CS Lewis was an author born in Ireland \u2013 but can he be considered an Irish author? That is the question posed by ex-rugby international Andrew Trimble in The Lion, the Witch and the Ulsterman (RT\u00c9 One, Thursday, 10.15pm), an engaging documentary in which Trimble, a former Christian theology student from Coleraine, considers Lewis\u2019s complex connection to the island of his birth through the prism of his own multifaceted relationship with Irishness.<\/p>\n
Lewis\u2019s Narnia novels have sold in the hundreds of millions and are a key fantasy text, alongside Tolkien\u2019s The Lord of the Rings. Yet despite his stature, he is rarely thought of as an Irish writer, despite growing up in Belfast<\/a> to a family from Cork<\/a>. <\/p>\n One reason, Trimble discovers, is that Lewis did not sound Irish. He learns this in Oxford, where Lewis worked as a \u201cfellow\u201d and tutor for 29 years, and where Trimble listens to a recording of the writer from the 1950s. His Britishness is striking. He pronounces \u201cprayer\u201d as \u201cpray-ah\u201d and \u201cidea\u201d as \u201cidea-r\u201d \u2013 betraying a thorny relationship with the letter \u201cr\u201d that many Irish people would regard as bordering on the obscene. <\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s a caricature of an Oxford accent,\u201d Trimble observes to Prof Suzannah Lipscomb. She suspects that Lewis\u2019s Irish accent would have been the first thing to go when he was packed off to an English boarding school aged nine, following the death of his mother. \u201cHe went to schools that were brutal to him,\u201d she says. \u201cThe Irish accent was probably beaten out of him.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet if he sounded thoroughly British, he retained an abiding fondness for Belfast and its rolling hinterlands, as the amiable Trimble discovers. In a Lewis-themed coffee shop in East Belfast, Prof Margaret O\u2019Callaghan says Lewis would have known growing up that the city was rived with divisions between unionists and nationalists, and suggests he may have taken refuge in flights of fantasy. She says the \u201cescapism into ideal rurality\u201d is a \u201creaction to a polarised city\u201d. <\/p>\n Lewis is a beloved but controversial figure due to his Christian beliefs \u2013 and his enthusiastic use of his fiction as an ideological Trojan horse (in the Narnia books, the wise lion Aslan is a stand-in for Jesus). British fantasy author Philip Pullman was so annoyed by Lewis that he wrote an entire trilogy, His Dark Materials, simply to scold Lewis over his cruel and chilling final Narnia novel, The Last Battle \u2013 in which Susan Pevensie is condemned for growing up and developing an interest in lipstick and nylon. <\/p>\n Trimble doesn\u2019t get into the weeds of Lewis\u2019s divisiveness. And he does not quite identify the reason why Lewis is excluded from the pantheon of significant Irish literary figures \u2013 which surely has more to do with the lack of any tradition in Ireland of celebrating \u201cregional\u201d authors. It could be argued Frank O\u2019Connor, the Cork Chekhov, receives short shrift for similar reasons \u2013 he doesn\u2019t fit in the Dublin bubble and is thus snubbed. <\/p>\n But Trimble never pretends to have the answer and, across a documentary that is as shaggy as a lion\u2019s mane, he proves agreeable company. The best thing that can be said about The Lion, the Witch and the Ulsterman is that \u2013 and apologies in advance to Philip Pullman \u2013 it makes you want to reach for one of your faded Narnia paperbacks and read it end to end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CS Lewis was an author born in Ireland \u2013 but can he be considered an Irish author? That…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":649034,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[4501,46,93,61,60,6085],"class_list":["post-649033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-belfast","tag-cork","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-rte"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649033\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/649034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}