several brothers in politics – is not George Bush the younger but there are similarities and the time is more or less the latter’s era. Blackwell is bumptious, often outrageous and exasperating  but very loveable, vulnerable even, behind the scenes, There’s a faint hint of Trump and even Boris Johnson although I doubt that 14 years ago when this book was written Sittenfeld was thinking of either. Eventually – via various stepping stones Blackwell is elected President. And, of course, it’s a Republican ticket.

Alice’s sympathies are much more liberal but she promises never to disagree with him in public. Later that gets difficult when policies and people threaten to overturn Roe v Wade and make abortion much more difficult (another bit of extraordinary prescience given what has happened in real life in recent months) and the war in Iraq is killing thousands of Americans.

Sittenfeld is very good indeed about the day to day problems and pleasures faced by any First Lady. The novel is also full of insights about how it would be to be continuously surrounded by aides, assistants, advisers, security people and all the rest of it. And it’s all contrasted by with her other, earlier life in Riley where she used to drive her own car, encourage children to read and visit the grocery store whenever she liked.

It’s a huge novel full of enticing sub plots too: her grandmother’s friendship with a doctor in Chicago and Alice’s first visit to the Big City, for instance, her aborted friendship with Dena, her new friendship with her sister-in-law Jadey and much more.

But I think what I liked most about this novel is its plausibility and naturalness. Yes, it’s fiction but nothing happens or is said which isn’t totally believable. And every single character is rounded and recognisable even as they change with the passing years.

Soon I shall read Sittenfeld’s latest: a what-if? novel called Rodham (2020) which presents Hillary Clinton as she would have been if she’d never met and married Bill. I bet my octogenarian friend has read that too by now.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Once Upon a Wardrobe by Patti Callahan

I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first in the series, in 1997 because people were beginning to talk about it. And, always professionally interested in children’s and YA fiction, I was curious.

I could see that it would appeal to many people but fantasy leaves me pretty cold. I get irritated by broomsticks, dragons and spells and yearn to read about real people in real situations so I was quite glad when I’d finished it –  duty done. Later I had to read a couple of the later titles for work reasons and reacted in the same way. And I saw (sort of) the first film – without the sound track – on the flight home from a press trip to Egypt and that was quite enough. I’ve never seen the stage show either.

Recently, like many people, I’ve thought a lot about JK Rowling (whose adult crime fiction as Robert Galbraith I adore, by the way) and how much she’s done to make the world a better place. She got a whole generation of children reading avidly at same time as the Internet grew which was an extraordinary accomplishment. She has given a great deal of money to charity. Indirectly the films based on her books created life changing opportunities for the children who starred in them –  the same three who, as adults, are now all multimillionaires but who decry Ms Rowling for her attachment to free speech.

From where I’m standing, she has said nothing remotely unreasonable and even if she had I would still defend her right to express her views. Instead there has been public vilification and death threats.

Reflecting on all this decided me that perhaps, 25 years on, I should revisit Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and see what I think in 2022 – partly, but not entirely, as a public demonstration of support for its author.

The first thing that struck me is that it was successful because it’s so familiar. We start with orphaned, misfit Harry as an abused, unwanted, unhappy child in the home of foul relatives – it’s the world of Cinderella, Jane Eyre, Snow White, James and the Giant Peach, David Copperfield and many more. Straightaway, we have someone to root for in horror. Then it’s off to boarding school with nice staff, nasty staff, nice students and nasty ones and suddenly it’s Malory Towers, Tom Brown’s Schooldays or almost anything by Angela Brazil. And yet – Jill Murphy’s The Worst Witch books notwithstanding – Rowling puts a totally original spin on all this. The boarding school details (names of lessons, books etc) are thought out in convincing detail and the plotting is tight with a good crime novel style twist at the end.

It’s also clever at another level. I chortled at the use of Latin in names such as Voldemort and the Hogwarts motto.  The names in general are good too, in a quasi-Dickensian way: Hagrid, Filch, Snape and the rest. Then there are literary allusions which no primary school reader is going to notice. A vicious cat called Mrs Norris, named after the nastiest woman Jane Austen ever created (Mansfield Park) is satisfying, for example.  And Fluffy, the drooling terrifying three-headed dog is obviously modelled on Cerberus.

Rowling also understands, as Enid Blyton did, what children want to dream of – and taste.  When they sit down to Christmas dinner it consists of “a hundred fat, roasted turkeys, mountains of roast and boiled potatoes, platters of fat chipolatas, tureens of buttered peas, silver boats of thick, rich gravy and cranberry sauce …” I suspect she’s chuckling again and that this is an oblique, tongue-in-cheek reference to lashings of ginger beer.

And what fun she must have had with the devising of Quidditch. With its arcane, eccentric rules it’s reminiscent of many a British game (cricket, golf and polo for instance) but totally different from any of them. No wonder it’s gone on to have an almost independent  life of its own.

Another stroke of near genius was to write a seven volume school series following Harry right through secondary school with the books getting more complex each year – so that the reader who is 11 at the start grows up with the series. It’s almost a course in reading development.

In short, I enjoyed this open-minded reread more than I expected to and I unequivocally admire the achievement. Nonetheless I shan’t be going on to read the other six. There are too many books about real life calling for my attention.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld