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THE MAGICIAN'S NEPHEW BY C. S. LEWIS WAS PUBLISHED IN 1955, THE YEAR IN which the National Peace Council of Great Britain launched its campaign against the manufacture of the H-bomb. Having completed his novel the previous year, Lewis could not have been influenced by the launch as such.1 This having been said, the Peace Council's campaign embodied a concern that had existed ever since the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and that had been revived in the early 1950s in response to the atmospheric testing of the hydrogen bomb. While the development of the bomb was typically justified in terms of its "deterrent" effect, testing nevertheless symbolized (and, as some saw it, increased) the prospect of a US-USSR nuclear war. There was concern, too, at the immediate risk to public health posed by radioactive fall-out.2 In what follows, I want to suggest that The Magicians Nephew is very much the product of Lewis's own anxiety about nuclear weapons.
In 1945, Lewis's overt attitude to the invention, deployment, and development of the bomb was strongly conditioned by the transcendental aspect of his Christian faith - to the point, almost, that it could not be described as "anxious" at all. Lewis believed that the end of the world was to be instigated by its creator and redeemer, by God, not man.3 Thus, when he learned that atomic bombs had been dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he composed a poem: On the Atomic Bomb (Metrical Experiment)" (it was published in the December 28 issue of The Spectator ofthat year). The poem begins:
So; you have found an engine
Of injury that angels
Might dread. The world plunges,
Shies, snorts, and curvets like a horse in danger, (lines 1-4)
Here, what looks at first like an acknowledgement of the bomb's cataclysmic potential modulates into something rather different. The plunging horse refers not to those annihilated by the bomb, but to everyone still alive. The horse's reaction, moreover, works to suggest that public fear of the bomb is an instinctive (and possibly illogical) reaction. The penultimate stanza of the poem constitutes a flat denial of the possibility that the bomb has made or could make any difference to the essential...