THE BOOK REPORT: A simple lightpost

In a couple of weeks, I will be turning 31 and my wife asked me what I wanted as a gift. After debating for a couple of days, I decided that I wanted a new tattoo. Several months back, in this column, I discussed my current tattoos, my motivations for choosing them, and the books that birthed the quotes. I was careful to choose marks that would mean something for the rest of my life, drawn from the books that were my foundation. Any new tattoo would have to hold the same depth of meaning.

Pauline Baynes wasn’t a famous writer. She was so obscure that when she died, in 2008, the press hardly noticed, including myself, but many readers would recognize her work. This is because Baynes was an artist by profession. She illustrated many books over her 60-year career, but one particular series earned her the respect and adoration of children across the world: CS Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia.

My father read the series first in our household, then gave them as a gift to my older brother. I remember pacing in front of my brother, begging him to let me read them, but he denied me because “I was too young to get them.” Without a TV to distract me, I became engrossed in the covers of the books, imagining the stories within while ignoring my brother’s complaints.

Finally, the day came when my father took down the box from my brother’s shelf and removed the first book of the series: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. I felt like an adult (though I was only eight or nine at the time) as he handed it to me. That book sparked a fire within me that consumed the next six and left me wishing that the story would go onfor another sixty.

The story is an beautiful example of children’s literature. It tells the fantastic tale of four children who discover a passage into another world. In it, they are kings and queens and must battle an evil witch who holds the entire land under a spell of never-ending winter. With the help of a talking lion, Aslan, they triumph in the end and restore order to Narnia. I spent hours wishing I was there with Peter, Edmund, Susan, and Lucy, fighting orcs and giants, fending off spells and being a hero.

While my imagination at that age could picture together almost any story, Bayne’s illustrations filled every blank left by Lewis’ text. Her touch with the pen sings even in black and white. She made the creatures of Narnia real by showing them to the readers. So at the end of this month, when the needle touches my skin again for the first time in seven years, it will add to my skin one of her illustrations, a simple lightpost in the middle of a forest, where the story begins, and where my life of reading began as well.