Book Review: East of the Wardrobe: The Unexpected Worlds of C. S. Lewis

For decades, Christians have been drawn to Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, finding their beliefs reflected, enriched, and reimagined in its pages. Though Lewis warned against reading the series as Christian allegory, modern scholarship on C.S. Lewis is dominated by Christian writers from explicitly Christian academic institutions. This has led to an imbalance in our understanding of the inspiration and sources from which Lewis drew in writing the Narnia series.

Lewis read widely and voraciously, including many texts originating from “the East” (e.g. Islamic, Zoroastrian, Buddhist). In fact, Lewis was captivated by the unique storytelling, imagery, and philosophical insight of these texts. Drawing from a lifetime of archaeological and academic engagement with the Near and Middle East, Warwick Ball sets out to correct this imbalance. If a kind of lazy orthodoxy has gradually been established about Narnia, East of the Wardrobe challenges readers to reconsider. While this may make uncomfortable reading for some Christians, Ball’s “archaeological approach” (8) succeeds in making Narnia even more fantastical, and reconfirms its legendary status.

Ball argues that an author’s work being “influenced” by a source does not depend upon the author’s conscious acknowledgement of this fact. While some allusions to Eastern sources are clearly intentional (The Arabian Nights are cited in Prince Caspian, for example), others appear to be the product of Lewis’ extraordinary mind, forming connections and drawing from images without identifying the exact provenance of each.

For the scholar, this presents something of a problem: how to illustrate elements of Lewis’ creative imagination that Lewis himself wasn’t conscious of? This problem is compounded given we have only partial information about what Lewis read, whom he spoke with, which exhibitions he attended. Ball doesn’t address this somewhat fundamental epistemological question head on, perhaps wisely. In Chapter One, which I enjoyed as a kind of paean to reading, learning, and libraries, Ball highlights Lewis’ voracious appetite for books of all kinds, and sketches Lewis’ Oxford, in which every pub and common room might have served as Lewis’ classroom for learning about the East. From there, Ball proceeds using the most informed guesswork possible, meaning he spends much of the book speaking in possibilities rather than certainties, suggestive comparisons rather than forensic lineages – but what fascinating possibilities they are.

Chapter Two explores the fundamentally pictorial nature of Lewis’ creative process. Ball deserves credit for spotlighting the little-known Pauline Baynes, the original illustrator of the series, who is “almost as responsible as Lewis himself for Narnia’s enduring spell” (57). Oriental motifs and devices are evident in Baynes’ renderings of Narnia. While this tallies with the nature of her training, Ball argues she recognised and animated the oriental elements in Lewis’ writing.

Ball’s analysis of Narnia’s Eastern elements begins in earnest in Chapter Three’s exploration of Calormen, the land adjacent to Narnia and inhabited with distinctly Arab-like peoples. This is the realm of crescents, turbans, Scheherazadian storytelling, and “wooden shoes turned up at the toe” (108). The case for conscious influence is strongest here, and the book capitalises on every point of similarity. Ball’s love of the Chronicles is palpable in this chapter; some passages would not seem out of place on a diligently researched fan blog.

The voyages, quests, portals and alternative time in The Chronicles of Narnia are stock features of Oriental cultures dating back millennia. Chapters Four and Five traverse interesting variations on this theme, though largely deal in broad parallels rather than close analysis. The most interesting excursus argues for ancient Buddhist sources and the Qur’an as primary sources for the “meta time” Lewis plays with. Just as the children return from “half a lifetime” spent in Narnia to find only a moment of mundane time elapsed, so Muhammad returns from journeying to the seven heavens and meeting the prophets to his still warm bed (180).

The most theologically dense part of the book is Chapter Six. Ball reexamines Lewis’ reception as a figure Christian through and through, suggesting this is only a partial picture. The view of Lewis as a champion of a puritan strain of Protestant evangelicalism is undermined not only by the preceding exposition of his considerable knowledge and respect for Eastern (including Islamic, Buddhist, Zoroastrian and Manachaiean) cultures, but also by his own tendency to bacchanalian indulgence.

The book’s final chapter highlights the porousness of cultures, the free exchange of ideas in the ancient world, and consequently the futility of absolute conclusions about an image’s origin; a pure genealogy is necessarily a false one. Self-perception is only ever partial, so readers are justified in noticing Eastern influences in the Chronicles that Lewis himself was unaware of, or might even deny. Whether Lewis was the kind of universalising, pluralistic figure Ball makes him out to be, the appeal of Narnia’s message undeniably extends beyond mere Christianity.

The number of literary sources Ball’s book encompasses is impressive. A single page (25) references Mathew Arnold, Lord Byron, and Thomas Moore, alongside several others. The book assumes a lot of a reader, especially one who happens to have been gifted it by a well-intentioned grandparent: a chapter heading by Lowell Thomas “is, of course, a quotation from the last line of John Burgon’s haunting evocation of Petra in his prize-winning poem of 1845…” (25).

Occasionally Ball doesn’t see the wood for the trees. He wonders whether Lewis may have taken the idea of the “stone table in Narnia—the notorious place of execution” from a stone table outside Cairo mentioned in a book about modern Egyptian customs (46). Surely the Christian altar is a more likely reference point, especially since it is the site of Aslan’s slaughter.

The book would have benefitted from a clearer definition of what Ball means by “the East” and “oriental.” An endnote briefly states he uses the nomenclature in a pre-Saidian sense, since this is what Lewis would have known. A short discussion of Edward Said is sidetracked by a comment on the “already overburdened Western guilt complex” (229) in its historical treatment of the East (e.g. the Crusades). Whether it is justifiable to “apply retrospective criticism in contemporary terms” (230) seems less important to establish than how the author understands a term fundamental to the book. Indeed, Ball goes out of his way to defend Lewis from real or imagined accusations (e.g. of misogyny, 85; of anti-Arabic bias, 131, 232-3) which I found irrelevant and too brief to be persuasive.

East of the Wardrobe is as enjoyable as it is important. Ball betrays intimate familiarity with the Chronicles, undertaking close-reading (even exegesis) of the texts that will delight Narnia fans. Theologians will be fascinated by the variety of Eastern concepts evident in books whose secrets were thought to be long revealed. Dozens of photographs (most of them the author’s own, though unfortunately only black and white) accompany the text, as well as frequent side-by-side comparisons of illustrations from the Chronicles with eastern art. Even the endnotes were amusing and intriguing, with many meriting footnote status.

C. S. Lewis emerges as a more complex and sympathetic author than commonly understood, whose bibliophilia sparked a love of beautiful stories, regardless of provenance. Laced with Ball’s humour and humanity, this book has something for every reader.

Frazer MacDiarmid graduated, in 2022, with a doctorate in theology from Christ Church, University of Oxford. He has since moved into policy, first working in Treaty of Waitangi settlements, and now for the British High Commission in Wellington. Frazer keeps an academic flame burning writing about books @turnsof_fraze.