From Spare Oom to War Drobe: Travels in Narnia with
My Nine-Year-Old Self
KATHERINE LANGRISH
(DARTON, LONGMAN & TODD, 288 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • tel 020 7799 4064

As a child, Katherine Langrish was obsessed with C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. Not content with reading and rereading them, she wrote her own 86-page book of Narnia-inspired stories and poems. Now an established children’s author herself, she has set out to analyse the appeal – and shortcomings – of Lewis’ creation.

Her approach is straightforward. Each of the seven books is given its own chapter in which she presents a blow-by-blow account of the plot with a commentary on Lewis’ ideas, themes and literary allusions, to which she adds her own reactions as a child and as an adult. So vivid are her memories that she can still feel the “bristly upholstery” of the chair on which she read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.