The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

[starlady]

As well as being Martin Luther King, Jr., Day in the States, today is the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected president of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. I recommend Adam Hochschild's piece in the Times to everyone.

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Lewis, C.S. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. New York: Harper Collins, 1994. [1950]

I can remember this book not being my particular favorite when I first read the books in fourth grade, and I can see why; it's one of the shortest of the books, and on reread it's surprising to me how much of it doesn't actually take place in Narnia--not until the beginning of chapter 6 do Peter and Susan get into Narnia--and how quickly it feels like things wrap up once they do. Not that things actually do wrap up all that quickly, but I couldn't help but compare this to today's YA books, which are so much longer and more, well, not 'realistic,' precisely, but more invested in realism. I think it was bedlamsbard who said at one point that the books read like fairy tales or legends abstracted out of real events, and that's certainly true of LWW. In particular, the utter cruelty of the final ending strikes me anew here; I just can't imagine writing this story and writing that ending. It may have been comforting to its initial audience, and intended as such on Jack Lewis' part, but it seems unspeakably violent to the Pevensies, and to Narnia. (I think at this point mentioning Cat Valente's complaint about portal fantasy, that it's always predicated on the need to return to one's original world, is relevant. Like her, I am highly skeptical of that automatic assumption.)

All that being said, I enjoyed this one a lot this time around, though I was surprised at how little screentime Edmund's actual repentance, forgiveness, and conversation with Aslan got; but I like all four of the Pevensies, though Lewis' investment to a large extent in conventional societal gender roles also grates--I much prefer Walden Media's revisionist take on that, though compared to Tolkien, the relative gender equity of Narnia--VDT is the only book in which equal numbers of boys and girls don't go to Narnia, at least initially--is remarkable. It's also interesting to read this book knowing that it was written first of all, and to see the little throwaway details and untied threads that dangle from it in places, and to try to think how they could possibly be made coherent--obviously, TMN is an effort on Lewis' part to do just that, but inevitably some things are still left dangling.

This seems like a good place to mention that I didn't understand until freshman year of high school the Christian aspects of these books, and that only then because I got my Quaker best friend to explain it to me. I think we can take this among other things as evidence of the fact that six years of CCD categorically failed to indoctrinate me into Catholicism in any meaningful fashion, or of the Christian privilege inherent in growing up even sort-of Christian; I also…well. This time around, reading about Aslan at the Stone Table seems ridiculously obvious (I do hope JRR had some scathing words for CS about the obviousness of the allegory), but on the other hand, I know it only seems obvious to me because I knew about it going in. I think it's perfectly possible to read these books and to believe, as I did, that Aslan ≠ Jesus, though this may require a certain obliviousness that probably isn't possible to sustain in the age of Wikipedia. I still don't really accept this whole 'Aslan = Jesus' thing, to be really honest. And I find myself asking, if the Emperor is God and Aslan is Jesus, where is the Holy Spirit in Narnia?

Another thing that's striking to me is the sheer blistering hatred C.S. Lewis had for school. It's a consistent motif--perhaps the most consistent motif in the books--that school is by definition awful, awful, awful. Considering that Lewis was writing the books in his later fifties, a good forty years after he'd finished that sort of school, it's quite striking how much those emotions remained with him. I know from Roald Dahl's memoirs that school was a living hell for boys of a certain temperament, or more probably most boys, but Lewis clearly never got over it entirely.

Comments

[larryhammer]

A more evenhanded comparison than today's YA books would be today's middle-grade books -- the books that elementary school students read, rather than older middle- and high-schoolers (who do read YA). (Yes, the terms are confusing.) By those standards, yes, they are somewhat on the small side but not nearly as much as if you compare them with books for older readers.

In fact, an excellent comparison could be made to the Imaginarium Geographica series by James Owen, which is not only a portal fantasy of sorts but has young Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams as characters. Somewhat longer, but still the same brisk pace. In contrast, Bruce Coville's works from a decade ago (My Teacher is an Alien or Magic Shop series) are even shorter and brisker.

---L.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's a good point. One of the interesting things that you can kind of glimpse through these books is how the conception of childhood itself has subtly changed (and not so subtly) since Lewis was writing them.

[larryhammer]

Oh indeed. And then compare further back to E. Nesbit's books. And then sideways to the contemporaneous Edward Eager fantasies. (I was about to include Swallows and Amazons, but no, they're actually older, between Nesbit and Lewis. But somehow they feel as modern as Lewis and Eager.)

---L.