What Is "The Magician's Nephew" About?

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The Magician's Nephew is the sixth published novel in the Chronicles of Narnia series by CS Lewis. Published in 1955, the book is actually the first novel in the series chronologically.

In this instalment, one of the main characters is Digory Kirke, who is a young boy in this story and the adult professor Kirke in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The story begins with Digory meeting a young girl named Polly Plummer. The two children decide to enter an attic, but accidentally end up encountering Digory's Uncle Andrew, who is a magician. Uncle Andrew plays a trick on Polly, which results in her vanishing. Digory meets up with Polly in a forest later, after Uncle Andrew blackmails him into saving her. Using a ring that Uncle Andrew gave them, the children are able to enter different worlds by jumping into pools of water in the forest.

The children make a note of the pool that will lead them back to their own world and then go through another pool, which takes them to a world called Charn. After travelling through a hall of statues, the children come across a bell. Digory rings the bell after reading a sign that dares people to ring it whilst at the same time giving a warning not to. The children find themselves in trouble when the ringing of the bell causes one of the statues to come to life. The statues consist of former rulers of Charn, starting with the good rulers and leading to the more evil rulers. The statue that comes to life is the last of the statues, Queen Jadis, meaning that she was the cruellest ruler.

Queen Jadis tells the children that she had a war with her sister and destroyed Charn with the Deplorable World. She became a statue after petrifying herself, and waited until someone rang the bell. The children escape from Jadis, but she ends up being sent to London with them through one of the pools. The children manage to get Jadis out of London, but end up back in the forest, this time with Uncle Andrew, Frank, who is a taxi driver and Strawberry, who is a horse.

The children try to show the others the pool that leads to Charn, but there is nothing there. They learn that there is emptiness because there is no world through the pool. A singing distracts them, and they discover that the voice belongs to a lion named Aslan. Aslan brings the world to life and Jadis runs away after a failed attempt to attack the lion. He then gives some of the animals the ability to speak and gives Digory the chance to make up for rining the bell and bringing Jadis to Narnia. He changes Strawberry into a talking winged horse called Fledge and the children use the horse to fly to a mountain to obtain a magic apple. They discover that Jadis has used one of the apples to gain eternal youth. Jadis tries to tempt Digory into eating an apple. She also tries to tempt him into taking an apple to cure his dying mother, but Digory does not believe that his mother would want him to steal it.

Aslan later congratulates Digory and plants an apple. Frank the taxi driver is made King of Narnia, and his wife is made Queen. Aslan tells the children that the apple tree will protect Narnia for a short while and that although the stolen apple would have cured Digory's mother, there would have been disastorous results due to it being stolen. He gives Digory an apple to cure his mother and Digory later buries both the core of the apple and the rings from Uncle Andrew in his garden.

The apple core becomes a tree, which is later destroyed. Digory uses the remains of the tree to build a wardrobe, which becomes the magical wardrobe in "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", by which time Digory is the much older Professor Kirke.