Elizabeth Hopkinson's Hidden Grove

  I’ve just come back from co-leading a Book Club holiday near Oxford with HF Holidays. It was hard work but rewarding. The book I chose - and about which I led discussions - was Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, which I wrote about in a previous blog. I chose it for its many references to Narnia and the ideas of  CS Lewis and Owen Barfield, two of Oxford’s famous Inklings.  But there were also some connections that were sheer serendipity. For one, the country house hotel we were using (Harrington House in Bourton-on-the-Water) had this statue of a faun in its garden. And even better, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford were holding a temporary exhibition on the subject of the Labyrinth. I found the exhibition fascinating and inspiring. I could have got tons more discussion points for Piranesi out of it, especially the similarities between Valentine Ketterley in the book and Sir Arthur Evans, who took over the dig on Crete in true colonial fashion and projected his own interpret...

Authors generally have a way of talking about Narnia. I’ve noticed it at the various literature festivals I’ve been to and in articles I’ve read online. It goes something like this. “When I was a kid, I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and fell in love with it. Then, at the age of 13/18/32, I noticed all the Christian symbolism and felt betrayed. I’ve never enjoyed it in the same way since.” Whenever I hear/read this, it’s like a stab to the heart. I want to get a word in. Because my experience of Narnia is the complete reverse. I first heard the story of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe  as told over several school playtimes by my best friend, the son of a local nonconformist minister. I went on to become completely obsessed by the whole series, reading the books over and over again. Now, I don’t know if my friend or his parents told me, or I just worked it out because I was such a religiously precocious child (I was!) but I can’t remember a time when I didn’t...