Narnia: The Magician's Nephew and The Last Battle

[truepenny]

I think I'm going to have to do a separate post on women, romance (thanks, papersky!), and adulthood in the Chronicles of Narnia. So this is just going to finish up with my remarks on the last two books.


I think it's both interesting and instructive that Lewis cites E. Nesbit in the opening paragraph of The Magician's Nephew, because the book has a decidedly Nesbit-ish feel.

This is probably why I don't much care for it.

I've never been able to like Nesbit; I can't decide if it's because I came to her too late or because I'm just temperamentally unsuited to appreciate her. For whatever reasons, I don't like Nesbit, and therefore I am not on board with Lewis's use of a semi-pastiche of Nesbit's style. (In particular, I don't think Narnia--or Charn--should intrude into London. Ever.) I also find the stuff about the creation of Narnia interminably dull, and the humor with the Beasts and Uncle Andrew is, frankly, forced. Lewis isn't really a funny writer, and his attempts at humor generally fall flat (except for Puddleglum, who is a treasure).

On the other hand, I love the sequence in Charn, although I feel absolutely no continuity between Queen Jadis and the White Witch. (In my own head, I've gotten around this by imagining that the White Witch is actually Jadis's several times removed great-granddaughter, named for her illustrious ancestress, but that is me willfully reading against the text.) Jadis is magnificent in her monstrosity, and I do like the heavy-handed parallel between her and Uncle Andrew. It works.

I also like the fact that Polly not doing stupid things has nothing to do with asinine notions of chivalry, but simply with her not being stupid. On the whole, The Magician's Nephew seems to be the most sensible book of the series on the subject of one-half humankind. Polly (like Jill) is downright and sensible and not terribly girly; the dreadfulness of Jadis has nothing to do with her sex, and the misogyny (as I said in a reply to papersky back here) is given over to Uncle Andrew, to be lumped in with the rest of his wrong-headed ideas--much, really, as a shibboleth of feminism was handed over to Eustace back in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I suppose I ought to be objecting to this on the same grounds I objected to Eustace's performance as a mouth-piece, but misogyny is stupid and very much of a piece with Uncle Andrew's other habits of thought.

I don't dislike The Magician's Nephew with any intensity, but it doesn't do much for me.



The Last Battle is the only one of the series where I feel that I am at a disadvantage because I am not a Christian. In the others, it is possible (or always has been for me) to more or less ignore the religious symbolism (with the exception of some extremely blatant moments in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Horse and His Boy), but The Last Battle is so very much about its Christian message that it's hard to see anything of the story around it.

It's also the sort of book that makes me want to tear my hair out in great fistfuls and scream. I hate books where little petty stupid people make everything go wrong and destroy pastoral, peaceful beauty in the name of "progress." It's very realistic (which is probably one of the reasons I don't like it), and I loathe it. It puts my teeth on edge--much as real politics do--because I want to scream and hit people until they stop being idiots and stop destroying things that are valuable and beautiful and irreplaceable. This is why I love--despite recognizing its fundamental implausibility--"The Scouring of the Shire," because the hobbits do manage to turn "progress" back in its tracks.

So I hate Shift and I hate the dwarves and I hate the way that Tirian and other people of good heart cannot stop these horrible, nasty, small-minded people from being in control and making the Talking Beasts afraid and oppressed (especially the Moles *sniff*). And the end of the book, for me, does not redeem the horror and pain and misery of the first half. I know it ought to, but it just doesn't. It feels like cheating. The good characters don't win; the game is declared over and they are pronounced victors by fiat. It's like when you're playing SimCity (not that I'd know anything about that *cough*), and you've mucked the city up so horribly that there's no way to salvage the situation, so you delete the city and start a new one. That's fine for a game, but it doesn't work in real life, and it doesn't work in novels. (At least, it doesn't for me.)

I like Tirian, although the noble elegiac language between him and Jewel makes me want to scream. And I love the end of Narnia, because the descriptions are beautiful and terrible, as they ought to be. Also, the parable of the Dwarves Who Would Not Be Taken In does work for me, even though the rest of the religious stuff doesn't. But overall, the point of the book seems to be, When everything is horrible and dreary, don't worry, 'cause you're sure to die! And that'll make everything better! And that's just not a message I can get behind.

I'm sure other people's experiences with this book have been different from mine, and I don't by any means want to argue that mine is the only way of reading. But it's the only one I can talk about.

Comments

[boniblithe.livejournal.com]

*sniffs*

I know. I hated The Last Battle too.

Edmund/Bacchus 4-eva!

[penmage.livejournal.com]

In my own head, I've gotten around this by imagining that the White Witch is actually Jadis's several times removed great-granddaughter, named for her illustrious ancestress, but that is me willfully reading against the text.

You know, I've always thought of it the same way. Jadis as the White Witch never really jelled in my head, though I always knew she was. The great-granddaughter idea has always been floating at the back of my conciousness.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

The central concept of The Last Battle - of the worlds branching out from worlds, and the cry of "Further up and further in!" is solidly rooted in Socrates' dream with which Plato closes The Republic (much to my relief - I can take the dialogue style where everyone starts going "Yes, Socrates/No, Socrates/Surely that is so, Socrates" much better in a short dialogue than what amounts to a bloody novel). As it happened, I read The Republic a couple of years before I read the bit in Matthew about the sheep going to the right and the goats to the left, and understood immediately why Digory had kept saying "It's all in Plato, all in Plato - bless me, what do they teach them in these schools?" in TLtWatW. The Last Battle isn't really a Christian book - it's a mish-mash of concepts from multiple different myths (Ragnarok is definitely in there somewhere, too).

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes, that is something else I noticed this time, having waded through The Republic since the last time I'd read TLB. (And right on about the unspeakable tedium of Socratic dialogue!) Lewis isn't afraid of flinging his mythologies higgledy-piggledy into his cauldron (the Witch talking about (Mosaic) Law is talking very much in Norse images). But ultimately the paradise they find isn't Valhalla or the Elysian Fields. It's a GARDEN. With a TREE. (I always feel Lewis elbowing me heavily in the ribs about this point.) Really, though, it's not the Christianity I object to so much as the pounding overwhelming waves of apocalyptic religious symbolism and Lewis's smug certainty (as narrator--not talking about biography here at all) that he knows what happens after that.

I'd lumped it all in under "Christian" basically because I didn't have a better word to hand--and because Aslan is so unrepentantly a Christ-figure that it's hard for me to see any other symbolic system as doing anything more than coloring Lewis's basic conception.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I reread all the Narnia books over Christmas for the first time in what must be nearly twenty years; I don't really have anything to add here, but I wanted to say I've been enjoying your commentary.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[alecto23.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I always liked The Magician's Nephew, although yes, bits of it really annoy me. When I got a bit older, I really liked the creepy way Charn reminded me of how the Earth may one day be, like a warning. I think it was (compared to some of his other pointed warnings) nicely done. But yes, the intrusion of magic into London was a bit jarring and though I never thought of it being E Nesbit like, you're right. Then again, I didn't mind E Nesbit as a kid, though now I find some of them - particularly the silly bloody Treasure Seekers and The Railway Children fairly nauseating. The other bit I liked was Digory managing to redeem himself a little: after being unspeakably silly in Charn and having the chance to be so again at the garden with the apples, he very nobly gives it all up for his mum. The toffee tree wasn't bad, either - reminded me of Tintin & The Shooting Star. Polly is still a gem.

I'm personally fixated on reading them in chronological world order, not in order of publication. It does seem like a bit of an anomaly if you read them in order of publication; its Nesbit-like qualities are easier to overlook if you read it first, I think.

I completely agree with you about The Last Battle. I almost completely unreservedly squirmed through most of the book because I hated the way Lewis was polluting and destroying his own creation. Even as an adult, I still can't quite understand why one would bother creating a nice lovely fantasy world and then doing unmentionable acts to it. If I wanted more unmentionable things to happen, I'd stop reading books so much and pay more attention to newspapers and world politics and things. Then again, I'm not ashamed to admit that I like escapist fiction - not that all my fiction has to be escapist, but I don't like it changing from one into the other.

[jodel-from-aol.livejournal.com]

I always got the impression of Lewis sitting in the background, psyching himself up with a peptalk about how he'd written a creation story, so now he just *has* to write the Last Judgement as well, and complete the set. Only he had a complete failure of imagination about producing a result that would have made it even remotely worthwhile to wipe that universe all out and start over.

Silly Lewis. Wind him up and he'll "interpret" things until the cows come home, but not much real talent for demolition. Leaves me with the conviction that 'That Hideous Strength' was a fluke.