Prince Caspian. And a fic rec.

[starlady]

So the other night (like two weeks ago) Prince Caspian was on the TV and I actually sat down and watched all of it. And I liked it, much better than I was expecting to--my sister tells me I turned down the chance to see it with her & our mother twice, which I actually really regret, but I don't remember that at all. 

Prince Caspian was never one of my particular favorites of the books when I was rereading them obsessively in elementary school and thereabouts (I like them all for different reasons, with the possible glaring exception nowadays of the 7th (and I go by internal chronology)), but I started to like it better in 8th grade after my reading partner (she was a 2nd grader) said that it was her favorite and we read it out loud: it's the last time the Pevensies are all together in Narnia, which is saying something. The movie of course is quite different from the book, in ways that I liked: Warrior Queen!Susan, Caspian generally being awesome, the extended battles and strategies in the war, even the Witch showing up again momentarily. I thought it was a better movie than TLWW, too, though I liked TLWW fine. (Obviously the changes made are the sort to bother some people a lot, which is not something anyone needs my approval about, and which I can understand, if not agree with.)

I actually sort of find it difficult to talk about Narnia in any intelligible fashion: obviously, there are parts of the books that are awesome, and parts that are full of fail, but I loved them so much as a child, and I still do, but I literally never understood the Christianity until I got my best friend to explain to me in freshman year of high school that Aslan = Jesus and the Emperor = God and I was like, Oh, that's disappointingly allegorical (yeah, as you can see, Tolkien is the Inkling I came to first). And my belief in a higher power has completely fallen away from me now (Quaker, yes; theist, no), and I really found Philip Pullman's critique of Narnia pretty persuasive (and I've talked already about how much of an influence HDM have been on me), and The Problem of Susan just bothers me more and more as time goes on (WAY TO BETRAY YOUR OWN FREAKING PREMISE, CLIVE, THE CURSE OF NARNIA CLEARLY DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU JOSS IT), and…I still love the books, and there's still something about them that speaks to me deeply. Someone who may or may not want to be identified said to me recently that she doesn't believe in God, but she still believes in Aslan, and I pretty much agree (you should see the explanations and justifications that I will spout when I talk about Hogfather and the Christmas spirit). And in a way I feel like PC, the movie, came close to giving me a glimpse of what I love most about Narnia now, the going there and the being there and the coming back. And Susan being so badass with her archery, OMG. I don't even care that they were clearly ripping off Legolas, SHE KICKED ASS. YES. MORE PLEASE. (Also, I find the joint holding of the throne, well, fascinating: that moment when Edward delivers the terms to the Evil Guy, I forget his name, and he's like, "Prince Edmund," and Edmund's like, "It's King actually," YES. And then when the four of them meet Aslan and he addresses them as "Kings and Queen of Narnia," YES. I really want to write something exploring that myself. As you can see, I'm still working on de-monarchicizing my imagination.)

But when the movie finished I decided to finally check out Carpetbaggers, cofax7's massive, and massively awesome, Narnia WIP: It's the story of how the Pevensies make themselves the rulers of Narnia in fact as well as in name, and it's just amazing. Cofax is awesome at plotting, and at teasing out how to go about nation-building, and at not flinching from the implications of 100 years of winter and never Christmas in all their deeply troubling reality, and she gets the Pevensies so right, and it's just so, so brilliant (also totally gen), I can't recommend it enough. 

And all this went down just in time for TVDT, which was my favorite of the books for a good long while. YES. 

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I quite liked the film of PC, because it resolves for me a lot of the issues I have with the book.

Some of those issues are structural: dude, virtually the entirety of that novel consists of Trumpkin telling the Pevensies what has already happened. Shuffling around the temporal framework improved it a lot, to my narrative eye. Some of them are philosophical, and those mostly revolve around Susan: I loved the line the filmmakers gave her about how she's happy to be back in Narnia but knows she'll have to go home again, and I approved of the change at the end, when Aslan says she and Peter have learned what Narnia can teach them, and now it's time to take those lessons home. It undercuts one of the central issues in The Problem of Susan, but I vastly prefer it to the book answer, which is "oh well, you're too old now, bye!"

Haven't seen Dawn Treader yet, and I'm a little worried because it is indeed my favorite book (though The Silver Chair has grown on me since childhood), but I'm looking forward to it.

[starlady]

It's been literally years since I've read any of the books, though I'm planning a reread over the break. I hope part of what I found boring about PC was the structural issues.

Yeah, I sort of feel about the Narnia filmmakers the way I felt at times about Peter Jackson, which is that they are able to get a little closer to the heart of the story than even Lewis himself sometimes, and I think the whole "Peter & Susan are too old" thing is definitely one of them.

I am looking forward to TVDT too! When my sister comes back we are going to see it. It has such beautiful images, and such grand adventures.

If I had to pick one absolute favorite book it still might be either TMN or TLWW. Or TVDT. I really like TMN, particularly in retrospect, these last few years.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I think you're the only person I've ever heard tag TMN as a favorite. (In fact, while typing my above comment, I was thinking TMN probably vies with The Horse and His Boy for Most Frequently Ignored Narnia Novel. People rarely list The Last Battle as a favorite, but they sure as hell don't ignore it; it's the Most Frequently Argued About Narnia Novel instead.)

What makes you like that one so much, especially now?

[starlady]

Drat, I thought I'd replied to this comment!

I just found it all really interesting as a kid--Jadis and her backstory, the Wood Between the Worlds and Diggory and Polly wandering around there, Uncle Andrew being so smart and so dumb at the same time (and that great line he has about high and lonely destiny, and C.S. Lewis is laughing at him so hard), and Narnia being created out of bits of our world mixed with its own substance. And when my mother was ill I found myself thinking about the choice Diggory makes at the end, and how it's even harder than I realized as a kid. And yeah, those silver apples, and how lucky he is to get them.

So yeah, it's the book that situates Narnia in this older discourse, and I really do like it a lot.