The Chronicles of Narnia - Book Review

Book 1 - The Magicans Nephew

Written by: Clive Staples Lewis
Illustrated by: Pauline Baynes
First published: 1956
Genre: Fantasy

Time Location, Our World: 1900
Time Location, Narnia: 1
Area: Western Narnia, London, Charn
Central Characters: Digory Church, Polly Plummer, Queen Jadis, Aslan, Uncle Andrew

Plot:
The book starts in London in the early 1900's, where a boy named Digory has just moved to London, where he lives with his aunt and "crazy" uncle Andrew, and his ill mother. One day he meets Polly, who lives in the neighbour house, and they become friends. One day, when they're trying to sneak into the neighbours house through the ajoined attics, they end up in the wrong house, and goes straight into uncle Andrew's office, where he works with his secret experiments. Polly discovers a bunch of rings, beautiful and colourful, some green and some yellow. Uncle Andrew offers her one of the yellow rings, and as soon as she's put it on, she disappears. Uncle Andrew starts to explain all about his experiments to Digory - how he had promised to burn a box with dust he got from his dying aunt, but instead started to study it. The dust turned out to be magical - and from another world, another universe. The rings were made out of this dust, and Polly had been sent to another world. Digory finds himself in a trap, as Polly do not have any of the green rings, wich is for hometravel, and uncle Andrew is too scared to go after her himself. Digory brings two green rings, and put on one of the yellow himself, and suddenly he's sent out of the world.
He finds himself in a strange forest, so calm and quiet and relaxing. That you could be half asleep forever, barely remembering who you are.
He finds Polly napping in the grass, and after a while they realize who they are and what happened. The forest is full of small pounds of water, and they soon discover that they have to jump into the one they came up from, with the green rings on, in order to get out of the forest. They realize that there might be a world in every single one of the thousands of pounds - and decides to go discover.
The first pound they jump into contains a dead, cold world, but by a moment under a curse, Digory manages to wake up one of the citizens - Jadis, the Queen of Charn. Jadis is an inhumane tall and beautiful woman, but turns out to be a wicked power thirsty witch with terrible magical abolities, ad in an attempt to get back, Polly and Digory brings the witch to London, where she creates a chaotic situation. They desperatly try to get her back to Charn - and brings with several others on the journey out of the world. But as they arrive, Charn is gone. They end up in the middle of a darkness, in the middle of nothing. Until a lion starts to sing...

My thoughts:
This is the story about how Narnia started, and how the evil of Narnia started. It's definitly the one out of the books wich I find most beautiful.
It was definitly hard to write the plot summary, cause this book contains a lot of important stories. We see Digory and the witch who shares a common wish about finding the land of youth - even though their motives are pretty different. Digory has a strong personality, and his actions lead to both fatal and beautiful things. We see the witch, who is from a world that has been destroyed by her evilness, and Aslan, who creates a beautiful living world out of his goodness. And though it might be clear to us who's the good and the bad ones - it's not always clear to Digory, even less to uncle Andrew, who accidentally puts himself into unfortunate situations by his own, dumb experiments.
Digory and Polly is at some point warned that the fate of Charn might be the fate of our own world some day, wich is really interesting cause this is somehow what I feel about this world sometimes.
But the most breathtakingly beautiful out of everything is the forest - the wood between the worlds. This is what I love about C.S Lewis writing - his ability to create things and places that you can't even imagine. The story of the quiet, relaxing place between all worlds - the place wich is not even considered a place - has inspired me since the first time I read this book. It's a beautiful story about the creation of Narnia, and a book I would love to see the movie about - still I dont think there would be possible to make a movie as good as Lewis' ability to bring the readers imagination to life. I have this movie only in my own head.
Rate: 6/6