If you—or your children or grandchildren—loved The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S Lewis, you’ll be enthralled by Callahan’s novel that unravels the origin of the beloved fantasyland Narnia. Eight year-old George begs his older sister, Megs, a student at Oxford, to ask Lewis, an English professor, where Narnia comes from—is it real? Lewis declines to answer directly, instead giving her a map of clues by telling stories of his own life. Each time Megs returns home to share with George, they begin her retelling with “once upon a wardrobe, not very long ago, and not very faraway.”
But Once Upon a Wardrobe is much more than Narnia, or Lewis’s life. The reader learns George is gravely ill, and sees into the world beyond his bedroom window through his imagination. With evocative imagery spanning the novel, Callahan writes, “hours in bed have taught George how to find the soft edges of the facts and drop himself into the worlds he hears about or reads of. He closes his eyes, sets his mind’s eye on the words, and floats on them like a raft.”
However, the ever rational Megs, a math major, firmly believes that imagination is just for children’s books. Lewis patiently explains the significance of imagination versus reason; but George tells her quite bluntly, “you think the world is held together by some math formula…I think the world is held together by stories.”
Callahan weaves together the words of Lewis and George as they lure Megs into understanding that stories allow us to “see with other eyes and feel with other hearts.” Though Lewis published his Narnia series soon after the strife of World War II ended, his words sculpted by Callahan are prescient: “reason is how we get to the truth, but imagination is how we find meaning.”
Once Upon a Wardrobe is a delightful read. But perhaps Callahan’s fiction can take us beyond the book we hold in our hands. Maybe among the schisms of this modern world of 2024, her storytelling will prompt our imaginations to soar, spur our hearts to understand others, and allow our minds to discover meaning we didn’t know existed. Hopefully, our children and grandchildren may then benefit long after we’ve read them stories about the wondrous land of Narnia.
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