Chrestomanci's Garden

[intertext]

I've never noticed before how reminiscent one part of the climactic scene at the end of Charmed Life is of the killing of Aslan in The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe. I'm talking about the bit where the baddies are preparing to sacrifice Cat, and they've captured Chrestomanci. There's this crowd of witches and warlocks, all jabbering and jeering and waving sticks, just like all the wicked followers of the White Witch. When Chrestomance is captured, and tied to a tree, they let out a kind of moan, and Chrestomanci himself is sad and tired and lets out a great sigh. And of course, there's the stone on which they are going to sacrifice Cat. And Chrestomanci says something to the effect that they don't know what they are doing, that they are going to wake up ancient powers in that place. All this takes place in this beautiful, almost sacred, garden that is part of Chrestomanci Castle, that DWJ admitted to Judith Ridge in an interview was probably like a medieval sacred garden. It's interesting, because I think the Narnia echoes, if I'm right, lend more of the "awesome" to the scene...

Comments

[radiantfracture]

Interesting! Do you think the echoes are deliberate? And if so -- what is she doing with them?

[intertext]

Sorry! I'm such a bad blogger these days. I only just saw your comment. In the interview with Judith Ridge, Judith asks her if she intended that garden to have connections with the sacred, and she says "I'm turning into C.S. Lewis!" but that she did go to a "deeper place" when she wrote that passage. I'm finding that consciously or unconsciously, DWJ is drawing from a "cauldron of story" - she's steeped in all kinds of literature, and had been reading the Narnia books out loud to her children. Also, her husband is a medievalist. And she'd obviously read Spencer. So there's all these influences percolating under the surface. Writing of Eight Days of Luke, she said that she used mythology to evoke a feeling of "the awesome" that was accessible even today. I think much the same thing is going on here.

[radiantfracture]

Nonsense -- no apologies. That's the pleasure of this particular text -- it has the capacity for slowness.

I would have said Eliot maybe rather than Lewis, for sacred gardens (he was probably also drawing on medieval sacred gardens).

"Cauldron of story" I like a lot.

Did I already tell you that the Backlisted podcast did an episode on Fire and Hemlock? It seems like the sort of thing I'd have already mentioned repeatedly...

[intertext]

You didn't! Fire and Hemlock is my absolute all-time favourite DWJ book, if I haven't told you that already. And for that, Eliot, definitely. She admits to it, and it's quite explicit, including the garden imagery. I wish I could take credit for "the cauldron of story" but I think it was Lloyd Alexander, possibly via Tolkien, possibly via the Mabinogion (or at least the cauldron that Taliesin dips his finger into and gains knowledge...). But I just reread that scene from Charmed Life again, and I'll hold out for the CS Lewis connections, although the garden itself has broader associations (there's an apple tree with a bubbling spring at its roots that recalls Norse myth).