Authors Electric

My earliest memory of the Narnia stories is watching a cartoon version of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with my little daughter and my mother. I thought it would probably be awful, but in fact it wasn’t. The artwork was delightful and it was well narrated. At the point where the knife is poised above Aslan, my daughter burst into tears and cried out, ‘oh, don’t hurt him!’ ‘Turn it off!’ said my mother, ‘it’s upsetting her!’   I didn’t because it was crucial to see it through to the end, all tears dried.   I found the other books in the series progressively harder going but I know plenty of people who love all of them. Forty years on, I found myself walking through a wardrobe into a snow-covered landscape and that lamp post. It was completely enchanting. This was at Mottisfont House, a local NT property, once a priory and later converted into a manor house. It contains, among other delights, a Rex Whistler room with trompe l’oeil devices. For Christmas, the house was...

I suppose it’s inevitable that on this glorious day of chocolate scoffing, of succumbing to all the temptations resisted (well, by some of us anyway) during the last few weeks, my mind should wander – or perhaps waddle – back to the role of delicious food in books.  But not in the nurturing, life-enhancing way I looked at last month ; just the opposite. And while this works as a literary and moral device, it can be pretty cruel to your characters. All downhill from here To begin at the beginning… How does the serpent corrupt Eve in the Garden of Eden? With a crisp, juicy apple, thus setting in motion 2,000 years of imagery in which the poor apple takes the brunt of all the evil in the world. Interestingly the idea of fruit being a catalyst for trouble isn’t just a Judeo-Christian one: think of the six pomegranate seeds swallowed by Persephone when kidnapped by Hades, which bind her to the Underworld for half the year. Golden Apple of Discord Or the gold...