I've just finished reading the Chronicles of Narnia. Like many of you I read them as child, fell in love with the magical world, and every now and then I reread them as an adult. They work on so many levels and many of the themes work as well, or better, for adults than they do as children.
This is simply a collection of random observations and thoughts: I'm quite aware that these books have been pored over by experts (particularly Christian thinkers) and there's a lot of debate on them. I was singularly crap at literary criticism on my degree, so I'm not even going to attempt a thorough analysis!
 |
| The First Book, Published 1950 |
The Order of the BooksIf you've read the books, you'll know there are seven of them. They span the "life" of the magical world of Narnia from its creation in
The Magician's Nephew, through to the "End of Days" in
The Last Battle. They weren't written in chronological order: the first was the most famous,
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and the rest were bolted around.
This "bolting" round is most obvious in
The Magician's Nephew, which strains to come up with an explanation for why there is a lamppost growing in the middle of the forest in Narnia, and why the wardrobe has the magical power it does. The book has so obviously been written afterwards.
Similarly, given the fact that old Professor Kirke had visited Narnia as a boy in that book, his reaction to the children in
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe doesn't quite follow. I'd have expected him to jump out of his chair and scream "So it wasn't all that ganja I've been smoking: YOU'VE BEEN THERE TOO". Or something.
We also find in
The Last Battle the Professor hosting a dinner (in England) for the Narnia kids, where everyone was discussing Narnia. Therefore presumably he'd admitted to having been there at that stage. You get the point: it's obvious the books weren't neatly written in the chronological order that CS Lewis (apparently) preferred you to read them in. Indeed, some academics engage in passionate argument about the order they should be read in and don't like this chronological order. Whatever.
Now, where is Narnia? Through a wardrobe I hear you say! Nope, it's in Italy: half way between Rome and Assisi. Apparently when asked, CS Lewis pulled out a 1904 copy of an atlas, and there on page 8 he'd underscored the name of the little town Narni. He just liked the name.
 |
| The real Narnia |
Christian InfluenceCS Lewis was a committed atheist from the age of 15. He apparently found Jesus in his room in Magdalen College in the Trinity Term of 1929, at the age of 30. I'm guessing he was hiding behind a curtain or something. In any case, Lewis described how he "
gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."
Many would say Lewis' Christian belief comes in most obviously in
The Lion, Witch and The Wardrobe. After all in it, Aslan the Lion (Son of the Emperor-Over-The-Sea) is betrayed by a Judas like figure (Edmund), is killed, comes back to life and saves the World. Amazingly as a child I did not see this parallel at all. I just read it as a story about a kick-ass place where animals talked. I've heard other people say they also loved the story until they realised it was about the Crucifixion and Resurrection, and then couldn't stand it, as it is effectively about brainwashing kids with the Christian message.
I'm not Christian, but I certainly don't have a loathing for everything they stand for. As much as I object to the really annoying ones trying to control women's reproductive functions and to stop my civil right to get married, and despite the general personal unpleasantness I've encountered from certain Christians,
I feel quite the opposite actually.
As for brainwashing kids, come on, seriously: I was too thick to even "get it". That is despite the appearance of a lamb in
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, who turns into Aslan, and tells Edmund that he exists in our world. It's about as a subtle as a 500kg of breeze blocks landing on your head. And I *still* didn't get it:
".. 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."
 |
| "Behold the Lamb of God" |
What's interesting is that some Christians love the Narnia stories: there was a surge of enthusiasm for the first Narnia film, particularly in America. Churches encouraged people to go and watch it and to see the Christ story represented in this way. Others have taken a much more fundamentalist line and even object to the appearance of Father Christmas in the story, let alone all the pagan influences (nymphs, dryads, fauns, Bacchus, etc). They describe it as "soft-sell paganism and occultism". I've never personally felt like whipping out the Ouija Board after a hard sesh reading
Prince Caspian but hey ho.
As a child I do remember disliking two of the books:
The Magician's Nephew and
The Last Battle. I just didn't get them and they didn't fit in with the simple happy story telling of the other books. They are, to me now, the most overtly Christian stories. They are thinly veiled Narnian recreations of the Books of Genesis and Revelations. Although I didn't identify them as such, the "God Talk" is much more overt in these works including this line from Lucy "
In our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole word".
Now I actually find these two books the most interesting, and in the case ofLast Battle the most moving, by a mile (I actually sobbed for about 5 minutes reading this recently). I can't help thinking they are written for adults much more than for kids.
The traditional Christian way of looking at the books (btw) is:
The Magician's Nephew (Creation);
The Lion Witch and The Wardrobe (Resurrection);
The Horse and His Boy (Conversion of a Heathen);
Prince Caspian (restoration of true religion);
The Voyage of The Dawn Treader (spiritual life);
The Silver Chair (Ongoing battle with forces of darkness);
The Last Battle (Last Judgement).
The Ottomans and IslamPeople have argued to and fro about whether Calormen, particularly as depicted in
The Horse and His Boy is meant to represent the Ottoman Empire, and whether its god, Tash is the Islamic God, Allah.
Well... let's just consider that these people wear turbans, carry curved swords, live to the south of Narnia, have a mighty empire led by a fat, corrupt old leader (the Tisroc), worship a different god to the true saviour, Aslan, and are referred to repeatedly as "darkies" in the Last Battle. They refer to Narnia as "white barbarians", when in fact it is the land of the free with its "sweet Northern air". Weren't the 50s a wonderful time? I don't think there's that much to argue about here. It's a desperately un-PC depiction of a "proud, cruel people": the Muslim Ottoman Turks viewed from a 19th century north-European perspective.
 |
| Magnificent Istanbul (Easter this year) |
However, I'm going to give CS Lewis his dues. He was writing in an entirely different era, for a start. Much like Mark Twaine's use of "n*gger" this can be used to highlight to a child how things have moved on and how unacceptable such attitudes are today.
Next, it's a little bit more complex than all that. The Last Battle is the end of the world: it is a fight between Good and Evil. When the world ends people are judged on their deeds, not on their religion. Emeth is a young Calormene who has believed all his life in Tash, but finds out that all the good things he has done have in fact been in Aslan's name. He therefore enters paradise. Aslan tells him that likewise if people claim to be acting in his name, but do bad things, they are actually serving Tash.
That all seems remarkably cool and open-minded, and is about faith instead of religion... until you realise that Tash is actually a Satanic character who is the "opposite of Aslan". He leaves a stench of death across the land, has a hideous bird head, and encourages sacrifice to himself. He claims the unsaved and disappears with dragons and giant lizards into a dark void at the end of the world. Emeth is the only Calormene to make it to paradise: presumably every other worshipper of Tash was in fact entirely evil.
Therefore he
has tried and gone further than many 50s Christians might have done, but let's not put CS Lewis on the Board of Christian-Islamic Interfaith Understanding - just yet.
Old FartismCS Lewis was an old fart. Again, yes, he was a product of his time, but not everyone in the 1950s had his views, by any means. There are lots of references to "what DO they teach them in school nowadays?" - presumably he was hankering back to the good old days of the Victorian education system, even from the standpoint of what to us is a very old-fashioned ethos.
The worst example of what an old dick he was is the beginning of
Dawn Treader. It starts off magnificently, with one of the best opening lines of any book ever:
"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it"
But then Lewis goes straight into a horrible side-swipe. Eustace's parents are "very up-to-date and advanced people", whom he addresses as Harold and Alberta, not Father and Mother. They are vegetarians, non-smokers and tee-totallers and wore a special kind of underclothes (!). Their house has very little furniture and the windows were always open. Eustace liked beetles and is a repulsive, smug, lonely little boy with no friends - the price, presumably of all these "modern" attitudes of his parents.
Similarly in
The Silver Chair we find a school, Experiment House, described. It is Co-Educational (heavens, boys and girls educated together!), where bullying was rife and all sorts of thing, "horrid things" took place because of the permissive atmosphere. Offenders were talked to by the Head (who was a woman!!) , rather than be punished. CS Lewis' contempt of modern attitudes is abundantly clear if somewhat amusingly framed. At the end of the book there is an inquiry into the school and as a result:
"the Head's friends saw to that the Head was no use as a Head, so they got her made an Inspector to interfere with other Heads. And when they found she wasn't much good at that, they got her into Parliament where she lived happily ever after."
SexismAgain people have argued to and fro about this point. There is little denying that the constant evil character is a woman. In
The Magician's Nephew Empress Jadis is a megalomaniac murderer who has destroyed her world, Charn. She enters Narnia (a neevil!) at its very creation and sups greedily at the tree of eternal youth, with the juice running down her face like blood. She comes up again as the White Witch who has placed Narnia under her evil reign, and who kills Aslan (Christ) with a stone knife. She (or a relative) comes back in
The Silver Chair as the "Queen of the Underworld". She is a beautiful, but evil, witch who shift-shapes into a poisonous green serpent. Again her aim is to murder, enslave and destroy the world.
The theme seems to be the forces of evil are represented by women and they are the antithesis of the positive male, force, Aslan. It is worth noting that these women are always attractive: they are enchantresses and temptresses, who are also secretly witches or serpents. It's actually amazing that Lewis forgets to give Tash a nice pair of boobs, so clear is he apparently in his determination to cast the baddie as a woman.
Then we come to the female characters. There are plus points and negative points about the human children. Yes, Lucy is a phenomenally annoying little oik, but she is honest and not a traitor like her brother. The girls are generally portrayed as taking a second place to the boys and the major issue is that if the girls do "do well" it is because they overcome their femininity and start emulating the boys.
In addtion, every "animal" character of any significance is male, not female. Mrs Beaver's main concern is her sewing machine: how befitting of a nice 50s role back at the dam.
 |
| Know thy place, Mrs Beaver! |
The big debate comes in around Susan. She is the only character excluded from entering paradise at the end of the Chronicles. She remains in this world, apparently because she is now only interested in "lipsticks, nylons and invitations". There is a terrible description of her as a vain, vacuous girl:
"She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age".
However, Susan is also described as "no longer a friend of Narnia" meaning that she has lost her faith. It is arguably for this reason that she does not enter paradise with the others, not because she's into lippy. That's a bit of anathema to me: I believe that what matters (if there is such a thing as salvation) is how you lead your life, not what you believe. The implication is also still there that she hasn't just lost her faith, it's been subsumed by being a pretty young woman.
Lewis didn't seem too keen on any of the female characters having any sexuality at all. On the other hand compare the descriptions of Kings Caspian, Rilian, and Tirian as strapping young men. Here's how King Tirian appears, for example. Well HELLO. Sounds rather like my boyfriend @SteMcCormick, and were I not very happily attached, I defo would :)
"He was between twenty and twenty-five years old, his shoulders were already broad and strong and his limbs full of hard muscle, but his beard was still scanty. He had blue eyes and a fearless, honest face."
 |
| Also, Ben Barnes as Prince Caspian. Mmm. |
Anyway, the conclusion is: let's also not put CS Lewis on any Equal Opportunity Boards either, just to be on the safe side.
SourcesLastly - one of the reasons I find the writing so glorious, despite ALL of the issues I've highlighted is the blending of sources. Lewis was an incredibly learned man who drew on medieval Celtic, Roman and Greek elements which he blended in beautifully. I can remember squeeing with excitement as we read the 1150 text "de Reis van Sint Brandaan" in Medieval Dutch at university. It was
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader! He'd taken big chunks of this (originally Irish) piece and seamlessly sewn it into his Narnia story.
 |
| It's the Ruined City of Charn! |
When I was in Turkey this Easter all I could think of was Narnia (yup, I'm odd, I'll admit it). "Aslan" actually is the word for Lion in Turkish. The description of Tashbaan, the capital of Calormen, was so clearly based upon Istanbul, with the Tisroc (Sultan)'s palace on the top of the hill. The ruins of Ephesus looked like the destroyed city of Charn to me. The City of the Giants was Hierapolis.
Even the imagery of entering paradise through a doorway in The Last Battle is entirely Islamic - albeit via the Christian Stable. In every mosque you will find a representation of this door and you pray towards it. Finally, we have the White Witch's offering Edmund Turkish Delight, which I stuffed myself with in the Spice Bazaar. I wonder whether CS Lewis ever went to Turkey, or what his interest was in the place.
SummaryThere are so many reasons to object to these books its untrue. They are arch-conservative, sexist, racist, shockingly un-PC about Islam, full of heavy Christian proselytising AND (worst of all) they're anti-vegetarian.
Yet here I am, a signed-up Tofu muncher, in 2012, wishing I hadn't just finished reading The Last Battle and feeling that it won't be long before I start again at the beginning of
The Magician's Nephew. I love Narnia and I love CS Lewis's writing. If you haven't had a read in a while, or have never read them as an adult, I'd encourage you to. There is an awful lot there and they are so clearly not just children's books.
