starlady | (Reply)

From:

I think this is very much what Philip Pullman was attempting to do, but he seemed to get caught a bit along the way.

I think that's a good point--Pullman's Narnia influence is so amazingly strong, and he also went back to one of Lewis' major influences (i.e. Milton) and drank deeply from that well. It's kind of funny how they do the same thing but exactly opposite--Lewis collapses all of Christianity into his own personal, highly idiosyncratic, brand of it, and Pullman collapses all of (organized) religion into a nightmare vision of the Catholic Church. Neither of them are actually very representative of mainstream Christianity/organized religion.

But yeah, exactly, re: the Emperor, at one point during this reread I turned to my roommate and was like, "So...where's the Holy Spirit in Narnia?" And I still don't know where the Holy Spirit is! I mean, it seems obvious to me that the Emperor and Aslan are 2/3 of the Trinity on the Christian interpretation level, but the other third is MIA.

I've not read much Narnia fanfic, in all honesty, just that by

cofax7 and

bedlamsbard and a very few others. A lot of the random stuff I find tends to be very mawkish, to my mind.

I'd love to read a novel/fanfic that dealt with that.

Dust in the Air and Jump in the Fire by

bedlamsbard both have elements of that, and I recommend both of them--'ware the content notes on Jump, though.