Envisioning Narnia

In ''The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" and the six other books that joined it in the 1950s to form the ''Chronicles of Narnia," C.S. Lewis performed a particularly British bit of magic. With astonishing economy of narrative and description, he created an entire world that has lived vividly in the minds of millions of readers ever since.

Now one of those readers, Andrew Adamson, gets the chance to show the rest of us what his Narnia looks like. As the director of the long-awaited film adaptation, which opens here Friday, Adamson has been in charge of the massive effort to bring a fully visualized, realistic rendering of Lewis's fantasy world to the screen.

The question is not so much whether Adamson's Narnia will look like Lewis's, for what you notice on rereading the chronicles is how remarkably little Lewis described. But that very sketchiness is the secret of Narnia's hold over the reader's imagination, and it may also prove to be the greatest difficulty for the filmmakers. None of us knows exactly what Lewis thought Narnia looked like. But each of us knows, in intricate and stubborn detail, a Narnia of our very own.

So the real question for any devoted reader is: Will Adamson's Narnia look like mine?

For the many who are coming to the movie without having read the books, of course, yet another question comes first: Just what is Narnia? So perhaps we'd better start (briefly) there. Narnia is a fantasy world in which animals talk, centaurs and giants and other mythical creatures from an assortment of traditions happily coexist, and Lewis's heartfelt Christian theology expresses itself both in allegory and, more interestingly, in the fundamental concern of the characters: how and whether to be good.

Given the enduring and widespread popularity of the books, not to mention the ubiquitous marketing campaign for the movie, by now even nonreaders probably know that Aslan, the lion king-in-exile of Narnia, is a Christ figure, complete with sacrifice and redemption. As for the witch, she's an embodiment of purest evil who has plunged Narnia into a century-long winter -- ''always winter and never Christmas," as its inhabitants lament. And the wardrobe? It's an ancient carved thing of mysterious origin (to be explained in ''The Magician's Nephew," should Walt Disney Pictures and its somewhat unlikely but persistent partner, the culturally conservative Walden Media, ever care to carry the series that far) through which four children, sent to a professor's country house to evade the bombs dropping on wartime London, first magically enter Aslan's kingdom.

These are the facts of Lewis's fantasy. But it is not the facts that keep readers coming back again and again to the Narnian tales, nor, for most children, is it the theology. Indeed, many of us did not notice, the first or second or even third time through, all the Christian symbolism that has been the cause of some turmoil as the movie was being made. (Would it be too Christian? Not Christian enough? Ultimately, Disney's involvement seems to have eased the ''too Christian" fears, just as Walden's soothed the ''not Christian enough" faction.) For a child, Aslan was just a wonderful character, wise and loving and brave; if his actions at the Stone Table stirred some familiar echo of stories heard in church, it was not loud enough to call the young reader out of this particular imagined world.

Apparently, that's the way Lewis wanted it. Naturally he never denied that his Christian beliefs underpinned all of Narnia, but neither did he want adults to spoil things for their children by making too much of the parallels. About as explicit as he ever got himself was to have Aslan tell the children visiting Narnia in ''The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" that they would be able to find him in their own world ''by another name."

So if it's not the religion and not the bare bones of the story that keep us coming back to Narnia, just what is it? Here is where our answers must become particular and individual, so I can only offer mine. And the simplest way I can put it is that the Narnia books have a flavor like no other stories I have sampled. They are odd and whimsical and sometimes weirdly paced and plotted, but individually and collectively they create a distinctive atmosphere, a mood, a taste, that is different from everything else in the world.

What's strange about my returning to this taste is that it's not necessarily something I always like. My sister and I often joke about her years of longing for Turkish Delight, the mysterious confection with which the White Witch tempts one of the children, Edmund, to betray his siblings. Lewis describes it so irresistibly that Kitty and I were certain it must be the most delectable candy imaginable. When she finally tasted some, she called me long distance to complain of how disappointing it was: chewy, sticky, and strange.

Narnia is a little like that for me. I sometimes find myself longing for it, remembering its particular savor and wanting to experience it again. And then as I'm reading one of the books, I'm at once satisfied and impatient. The unique tone is still there, but now I notice the occasional authorial intrusions, the blind incomprehension of women, the unconscious assumptions about ''foreign" cultures and ''savages."

Many of the characters remain indelible and endearing -- who could fail to love the brave mouse Reepicheep, the noble Prince Caspian, or plucky Lucy, the first child to discover Narnia in ''The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe"? -- but some of them are, frankly, a bit twee for my taste.

But here's the thing: For all their sketchiness, all of Lewis's characters are peculiar and individual. He drew on familiar myths, to be sure, but he also had a gift for imbuing even a generic faun with a distinctive personality -- and an umbrella, yet. It's that kind of oddity that is most difficult to preserve in any large, collectively produced endeavor, which is pretty much the definition of a mainstream Hollywood movie. Say ''faun" and the costume shop knows just which archives to look through; requisition ogres for the big battle scene -- which took only a couple of pages in the book but inevitably expands to epic proportions on a movie screen -- and they've probably got a few left over from that last big fantasy blockbuster.

Lewis gave us only the slightest physical descriptions of his characters, which were then slightly fleshed out by Pauline Baynes's delicate line drawings for the books. But most of the work of envisioning them fell to us, the readers. And that's why my Aslan may not look exactly like yours; we each have our own lion. But now Andrew Adamson's lion will be on every movie screen, poster, and toy shelf, in all its brightly colored, realer-than-real, computer-generated glory. Aslan will speak not in the silent voice inside my head or yours, but in the rounded, perfect tones of Liam Neeson. Will we be able to hear our lions anymore?

It's not that I don't love movies. I do. But the Narnia that lives most vividly is the Narnia in our minds. And that's a landscape that no camera can ever film.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.