Narnia by C. S. Lewis

This year [2007] I read four Narnia books, The Silver Chair, The Last Battle, The voyage of the Dawn Treader, and The Horse and his Boy respectively, and I've read all the other books numerous time as well. I sit here, in Arusha, Tanzania, listening to a mix of contemporary and classic music from Starbuck’s ‘Now Playing’ its strange to consider what I have to say about these well known stories.

C. S. Lewis created a world 40 to 50 years ago which continues to influence fiction in a large way; I will often pick out a children’s fantasy book with a pretentious quote on the back cover saying something along the lines of ‘up to the same standards of C. S. Lewis’ or ‘the best child’s fantasy world since Narnia,’ and promptly place the book back on the shelf. Its not that I hold the Narnia books as absolutely supreme, but these books do say something which will never be said the same way again. C. S. Lewis always claimed that he wrote his books because they were books that he had always wanted to read but the problem was nobody else had written them yet. He also didn’t really like his books to be called allegories, either. But in many ways they are just that, stories which connect children with what he believed to be the truth. They are like hints at the bigger picture of life.
John Elderedge in his book 'Waking the Dead' calls them myths, not in a Marxist sense, but in the sense that they touch something mythical in each of us. Look at the success of mythical movies, such as Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. They are not factually true stories and don't claim to be, yet in some ways they are true. I will write more on this later.

When we go with Jill, Eustace and Puddleglum to the great city under the earth in The Silver Chair, it feels as if we are descending into the Underworld, Sheol, or Hell. But when we arrive there we see a metaphor connected to our own world, modeled on a dull grey place, with dull grey buildings and populated by the deceived minions of an evil queen. This is clearly a statement about how the modernized world is blinded by evil and totally unaware of what goes on the surface of the earth above their secluded city. This, I believe, represents the way the modern world is cut off and blinded from the spiritual side of life and forced to live the dull existence of existentialism, for the minions themselves no longer believe there is any world above their world.

Perhaps the most significant, but most intangible archetype/metaphor in my readings of literature is the figure of Aslan as a Christ figure, and the white witch who appears in many forms as the image of Lucifer. Having read Jesus’ words in the Gospels and elsewhere in the Bible, C. S. Lewis does a marvelous job of capturing the voice of Christ in the mouth of Aslan. The names Aslan is given in the novels are significant also: the great Lion; the great Bridge Builder; the Prince from across the sea. “He is not a tame lion,” the Narnias say of their Lord with reverence. When Caspian, the Young King of Narnia reaches the end of the world in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, he is forbidden to continue to go to the end and is forced to return to Narnia, which causes him to turn uncharacteristically sour and sulk off to his cabin. He returns shortly clothed in white (like Gandalf in LOTRs), having met with the Great Lion himself in the small room, who explained to him why he must return to Narnia and has changed the young kings heart. “He was not rough with me,” Caspian says, but you can hear the fear and reverence in these words and he is visibly shaken. The Christ figure Lewis creates is not a meek or mild person for the majority of the narrative, but fierce and direct, gentle and good.

The only improvements in the books could have been to change the stale dialog between the children from our world as it seemed contrived and carried little depth. The human characters themselves, excepting Lucie and maybe Eustace, were generally undeveloped, and are used more as catalysts to the wondrous events of Narnia than much else. But aside from these few vices, each story is significant and very exploratory of Lewis' world, of the themes and characters of Narnia but in a way in which the reader plays as much part constructing the world as the writer, much in a way that M. John Harrison would have it himself.

starting again

I've been thinking a lot about posting reviews for books and films every now and again for a while now. I have a blog, as you may well know, at si-smallthoughts.blogspot.com,
but it doesn't seem appropriate to post reviews, comments and recommendations there, so this may become a useful tool.

Now, I'm not quite sure where to start this, but here goes anyway.