HOLLYWOOD (By Charles McGrath, NYTimes) November 13, 2005 — Disney's new feature film, "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," spends a good deal more time than C.S. Lewis's beloved children's book on the climactic battle between the forces of the sinister White Witch and the army of Aslan, the supernatural lion. The movie of course has the benefit of studio bean counters and recognizes that this could be the mother of all screen battles - not just your basic struggle of good and evil but a $200 million smackdown between the religious right and godless Hollywood, between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and, for that matter, between Aslan and King Kong, a resurrected version of whom opens in a movie of his own a few days after "Narnia" does next month. The great philosophical debate of my childhood was: Who is stronger, King Kong or Mighty Joe Young? In the Kong-Aslan matchup, Aslan, a Christ figure, would seem to have the advantage of omnipotence, but that's not to say he will prevail at the box office.

There are seven Narnia books in all, making them potentially the third great onslaught - after the movie adaptations of "Harry Potter" and Tolkien's famous "Lord of the Rings" trilogy - of British children's lit into the multiplex. Like the Rowling and Tolkien books, Lewis's evoke a richly imagined parallel universe, but they differ in including a frankly religious element: not just an undercurrent of all-purpose, feel-good religiosity but a rigorous substratum of no-nonsense, orthodox Christianity. If you read between the lines - and sometimes right there in them - these stories are all about death and resurrection, salvation and damnation. From a moviemaking point of view, this is excellent news if you are hoping to reach the crowd that packed the theaters to see Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ," probably not so great if you're also hoping to lure all those wizards-and-weapons fans who made the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy such a hit (Disney is still kicking itself for passing on that one) and sheer disaster, presumably, if your target audience also includes the hordes of moviegoing teenagers that turned Disney's last mega-hit, "Pirates of the Caribbean," into an apparently inexhaustible asset.

In fact, there are some Hollywood observers who seem to believe that there is a good reason Lewis is among the last of the classic children's authors to be adapted for the movies, and that in taking on Narnia, Disney has backed itself into a corner. If the studio plays down the Christian aspect of the story, it risks criticism from the religious right, the argument goes; if it is too upfront about the religious references, on the other hand, that could be toxic at the box office. Disney, which is producing "Narnia" with Walden Media, the "family friendly" entertainment company owned by the politically conservative financier Philip Anschutz, is hedging its bets and has, for example, already issued two separate soundtrack albums, one featuring Christian music and musicians and another with pop and rock tunes.

"The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," published in 1950, was the first of the Narnia books. It now comes second in the order established by HarperCollins, Lewis's publisher, but it remains the most famous and is also the most essential volume in the series. It tells the story of the four Pevensie children - Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy - who have been sent by their parents to stay with an elderly professor in the country as the blitz rages in wartime London. While exploring the professor's house, Lucy, the youngest, comes upon an old wardrobe in an empty room and, pushing aside some fur coats there and groping to the back, finds herself in a snowy wood at nighttime. This is Narnia, it turns out - a more or less medieval version of Paradise, populated by dwarfs, fauns and talking beasts, that is now under the wintry spell of an evil queen (the witch of the title), whose hold over the place is broken only by the arrival of a supersize lion named Aslan.

Aslan is fierce but beautiful, stern but loving; his breath is perfumed like incense; and the mere sight of him is enough to set most creatures tingling. He is, in fact, nothing less than the Son of God, who dies and then comes back to life and through the seven volumes repeatedly tests but ultimately saves the children and leads them to eternal safety - all except Susan, that is, who will become too interested in "nylons and lipstick and invitations."

If the series is read in what is now the canonical order, Volumes I and VII, "The Magician's Nephew" and "The Last Battle," which are, respectively, a Creation story and a version of Armageddon, unmistakably spell out the theological dimensions of the story, but if you're not forewarned, it is perfectly possible to read most of the other volumes without a clue that anything more is going on than meets the eye. Actually, the books are better when read without the subtext. Aslan, for example, is much more thrilling and mysterious if you think of him as a super hero lion, not as Jesus in a Bert Lahr suit. And though central to the Narnia books, Aslan is not the real draw. Narnia itself is - or, rather, that wardrobe door opening onto a parallel universe, a magical place to which only children have access. This is what captivated my children about the story - in my daughter's case so much so that we had to empty her bedroom closet of clothes and build a little shelf on which she could climb up with her books and dolls and stuffed animals. She spent hours in there, dreaming of getting through to the other side.

The allegorical element in the Narnia books drove J.R.R. Tolkien crazy. By remarkable coincidence, he and Lewis - arguably the two greatest pre-"Harry Potter" writers of fantasy literature in English - overlapped for some 30 years at Oxford. Tolkien, older by seven years, was known as Tollers; Lewis preferred to be called Jack. They were absent-minded dons of the old school, the kind who wore carpet slippers, baggy flannel trousers and elbow-patched tweed jackets in which a forgotten pipe might at any moment start a pocket fire. Tolkien was famous for mumbling, Lewis for conducting conversations from the next room while noisily using his chamber pot.

Tolkien and Lewis were friends - close for a while, then a little less so, while maintaining a certain wary affection - and the senior members of a literary club called the Inklings, whose members customarily read aloud from their own writing and, after a few pints, said what they thought about the work of others. On at least one occasion when Tollers was reading from "The Lord of the Rings," Hugo Dyson, another member, groaned and said (in slightly less polite language), "Oh, no, not another elf!" And in 1949, after being exposed to an early draft of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," Tolkien said, "It really won't do, you know."

Tolkien, a devout Catholic, thought that religious writing ought to be left to the professionals - to the clergy. He also hated that "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" was such a hodgepodge. Tolkien in his own work was what he called a "subcreator," the maker of an imaginary world as intricate, as detailed and as self-sufficient as the real one. For "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, he created not just a story but also an entire world, Middle Earth, a geography, a mythology and several languages. Lewis, by contrast, was a magpie. He took whatever came to hand and dumped it all in. "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" is a pastiche not only of Christian theology but also of Wagner and of classical Greek and Latin mythology, of Arthurian romance, Grimm's fairy tales and Scandinavian folklore, of Kenneth Grahame, Beatrix Potter and Edmund Spenser. Near the end of the book, even Santa Claus (as Father Christmas) makes a cameo appearance, much as he does at the end of the Macy's Thanksgiving parade.

Unlike Tolkien, who had three sons and a daughter, Clive Staples Lewis knew very little about children. By choice, he spent most of his life as a militant bachelor, immersed in medieval and 16th-century literature. Lewis was also a famously precocious atheist who, in 1931, underwent a conversion, brought about in part by conversations with Tolkien, who convinced Lewis, a lover of myth, that the story of Christ, his birth, death and resurrection, was a myth that just happened to be true. Lewis went on to become an outspoken Christian apologist, and in books like "The Problem of Pain," "The Great Divorce" and "Mere Christianity," he expounded in clear, plain-spoken language his particular brand of no-frills, muscular Christianity, which was in many respects a theological version of stalwart English middle-classness. He had no use at all for those who wished to recover the "historical Jesus," for example - the slightly distant and unknowable one Anglicans worshiped every Sunday was perfectly good. These religious writings made Lewis immensely popular, and in some circles he has even been elevated to secular sainthood.

In middle age, Lewis became the romantic figure depicted in "Shadowlands," the Richard Attenborough movie based on William Nicholson's play. Both are a more or less faithful account of his surprising marriage, at age 58, to one of his many female groupies, Joy Gresham, an American divorcée and convert from Judaism, who died of cancer less than four years later. But for decades before that, Lewis also had a secret life, another marriage of sorts, that was both mysterious and a little weird.

For more than 40 years, he lived with the mother of a friend named Edward Moore, with whom he had made one of those earnest World War I pacts: if anything happened to either of them, the other would take care of his friend's family. In the event, it was Moore who died, while Lewis came down with trench fever and was later wounded, not severely but badly enough that he was sent home.

Lewis, then 20, went to Oxford in January 1919, but he kept his word and moved Mrs. Moore and her daughter, Maureen, to lodgings nearby. In those days, for an Oxford undergraduate to spend the night away from his college, let alone spend it with a woman, was a serious offense, and so Lewis embarked upon a double life, spending the week in college and weekends and vacations with Maureen and Mrs. Moore, or Minto, as she was known. The arrangement persisted for the rest of Minto's life, long after Lewis earned his degree and became a don.

In 1930, he and Minto bought a house together, and Lewis's brother, Warnie, a career army officer whose excessive drinking had forced him into early retirement, moved in. But during the term, Lewis still slept in his rooms at Magdalen College. Many of his friends didn't even know about Minto; others had the vague impression that she was his stepmother.

The exact nature of their relationship is something that many of Lewis's biographers would prefer to tiptoe around. But Lewis was far from a sexual innocent, and the evidence strongly suggests that, at least until he got religion, there was an erotic component to his life with Minto. Did they actually sleep together, this earnest, scholarly young man, conventional in almost every other way, and a woman 26 years his senior? Walter Hooper, the editor of Lewis's "Collected Letters," thinks it "not improbable." A.N. Wilson, the best and most persuasive of Lewis's biographers, argues that there's no reason at all to think they didn't, leaving us with the baffling and disquieting psychological picture of C.S. Lewis, the great scholar and writer and Christian apologist-to-be, pedaling off on his bicycle, his academic gown flapping in the wind, to have a nooner with Mum.

What Lewis saw in Minto is another matter. No one else could stand her. Warnie once described her association with Lewis as "the rape of J's life." He wrote in his diary at the time of her death in January 1951, "And so ends the mysterious self-imposed slavery in which J has lived for at least 30 years."

Minto said of Jack, "He was as good as an extra maid," and she subjected him to a kind of domestic slavery that Wilson says he thinks amounted to sexual masochism on Lewis's part. His servility grew worse toward the end of Minto's life, when she slipped into an angry and querulous senility, and he spent most of his waking hours caring for her, for her ancient, incontinent dog, Bruce, and for Warnie, who eventually became a six-bottle-a-day man and was now stumbling around in a stupor all afternoon.

It was at the beginning of this period, during the summer of 1948, that Lewis returned to the writing of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," which he started and abandoned in 1939. Inevitably, there have been a number of Freudian interpretations of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," theories making a great deal of the observation, for example, that you get to Narnia through what amounts to a closet-size vagina. But if in fact there is a psychological explanation for how the books came to be, it is probably a good deal simpler. Lewis was at the time so despondent and worn down, so weary of the world of grown-ups, with their bedpans and whiskey bottles, that he must have longed for a holiday in a land of make-believe.

Lewis later claimed that in writing the Narnia books, he "put in what I would have liked to read when I was a child and what I still like reading now that I am in my 50's." Children's literature - the notion of books written specifically to be read to or by young people - was a Victorian invention, and Lewis as a child was shaped by a typically Victorian reading list. With the indiscrimination that so troubled Tolkien, he cannibalized much of it for "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."

The talking beavers, for example, who hide the Pevensie children in their lodge, come from Kenneth Grahame and from Beatrix Potter. The idea of an enchanted place on the other side of a door may owe something to Lewis Carroll. And Lewis never bothered to deny that the central conceit of the book - a group of children displaced from their parents and adventuring on in an unfamiliar landscape - was inspired in part by E. Nesbit's Bastable books, especially "The Story of the Amulet," about children who travel through time, and "The Enchanted Castle," where on the grounds of an old house statues come to life and the Greek gods make an appearance.

In turn, of course, the Narnia books cast their shadow over other writers. J.K. Rowling has said that she was influenced by them, and you can feel aspects of Harry Potter being anticipated in, say, the character of the loathsome Eustace Scrubb, who before he is redeemed by Aslan is cut from the same smarmy cloth as Harry's cousin Dudley, or in the scene in "The Magician's Book," where Lucy picks up an enchanted book whose pictures come alive and predict the future as she looks at them. Lewis's greatest influence, though, is on the British fantasy writer Philip Pullman, whose "His Dark Materials" trilogy is both a homage of sorts (it begins with a girl in a wardrobe) and also a kind of anti-Narnia, a negation of everything Lewis stood for. God in these books turns out to be a senile impostor and Christianity merely a "very powerful and convincing mistake."

Pullman is an atheist and, not coincidentally, one of Lewis's fiercest critics. He has said of the Narnia cycle that "it is one of the most ugly and poisonous things I've ever read" and has called Lewis a bigot and his fans "unhinged." The books do have their faults, certainly. They're not nearly as well written as either the "Potter" or the "Dark Materials" books. And by the standards of political correctness, they commit a host of sins. They're preachy, they're sometimes gratuitously violent and they patronize girls. The villains, moreover - the Calormenes, who dwell in the south - are oily cartoon Muslims who wear turbans and pointy-toed slippers and talk funny.

Then there's the unfortunate business with Susan, the second-oldest of the Pevensies, who near the end of the last volume is denied salvation merely because of her fondness for nylons and lipstick - because she has reached puberty, in other words, and has become sexualized. This passage in particular has set off Pullman and other critics (and has caused the fantasy writer Neil Gaiman to publish a kind of payback scenario, in which Susan has grown up to be a distinguished professor, not unlike Lewis, and in which for good measure Aslan performs earth-shaking oral sex on the witch). But you sense that among many British critics the real failure of the books is that they're so middle class - so affirming of traditional behaviors and role models, of old-fashioned, Church of England religion and Tory politics.

This criticism is perfectly fair up to point - Lewis was a progressive in nothing except his choice of women to sleep with - and the solid, no-nonsense "values" of the books are precisely the source of their appeal to Anschutz, a former Sunday-school teacher who has plotted a 15-year battle plan to turn Narnia into a mega-weapon in the entertainment wars. But there is also an undercurrent of restlessness in the Narnia books, which manifests itself in Lewis's obsessive borrowings and crammings - the need to include Bacchus and Silenus in the same scene as some talking animals and slow-witted giants - and in a kind of headlong narrative hastiness. Lewis seldom lingers, and the books are always rushing on to the next thing. In "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader," Prince Caspian travels to the end of the world just to see what's there, and the motto of the final volume, in which the children travel from the old Narnia to a newer and even better one, is "Further Up and Further In."

Lewis once characterized the imagination as a faculty that "stirs and troubles" the reader with a "dim sense of something beyond his reach," and the Narnia chronicles, however stodgy their apparent message, surely succeed at doing just that. Like all the great children's books, they're not really concerned with explaining or defending this or that orthodoxy. They're interested in mostly the same thing Hollywood is: escape.