The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis

The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis

So, after years of procrastination I have finally read my way through the Chronicles of Narnia. I have been aware of the series for as long as I can remember, with reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe way back when I was about eight or so, and re-reading it a few years ago – about 2015 I think. On its own I was not really impressed with the book, being a rather slow fairy tale lacking in plot, character or excitement of any kind, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt thanks to its position as just one part of a wider series. Now, after the reading the whole thing from start to finish, in C.S. Lewis’ recommended reading order – which is different to publication order or writing order – I can provide my definitive opinion on the series, taking each book in turn and seeing how it all weaves together.

 

1. The Magician’s Nephew (1955)

While canonically the first book in the series, The Magician’s Nephew feels more like a prequel than the beginning of a wider series – probably because it is. Its main relevance is surely to those who already know about certain lions, witches and wardrobes, and sets out to answer questions that nobody needed answering.

                Taking place at some point vaguely in late Victorian London, decades before the events of the rest of the series, our protagonists are two children, Polly and Digory. Digory has recently moved in next door to Polly because his father is off colonising India while his mother has fallen terminally ill, and so he is now under the care of his aunt and his eccentric uncle Andrew. The two children become friends, and whilst exploring the attic they stumble across Uncle Andrew, who has been conducting magical experiments. He has created a set of magical rings which can transport their wearers to another dimension, and he forces the two children to be his guinea pigs and scout out the other world for him. The children discover not one, but a whole plethora of other worlds, and one of the first places they find themselves is a dark ruined city named Charn. Digory makes a fatal mistake by awakening the evil Empress Jadis, who pursues the children back to London with the aim of using her sorcerous powers to take over our world.

                After much to-ing and fro-ing, with Uncle Andrew becoming swept up in Jadis’ plans, Digory manages to teleport himself, Polly, Jadis, Uncle Andrew, a random cab-driver and a horse all to yet another dimension. This one, however, is the newly formed world of Narnia, which our motley ensemble of characters witness being created by the mega-powerful lion Aslan. By singing, Aslan forms the land and creatures of Narnia, blessing some of them with the ability to speak. The witch Jadis of course decides that this is another world for her to conquer, and rushes off for some reason whilst Aslan is very reproachful to the other characters for bringing Jadis to his new world. Uncle Andrew finds himself tormented by the animals, because he apparently deserves it, whilst Digory is given a thorough scolding and asked to go off and bring back a magic apple from a ‘special garden’, to protect Narnia from the witch until the events of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe are ready to take place. Oh yes, and the random cockney Cabbie is made king of Narnia and his horse is turned into Pegasus.

                My verdict of this book is that it lacks direction. It was actually one of the last of The Chronicles of Narnia to be written/published, and it honestly feels like something that should have been tacked on the end of the series, only of use to those who already know about the world of Narnia and where it’s going. About half-way through the book we suddenly find ourselves yanked away from the already established plot of ‘Mega-Witch Invades London’ to witness the creation of Narnia and the introduction of God-Lion Aslan, and I feel that if this is perhaps such an important event, then why do we spend so much time going back and forth for the first half of the book? And then, because it’s a prequel we get no real resolution to the story, just the convenient setting up of events, characters and props for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which is the only reason we’re reading this story. We get some background on where the Witch originally came from, and then we also find out how the fabled Wardrobe came to be (it was made out of wood from a tree grown from a magic apple core which had been planted with Uncle Andrew’s teleportation rings. At last, now it all makes sense!)

                My verdict is that it is not a very good story at all, and its place at the beginning of The Chronicles of Narnia only serves to wear out our introduction to the series.

 

2. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)

I previously reviewed The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a standalone novel back in 2015, as that is how the Chronicles of Narnia began – and apparently back then I found it brief, lacking in plot but otherwise inoffensive. Now I’m reading it in the proper reading order (as endorsed by its writer), and as the second instalment of a series of short novels aimed at Christianising children I can see it under pretty much the same light. I do not find the experience of reading this book in any way enhanced by first reading a prequel of it.

The story involves four children evacuated from London during the Blitz living at a grand country manor (owned by the now aged protagonist of The Magician’s Nephew) who discover a magical wardrobe which acts as a gateway to the land of Narnia, held in the grip of a cruel tyrannical witch (the antagonist of The Magician’s Nephew). One of the children, Edmund, is lured into working for the witch in some sort of allegory for sin, whilst the other children meet the great lion Aslan who’s so ‘awesome’ it’s a wonder he hasn’t overthrown the witch already by himself. After confronting the baddies, rescuing Edmund, and outwitting the witch through absolute Deus Ex Machina, Narnia is saved and everyone agrees about what a good thing it is that the children showed up and fulfilled a convenient prophecy.

Things I like: it’s short and relatively simple as books go, which is good as it’s aimed at children. I like one or two of the characters, especially Edmund as he gets a bit of a character arc and has most of the interactions with the villainous witch, who is probably the most entertaining character in the book. I like the weird ending where the four children just end up becoming kings and queens of Narnia, ruling for decades and forgetting about the real world (or is Narnia the ‘real’ world???), only to stumble back through the wardrobe and find that only a few minutes had passed since they first left.

Things I don’t like: The meandering plot which doesn’t feel very coherent, Aslan’s pulling a rabbit out of a hat to survive death and become Super Aslan, Father Christmas suddenly showing up to dole out some weapons, and C.S. Lewis’ faintly patronising style of writing for children, as though he thinks he knows best. It’s about the third time in my life I’ve read this book, and I still feel that it’s a solid ‘D’ grade piece of literature. It doesn’t bode well for the rest of the series, if we get more of the same.

 

3. The Horse and his boy (1954)

The Horse and His Boy was the fifth Narnia book to be published, but is canonically the third book in the series’ own internal timeline. In reality it should be seen as more of a spin-off, because the events of the book and the characters in it have almost nothing to do with the rest of the series. Set in the years after the four children from The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe become kings and queens of Narnia, the story follows the adventure of a young outcast named Shasta living an orphaned life in the desert land of Calormen. After meeting a talking horse from Narnia, named Bree, Shasta and his new companion (or Bree and his new companion) set off to travel to Narnia. On the way they meet an escaped noblewoman and her own talking horse and learn of a terrible plot by a prince of Calormen to invade the neighbouring northern kingdom of Archenland, and it is up to them to warn the king in time to stop the war.

First point to note, this is a better story than the previous two discussed in this review. The new setting of Calormen is somewhat refreshing, and there’s no intrusion of the real world at any point in the narrative. The city of Tashbaan where much of the plot takes place is different and exotic, and there’s usually something happening in the story to keep hold of the reader’s attention. Shasta himself is the reader’s surrogate, so although not having a great character he at least has a presence in the story and motives which make sense. A better character is Bree, the horse, a proud and slightly bloodthirsty creature who has a real personality of his own. The early chapters of the book which just involve Bree and Shasta are entertaining simply through watching Bree’s interactions with his human companion, his tough war-horse ideals being very different to Shasta’s young and naïve take on life. Of the remaining characters none are overly extraneous – Aravis is on the run after escaping an arranged marriage and hates the culture that women in her homeland have to live with, so at least she knows what she wants, while her horse is kind of forgettable. The rulers of Calormen are obsequious and haughty, and the villain Prince Rabadash is a hateful, arrogant little scumbag. Of the other characters we’ve got a careless young prince of Archenland who looks exactly like Shasta (can anybody else spot an upcoming plot-twist?), several of the children from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe all grown up and making a fan-pleasing return, and finally of course we have our own Christ-Lion Aslan showing up to moralize at everybody. At least most of the characters have a purpose in this story, unlike in the previous entry where we had four children doing the work of two or three.

Now on to the bad stuff. The most notable problem this book suffers is the old Edward Said issue of ‘Orientalism’. To create a new and unfamiliar landscape C.S. Lewis has fallen back on the oldest cliché you can find, painting a decidedly Arabian picture complete with all the expected features – scorching deserts, crowded trading cities, massive slave-filled palaces and sultans living in opulence and luxury, obsequious Grand Viziers, princesses on divans and forced marriages. It wouldn’t be so bad, all this stereotyping, if it wasn’t so painfully obvious that C.S. Lewis was using this new landscape to make a very firm point – Orient = Bad, West/North = Good. Shasta and Aravis are shown as being very unhappy in this country, and with Bree saying how wonderful life is in the north, in Narnia and Archenland, the audience can be left in no doubt what point the author is driving home. That Shasta is a mysterious orphan who does not know who his parents were – looking quite unlike the other people of Calormen – is yet another dodgy part of this equation, and so it comes as no surprise when it is revealed he is actually a lost prince of Archenland, and so therefore it was his destiny to escape the savage land of Calormen and reclaim his place in the good and temperate north. I didn’t want to call this book racist, but it clearly is. It’s not even pretending to be anything else.

The verdict on The Horse and His Boy, is that it is a better book than the previous instalments of The Chronicles of Narnia, but that it has some much more pronounced problems. For the most part I enjoyed it, but as it went on I grew increasingly bored of the lazy stereotyping of Middle Eastern culture and its more heavy-handed Christian metaphors. On this note, I won’t look too deeply into Aslan in this book as he’s not a particularly major part of the story and I’m sure I’ll have more to say about him later on. Suffice to say that as in the other books discussed so far this Lion-Jesus-Metaphor comes across as overbearing, judgemental, capricious, and a little bit unpredictable. I suppose if one of your characters is meant to be an omnipotent deity then they probably will end up appearing like this. Is this how C.S. Lewis imagined Christ? Perhaps a lion is a good image to have for them – very impressive, and it could easily maul and eat you if it wanted to. Really sells the idea of Christianity.

 

4. Prince Caspian (1951)

The second book written in the series, number four in the Narnian timeline, Prince Caspian feels very much like a direct sequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, largely because it is. For the first time we are given a map of Narnia, not that it is especially necessary – just a nice touch – and we begin with the four children from the first book (or second, which is confusing) a year after their adventures in the Narnian wardrobe concluded. Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are sat on a platform, awaiting a train which will take them all to separate schools, when suddenly they are transported without warning right back to Narnia. Lost and bewildered in a scarcely recognisable world, they eventually realise that while only a year has passed for them back in their own world, an age appears to have gone by in Narnia – the castle of Cair Paravel is in ruins, great forests have sprung up and the history books appears to have all but forgotten about the children’s reign as kings and queens. Most importantly, Aslan worship has been forbidden and abandoned! They rescue a dwarf who explains as much to them, but tells a tale about the young Prince Caspian, the noble true king of Narnia, who has escaped from his uncle’s assassins and is now leading a doomed rebellion against the evil regime.

                So then, essentially we get three parts to the book. The first sees the four Wardrobe Children (I may as well call them that from now on) wandering lost and confused around the new Narnian landscape, which is a bit of a small-scale survival story as they must use what little they have carried with them from their own world to survive, and it does appear that they are struggling. All they have to eat are apples, and the only shelter they have is some old castle ruins – and they’re not even sure how or why they’ve ended up back in Narnia. Once they’ve rescued a dwarf ally from being murdered by the bad king’s goons, we are then taken into a different narrative, explaining the origin story of Prince Caspian and the rebellion, a sequence which takes up the middle section of the book. When at last we re-join the Wardrobe Children, the third and final section of the story begins, with our heroes setting off across Narnia to find Prince Caspian, hook up with Aslan, and defeat the evil king Miraz.

                Actually I quite enjoyed this book, compared to the others so far. The initial premise of having the Wardrobe Children transported to a future Narnia and having to work out what’s happened and how to survive is a good beginning, and the subsequent tale told to explain what has been going on since they left, and who Prince Caspian is, leads you on and gets you thoroughly clued-in for the rest of the story. The children are still not great characters, although there has been some development since the previous book. Lucy is still the One True Believer whose faith in Aslan gives the story a bit of drive, whilst Susan takes on the Doubting Thomas role – although her character appears to have ‘levelled up’ with some awesome longbow skills. Edmund has learnt his lesson from the previous book, and whilst still a surly little oik he at least supports his siblings and tries to do the right thing. And Peter of course is the set-jawed hero, by which I mean he’s the dullest of the lot. He just appears to be serious, trying to be a leader, and occasionally makes decisions ‘Like A Man’, because that’s what’s expected of him. Of the other characters, they are fine I suppose. The evil king, Miraz, is not that great a villain. He’s just kind of there, and besides his thorough dislike of anything related to Aslan or talking animals, he’s not even particularly evil. He’s more of a nuisance. There are a few other characters, like Caspian himself, but overall there’s nobody who leaps out – besides Aslan, but we will discuss him later.

                So I quite enjoyed this book. Unlike other Narnia books I’ve read so far it not only knows where it’s going but it also tells a relatively engaging story whilst getting there. The heroes triumph through their faith in the One True Lion, Aslan, thanks to Lucy, and Narnia is restored to its happy old self when the evil king is vanquished. The characters are still vague and sketchy, and the writing is wishy washy like always and sometimes a tad patronising (there’s one section where C.S. Lewis describes some soil as ‘like you would find in Somerset’, as though a kid would have an opinion on what soil is like in Somerset, assuming they’ve ever been there), but overall it wasn’t a bad children’s book. Let’s call it the best so far.

 

5. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

Book number 5, or third one published, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader follows on directly from Prince Caspian and once again we accompany our wardrobe children – or at least, two of them, Lucy and Edmund. Peter and Susan have been handily written out of this story, which is good because they were the most boring characters in the previous episodes. In their stead we have Eustace Scrubb, an irritating little toe-rag who is a cousin of the wardrobe children, a character not unlike Dudley Dursley from the Harry Potter series, a mean-hearted, spoilt boy who inexplicably hates Lucy and Edmund, and thinks magical things are stupid.

                The story begins with our remaining two wardrobe children staying with their cousin Eustace’s family, and while all three children are looking at a nice painting of a ship, they are suddenly pulled through the painting and end up floating in the sea off the coast of Narnia. The ship in the painting is already there, ready to rescue them from drowning, and it turns out to be under the command of King Caspian and his aggressive mouse-knight Reepicheep from the previous book. Caspian has brought a crew of Narnians out onboard this ship, the Dawn-Treader, to search for some missing companions of his father, lost years beforehand while journeying these seas. Lucy and Edmund gleefully join Caspian’s voyage, with nasty little Eustace reluctantly going along as well, as there’s no other way for him to get back.

                With all this having been set up, the rest of the book is just a series of adventures as our intrepid crew sail from one place to another, discovering various magical islands and gradually finding out what has become of the lost Narnian nobles who preceded them. There’s not really a plot, just a series of little episodes consisting of a chapter or two each. On one island Eustace runs off like a little pillock, and gets turned into a dragon, which he hates. After some introspection and character growth, where he learns to appreciate the other members of the crew, he then meets Aslan and turns back into a human again, Having Learned A Very Valuable Lesson About Humility And Friendship. On another island they find a magical pool of water which turns anything submerged in it into pure gold – a death trap for anybody who touches it, and one which invokes greed and treachery for those who wish to control it for their own ends. Most of the trials of these islands are solved because Aslan shows up and gives everybody a talking-to, as one might expect.

                So in terms of characters, Lucy seems to be the one doing the heavy lifting for most of the book, being the main audience POV character and being generally more perceptive than the others. Prince Caspian takes on the dull stoic hero role that Peter would have done otherwise, while Reepicheep the mouse is quite a vicious little fellow, almost causing more problems than he helps with thanks to his brazenness. Edmund is just boring now, having nothing really to do and no character arc of his own, and I feel that perhaps he should have been written out of the story like his elder siblings. The new addition of cousin Eustace is perhaps the most interesting of all, simply because he is such a detestable little toerag. C.S. Lewis appears to have poured everything he hated into Eustace’s character, describing his parents in the first page of the book as ‘very up-to-date and advanced […] vegetarians, non smokers and tee-totallers [who] wore a special kind of underclothes’ and proceeding to describe all the ways in which Eustace was nasty, selfish and generally without any merits to his personality. He is just irritating, complaining bitterly throughout the first half of the book about how much he hates everything, then goes through a big amount of character growth mid-way through when he has a stint being a dragon. The only downside, apart from how much of a little arse he is, is that once he’s solved his dragon problem he has very little to do for the remainder of the story, so he kind of makes himself irrelevant as a character by the end.

                Like Prince Caspian this is quite an enjoyable book, as far as the Chronicles of Narnia go. Once again, if one can cope with the obvious Christian metaphors then it’s not half bad, and actually gets quite good towards the end once the characters reach the fabled ‘edge of the world’, an obvious analogy for Heaven, where we finally part with one of the characters knowing that they’ll never be seen again. Their meeting with Aslan, who comes to them initially in the form of a lamb and then explains that he can certainly be found in the real world, explaining:

“…there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.” [Pg. 188]

This is fairly heavy-handed acknowledgement that Aslan is Christ, but altogether the build up to the final chapter and its contents is certainly one of the better moments in the series so far. Altogether the book is quite an alright read.

 

6. The Silver Chair (1953)

The fourth book published, penultimate in the reading order, The Silver Chair like its predecessor follows on directly from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, picking up with former toe-rag Eustace Scrubb the following year once he’s returned to school. Making friends with class mate Jill Pole who has been suffering from bullying, the two of them end up in Narnia, as you do, and immediately meet Aslan who offers them a quest. They are to track down the lost son of the now elderly King Caspian from the previous books, so that the divine right of kings can be observed, or some such. The lost prince Rilian went missing, presumed captured by some evil witch or snake, and is hinted to be trapped beneath a ruined city of giants to the far north of Narnia. Scrubb and Pole set out on their adventure armed only with some clues handed to them by Aslan, and quickly team up with an odd fellow called Puddleglum the marsh-wiggle, an eternal pessimist but who is nevertheless fully loyal to the children and is occasionally useful.

                Just as with the previous book we have a journey broken up into several episodes, with our intrepid trio making their way north and facing various dangers, mostly giant-related. Unlike the previous book however we’ve got a clear plot with some vague stakes, as the underlying mystery of what happened to Prince Rilian spurs on the character as well as the story. The eventual climax of the book, once our characters head deep down into an underground realm inhabited by a vast plethora of strange misshapen beings ruled by an evil witch, sees our heroes come face to face with an enslaved knight and his strange dependence on the titular ‘Silver Chair’, a sinister magical device that he has to be strapped into every night and left one his own.

                C.S. Lewis has made a wise choice in jettisoning the last of the wardrobe children and once again making use of his now established character formula, consisting of ‘a boy’ and ‘a girl’. Eustace is on his second outing to Narnia, and is nowhere near the insufferable oik he was in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, having previously learned to trust the world and creatures of this fantasy land and generally be a better person, although as a consequence he has now become the dull protagonist in the same vein as Peter and Caspian, while his English public-school persona and style of speech gives him the vague modicum of personality. Jill Pole meanwhile is our replacement Lucy, the audience-surrogate newcomer to Narnia who needs to learn to trust Aslan and his words whilst also overcoming her fear, both of the inhabitants and lands of Narnia but also of the other children at school who she’s run away from. Like Eustace she’s not especially strong a character, but seeing as how most of the action is seen through Jill’s eyes it does slightly make up for this deficiency. The third and final main character is Puddleglum, a native of Narnia who looks something like a frog-shaped human and spends most of his time looking on the hopeless side of life. Every time the group make plans or consider what might happen next, Puddleglum predicts the bleakest outcome. After meeting the children Puddleglum offers them some cooked eels for dinner, saying they’ll probably hate it and that they won’t even be well cooked, and later when Jill falls into a pit, Puddleglum immediately assumes she’s broken both her legs. Although this gloomy outlook and constant negativity ought to get annoying, strangely there’s an underlying jollity to the character that gives him a comical edge. In some regards he’s actually quite a cheerful presence, and the fact he’s only one third of the group means he never spends too much time trying to get on your nerves. It’s a fine balance to make a character like this never get annoying, and Lewis appears to have struck it faultlessly here.

                The dynamic of the three characters is as good as you can expect from a C.S. Lewis children’s novel. Although none of the characters are great, there are at least enough of them to keep the reader engaged and never forget that any of them exist. In the previous novel, once Eustace had learned his lesson and become a better person he actually became superfluous to the narrative, no longer having a unique identity and ending up as something of a background character, so thankfully this fault doesn’t appear in The Silver Chair. Essentially Jill and Eustace spend the whole length of the book bouncing off eachother with every situation, with Puddleglum interjecting his own unique take on matters to keep the writing interesting. With better-defined characters it could have worked better as a book, but even with the paper-thin Eustace and Jill taking up space it doesn’t not work here, I you catch my drift.

                The story itself is on the stronger end of the Narnia spectrum, being quite engaging from start to finish. Our protagonists are told right from the beginning what they’ve got to do and are driven on to find and rescue the missing prince and solve the mystery of his disappearance, and rarely does the story get too bogged down in itself. After overcoming several difficulties, including being looked after in a castle of suspiciously friendly giants, the three of them wind up in vast subterranean world for the last section of the book. The quiet and gloomy atmosphere of this location is one of the better in the Chronicles of Narnia, and the reveal of the curse of the Silver Chair and the confrontation with the witch is better than expected for this book series. I particularly enjoyed the climactic chapter when the witch appeared, attempting to ensnare our heroic trio with a dastardly spell to make them forget the world on the surface and the sky overhead, and believe that the only world they have ever known was this gloomy underground one, creating an almost tense situation. I’m wondering again if it’s some sort of Christian metaphor from C.S. Lewis, the witch standing in for society and education in an effort to convince us all that only cold hard facts are true, and that fantasy and make-believe (i.e. religion) cannot be believed due to its intangibility. When the children cling to their memories of the sun to resist the spell, comparing it to the lamp hanging from the ceiling of the witch’s lair, she responds:

“You see? When you try to think out clearly what this sun must be, you cannot tell me. You can only tell me it is like the lamp. Your sun is a dream; and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp. The lamp is the real thing; the sun is but a tale, a children’s story.” [Pg. 142]

All in all, it ends up being a satisfying ending to an all round decent story, and ends up being one of the better Chronicles of Narnia books. By this stage C.S. Lewis appears to have been able to clear out extraneous characters from his story and use themes and motifs a little more effectively than he has in previous books. Another good feature is that Aslan himself takes a less active role in proceedings, functioning more as a quest-giver at the start and finish of the books rather than the deus ex machina which he has been in most of the others, and it’s the characters themselves who are mainly the ones driving the action. I may even go as far as to give this one a ‘thumbs up’.

 

7. The Last Battle (1956)

The final Narnia book to be published (although it was written in 1953, before The Magician’s Nephew), The Last Battle tells the tale of Narnia’s destruction. Beginning rather innocuously in a wood, we are introduced to an elderly ape named Shift and his donkey friend Puzzle, before showing that this supposed friendship is in fact a rather abusive relationship, with Shift bullying and deceiving Puzzle into doing anything and everything that he wants. The pair find a lion skin, which Shift decides to make Puzzle wear in order to impersonate Aslan. Next we are introduced to the young King Tirian, descendent of King Caspian and Rilian, and his unicorn buddy, who learn how Shift and a false Aslan have basically taken over huge swathes of Narnia with the help of the evil Calormenes from the southern desert. As more Narnians are taken in by the deception, Tirian finds himself pushed to the brink of defeat, and with the help of Eustace and Jill from the previous book they are forced to make their last stand against the forces of darkness.

                So as befitting a book with a title like The Last Battle, the whole story is filled with a fatal foreboding. The ape Shift and his many accomplices prove to be an interesting array of villains who are consistently one step ahead of Tirian and, despite the sudden appearance of Eustace and Jill, it seems inevitable that Narnia is doomed. Shift himself has no grand scheme other than to satisfy his own greed by using the dressed-up donkey to deceive everybody, which makes for a curious set up for a final act to a book series like this. I have to say I was actually mildly invested in it.

                One thing, however, that is most readily apparent in this book – more so than in any of the previous instalments – is the overt racism in the text. I’m not reading anything into this, and I wouldn’t even call it subtle like it was in A Horse and His Boy, it’s matter of fact throughout the text. C.S. Lewis brings in the Calormenes, the brown-skinned southern neighbours of Narnia to act as the primary antagonists of this tale, armed invaders who have snuck into the country thanks to Shift’s invitation to despoil the land, enslave the Narnians, and eventually conquer the Cair Paravel. These people are described as bearded, dark-skinned, wearing turbans and carrying scimitars, and worshipping a violent and blood-thirsty god called Tash, and Lewis only ever portrays them negatively. The last time they featured in the Chronicles of Narnia it was in A Horse and His Boy, and while that made for some uncomfortable reading (for instance the main character who may have been raised in Calormen but was ‘actually good’, because it turned out he was the lost son of a noble northern king) it was not quite so bad as here. C.S. Lewis lays out his prejudices in stark daylight when Shift, who is after all the main villain of the story, proposes the idea that Aslan and Tash are one and the same. King Tirian of course hates this idea, because how can the evil god of a foreign people be reconciled with the good and noble One True God of the white folk? I can’t help but see this as Lewis rejecting any similarities between Christianity and another widely-followed religion in our own world, one practiced predominantly by peoples from a southern, hotter region who are stereotyped as wearing turbans and carrying scimitars. This religious antagonism is further highlighted in the later chapters of the book with the character of Emeth, a good Calormene who bravely goes to his death but is saved by Aslan. It turns out that although Emeth has served the evil Tash all his life, in his heart unbeknownst to him he has really been serving Aslan because all his good deeds were for Aslan, as Tash could never accept good deeds done in his name. It stinks of the ‘noble savage’ idea. While the earlier books were quite palatable, in this final instalment we see C.S. Lewis’ hatred of non-Christians laid bare for all to see, because it is so central to the whole narrative, and at one stage our heroes have to impersonate Calormenes by ‘blacking up’ and putting on the same costumes. We could try and brush all these issues under the carpet by saying that Lewis was a white Englishman writing in the 1950s, and he was just echoing widely held views of the time, but I can’t see it this way. Lewis was a highly educated Oxbridge professor and friend of J.R.R. Tolkien who would certainly have been more worldly than many people alive at that time, but it’s likely his position as an adult convert and apologist for Christianity which must have affected his views, giving him the zealotry and certitude of the convert which allowed no other world-view to exist in his head. The Last Battle may be a fantasy, but it is a terrified fantasy of a world in which those of other faiths and beliefs are to be hated and pitied.

                So after the apocalyptic last battle alluded to in the title, the characters from this story are united with the protagonists of all the previous books in the series as they find themselves in a new Narnia, an allegory for heaven in which everybody who has been good and trusted in Aslan is allowed to live forever in a perfect world. The imperfect real world of England and the imperfect Narnia are flawed and due for ending, and the true happy and glorious world under Aslan’s rule is showed in a fairly trippy final few chapters. And here the parable of religious conversion is taken to its logical conclusion, because although it is revealed that nearly all the characters from the Chronicles of Narnia have just died in a massive train crash, with the certainty of eternal life after death in a perfect world is the real reward, and everyone lives happily ever after.

                The Last Battle is a fascinating book. I’ve been highly critical of it, yes, because as the purest distillation of C.S. Lewis’ views I can’t help but find it a very unpleasant read – but at the same time it has a great deal more substance than any of the previous entries, and really serves as a conclusion that ties the whole Chronicles of Narnia series together. If I were a believer after C.S. Lewis’ own heart, and could overlook the deeply concerning views evident in the text, then maybe I would find the book more enjoyable, and find the promise of life after death comforting. In the end I appreciated much about this book, such as the atmosphere, the desperate stakes, the reappearance of previous characters from the series, and the interesting character studies.

 

Final thoughts

It is impossible to separate these whimsical fairy tales for children from the author who wrote them. The Chronicles of Narnia, however you view their inception in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe very clearly stand as an allegory for Christian belief, with Aslan being a fantastical version of Jesus Christ who literally rules and guides the peoples of the land of Narnia. C.S. Lewis was a man who had undergone an intense spiritual journey, being fervently raised as a Christian in Ireland before adopting atheism as a teenager, and then re-converting to Anglicanism later in life. While I haven’t read any of Lewis’ other writings, and so can’t speak with any authority on whether the zealotry and absolute dogma evident in Narnia is due to any underlying guilt at having been atheist, it cannot be denied that religion is the most important aspect of the entire series. Let’s look at Aslan himself.

                The lion character who appears frequently during the series, Aslan serves as an occasional Deus Ex Machina who can directly solve plot problems, as he does towards the end of The Lion, the Witch and Wardrobe and half-way through The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in curing Eustace of his dragon transformation, but more frequently he works from the side-lines, watching over the protagonists of each story and gently chiding them when they do something wrong (or less gently chiding them in several cases). One scene that always sticks out in my mind is half-way through A Horse and his Boy as Shasta and Aravis are fleeing their enemies, when he suddenly appears as a lion and mauls Aravis for no discernible reason. This act forces the characters to take shelter with a mysterious hermit, who looks after Aravis and the horses while Shasta has to complete his quest alone. I still can’t quite understand the reasoning for this. Aslan intentionally hurts somebody in order to make the hero’s quest even harder, for what purpose? Does it spur Shasta on towards fulfilling his goal? Does it teach him an important lesson? It looks to me as though Lewis views Christ not as a benevolent being, but as a capricious and sometimes wrathful being. And often there are exchanges between Aslan and our other characters that are incredibly judgemental, with Aslan declaring the characters’ actions to be unworthy of him. Essentially a child reading these books is encouraged to feel guilty for not living up to Aslan’s expectations, and to fear the lion’s wrath, as though that’s a normal part of life.

                Another constant in the series is the appearance of talking animals, who possess human-like intelligence and emotions, such as Bree the horse and Reepicheep the mouse-knight. Not all animals in Narnia can talk, and those who can’t are considered as ‘dumb beasts’, essentially subhuman, while the talking animals are held as citizens of Narnia, almost equal to humans. I’m not quite sure what to make of the significance of this. C.S. Lewis was fond of nature, and maybe he thought talking animals would appeal to children. When Aslan creates talking and non-talking animals in The Magician’s Nephew, he very clearly demarcates them as being one or the other. To be one of His favoured, then you are clearly blessed, while those who are not are inferior. Is this a bit of Old Testament God’s Chosen People, do you think? When Eustace, Jill and Puddleglum discover that they have eaten the flesh of a talking animal in The Silver Chair, it is considered on par with cannibalism, while in The Last Battle Ginger the cat, who has schemed with the Calormenes and declared that Aslan does not exist, is punished by having his speech taken away. As I say, I don’t have any solid thoughts on the whole talking animal aspect of the text, but the way it splits some otherwise indistinguishable characters into either ‘blessed’ or ‘not-blessed’ doesn’t feel very comfortable.

                Aside from the allegories, which cannot be ignored, the stories themselves are okay. Narnia is a fantasy fairy tale kingdom where ordinary children can go on adventures and explore strange new lands, and in many of the books this is the main incentive for reading on. The story of Caspian leading a rebellion against his evil uncle, as well as the voyage to strange magical islands and then freeing the lost prince from the power of the Silver Chair are all good adventure stories which almost overcome C.S. Lewis’ frequently lazy and condescending writing style and his paper-thin characters, and for the most part I enjoyed reading them. The individual books and the series as a whole have their own rhythm, and while reading them in the ‘preferred’ reading order can feel awkward, I’m not sure publication order or writing order have any merits either. It feels as though it would make more sense to read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe first followed by Prince Caspian, then the Eustace books, it still leaves The Magician’s Nephew and A Horse and his Boy awkwardly hanging out of place, and they have some importance in reading before The Last Battle, which is as definite a conclusion as you could ask for.

                Is it suitable reading for a child? Well, now there’s a question I’m not sure how to answer. The prose is not too complex, the stories are bite-sized and can be completed without too much effort, and a fantasy land of talking animals might be of interest. Yet the stilted nature of the writing, the old fashioned world-views and the uncomfortable subtext might make it a turn-off for the younger members of a modern audience, and I myself would rather they be reading something a little different, if it can at all be helped.