The Complete Idiot's Guide to the World of Narnia

  

You might have noticed that I'm a sucker for books about Narnia Michael Ward's Planet Narnia is still my favourite). I need to be careful, though, because particularly the American guides to Narnia tend to come from an overtly Christian standpoint and are only really interested in showing how Lewis used the Chronicles to retell a Christian story. In my view, there is more to Narnia than that, and while it's not possible to completely disentangle Lewis's Christian message from the stories, I don't agree that they function solely as evangelical propaganda.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that James S. Bell Jr and Cheryl Dunlop's The Complete Idiot's Guide to the World of Narnia is strongly weighted towards the Christian angle. They pull in Bible quotes at every opportunity and stress the parallels between Aslan and Jesus. I noticed that they skimmed over certain aspects of Lewis's biography: Mrs Moore doesn't rate a single mention. The pitch of the book is uncertain. Sometimes it seems to be directed at child readers of the Chronicles, sometimes at adults. (The authors recommend reading the books aloud, 'even if you don't have a child,' so perhaps the primary audience is grown up!)

This is a comprehensive guide to Narnia, examining the literary and mythological influences on each book (though always stressing the Biblical), though there's a bit more emphasis on the 'morals' of the stories than I'd like. Picking out explicit moral lessons is a sure way to kill the magic of a book. Maybe this guide might be most useful to a first time visitor to the Narnia universe.