Chronicles of Narnia - POLL

Very difficult for me. The Silver Chair is the least of them for me because the Emerald Witch is a pale (green?) reprise of The White Witch, but boasts Puddleglum the Marsh-Wiggle and the scene in the giants' castle.

I always wished Lewis wrote more novels about the High King Peter's reign during the so-called Golden Age.

my favorite is 'the magician's nephew,' though ppl who insist you should read that one first are insane.

isn't there some hint that the witch in 'silver chair' is the same person as the white witch?

i can never remember anything that happens in 'prince caspian,' so that's probably the worst one for me.

I agree re The Magician's Nephew. It's a beautiful little book: the Wood Between the Worlds, the desolation of barren Charn, the scary resonance that the Deplorable Word has for children reading it -- I can't ask for a better creation myth.

isn't there some hint that the witch in 'silver chair' is the same person as the white witch?

She's not! A Dwarf at the end of the novel speculates that they're of the same breed or something.

Magician's Nephew is definitely the most interesting from the perspective of narrative construction, and Horse and His Boy kind of prefigures a lot of kid-and-his-spirit-animal '70s novels. THe Last Battle is dire, dire, dire, and Dawn Treader is episodic to the point of idiocy. Dawn Treader is not uninteresting though, just kind if undramatic (except for Eustace's transformation from asshole to semi-decent guy). Prince Caspian and Silver Chair are kind of 'ehh' and I guess the whole series wouldn't exist w/o Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe. I guess this means

1. Magician's Nephew
2. Lion, Witch and Wardrobe
2. Voyage of the Dawn Treader
4. Horse and His boy
5. Silver Chair
6. Last Battle

I disagree about Voyage of the Dawn Treader: each one of the lords they find boasts an interesting back story and adventure. I'd rank them:

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Magician's Nephew
The Horse and His Boy
The Lion...
The Last Battle
The Silver Chair
Prince Caspian

huh maybe I should reread these because I have long felt that The Silver Chair was far and away the best of the series

My opinion of Dawn Treader has fallen off since I taught it to my fifth graders this past fall, and it was such a mega slog. The language is a little inflated (comically) for an adult, but it was very difficult for my students, and the irony of Eustace's speech and affectations were totally lost and distancing for them. The kids also marked the Aslan-as-deus-ex-machina schtick pretty early, and it became kind of laughable when he showed up in the ship medallion, on the Dufflepuds' island, to skin Eustace from his dragonness, at Drinkwater, etc., etc., But Reepicheep, man, what a character – he's entirely why I've got it tied for number two.

I only minded it when he appeared as Coleridge's albatross guiding them past Dark Island.

I only read the first three when a young teenager and hated them but that is because I had just before read the Lord of the Rings and was looking for more the same. Everyone knows that talking lions only exist in Oz.

haha, oddly enough tolkien was annoyed by exactly the same thing when lewis started reading them out loud at the pub -- talking lions, fauns, father christmas all co-existing in the same universe.

I'm not sure The Last Battle is actually dire, as such. I think it's possibly successful in its own terms, but crucially those terms are not predominant in the previous novels, at least not predominant in most readers' minds, and are in a form, allegory, that isn't really v popular these days, with reason imo.

I think it's just a case of the allegory cracking the narrative basically. It's also kinda absurd, as allegory often is.

Did the BBC adaptations of these not use the same actress for the witches in TLW&W and TSC?

Yes, but wikipedia says they used a lot of actors in more than one part for budget reasons. (lol BBC)

I loved The Horse and His Boy because it has Aravis and she's fleeing an arranged child-marriage on horseback, and she's stroppy. That was my kinda girl. Little bit afraid to re-read it now; Anne Faddiman did that for me, luckily, in the Re-Readings book of essays, so that's okay.

Reepicheep is ALL-TIME.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

i liked the silver chair the least because i thought it was horribly sad that when our heroes showed up, eustace didn't recognize caspian in his dotage and couldn't say hi before he died.

i love them all, but the last battle does get awfully judgmental. not least with the susan thing.

reepicheep <3

need to re-read these.

Marshwiggle ftw

surprised by the love for magician's newphew, thats probably my pick as well, it just has a grander sense of space and time than the others.

reshpecktabiggle

ya i remember reshpeckobiggle being a str8 fire line when i was 11

It's been ages since I've read these, but I think Magician's Nephew was my favorite at the time. I remember it as being the most science-fictiony - kind of Borgesian with its different worlds, also reminds me of L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.

ppl who insist you should read that one first are insane

i recently mentioned to a friend how infuriating i found it that recent editions have the magician's nephew first -- she said that when she bought the boxed set for her nephew she used a label maker to re-number the books so that he read them in the correct order

she is a librarian lol

yeah for a long time i thought the magician's nephew was first in the series cuz thats how the boxset my parents got me when i was kid was labeled and then one time one jeopardy there was a question about what the first novel in the chronicles was * i got so mad that the show got it wrong that i looked it up and realized that the magician's nephew had been written well after the lion...

Jadis is such a grand character in TMN. There's a real sense of grandeur and weird pathos when, as she watches Narnia's creation, she says quietly, "My end is upon me."

the bolt of Tash falls from above

ya i remember reshpeckobiggle being a str8 fire line when i was 11

lol yes -- a hammered Puddleglum

my favorite is 'the magician's nephew,' though ppl who insist you should read that one first are insane.

first one I read, but only because it was the first one I came across. After that I read them in the order they were written, except that my local library did not have The Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe or Dawn Treader, so I read them after all the others.

I think they are all great (apart from the Last Battle, obv.), but it is a long time since I re-read the later ones. I have a high opinion of The Silver Chair and its grimness, but maybe that is a false memory.

When I re-read A Horse And His Boy, I found its orientalism and white people good, dark-skinned people bad aspect a bit distasteful. But I still found it funny, so maybe it is still my favourite.

i can never remember anything that happens in 'prince caspian,' so that's probably the worst one for me.

no wai! Prince Caspian is great. Aside from being a metaphor for the Palestinian struggle for freedom, it also features what proved the inspiration for the video to Zodiac Mindwarp's Prime Mover.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Remember being really spooked out by Magician's Nephew as a kid.

I guess The Horse was too "orientalist" or something.

i like it a lot, prob 3rd fave, but it does suffer from colonialist narrative clumsiness at times, though i'm dem sure those caliph wallahs are all dem fine fellas in their own way wot wot

may this poll perish in the fire of perfidy, into ashes of indignity.

morelike voyage of the yawn treader

voyage of the don't read 'er

The Horse and His Goy

Blanked out on this. Dawn Treader/Silver Chair/Horse probably would hold up the best in the area I kinda realize I like the best in most of the fantasy I've read, namely the description of places, landscape, climate and so forth. It's a fleshing out of a landscape he obviously only initially considered as generic medieval Europe, and while obviously it's not what he would have seen as the point of the stories, it's more central to his work than he guessed. (See also some of the SF stiff and especially Til We Have Faces.)

SF stiff? But of course. SF stuff.

I have a hard time choosing among those books because you're right: Lewis, newly confident a narrative writer, devotes several superb paragraphs in each book to describing a Narnian sunset, the intense quiet that comes upon travelers at sea, or a mysterious bird. To me this culminates in his description of the creation of Narnia, in which several characters, some awestruck, others gobsmacked, register the sudden popping out of stars and animals, all to the accompaniment of Aslan's numinous song.

It also makes the actual ending of Narnia in The Last Battle the most spectacular part of that book; for me as a kid, more than Revelation ever did in its battles and vagueness of a new paradise, you felt the stakes were being played for keeps, and the terror of its end is just that: desperate figures running towards a door, a monstrous hand squeezing the sun into oblivion, nothing but vacuum and ice remains. Even the 'new' Narnia couldn't make that go away.

Remember when Aslan calmly orders Peter? "Peter, High King of Narnia, shut the Door."

I just had a brainwave to do a talking lion poll, then realised I probably need to do more sleeping and less boozing.

xpost -- that vs. his command to Father Time: "Now make an end."

aslan voiced by john inman

I read that as "Don Imus."

http://blogs.kansascity.com/photos/uncategorized/2009/03/16/don_imus.jpg

ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOARRRRRR!

i think reading the horse & his boy as a child was the first time i enjoyed being bored

I love how Eustace does not get less unlikeable as the series proceeds.

https://i.imgur.com/3hCAbbB.jpg

hate u miraz

reshpecktabiggle

― mookieproof, Wednesday, August 3, 201

im a few glasses of valpolicella in but i feel that 't' is extraneous and in my dim recollection (tho i quote that word in particular a lot) its obiggle

regardless we can allow for dialect i feel

THAHB is the best one and was robbed

I reactivated the thread because I reread it

deep dialect from before the dawn of time

agreed that THAHB is the best

the last battle is good not bad, few know this

they're all good i think

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/01/narnia-week-heaven-heaven-is-a-place-a-place-where-nothing-nothing-ever-happens/

my fave was always dawn treader: must have read it a dozen times. love a voyage.

silver chair was the creepiest, in which narnia felt the oldest (in spite of magician's nephew).

i am an original-sequence loyalist.

Well shit I was reading the years old thread thinking “the horse and his boy is the best” and there you go

It was later that Allah Tash was problematically represented as some spider-vulture; Horse is colonialist but well told and sympathetic— the secondary-character nature of the Four Monarchs is a narrative coup

Silver Chair overrated but good
Prince Caspian boring
Last Battle and incredibly constructed bit of traumatizing filth
White Witch is lessened by Nephew— also how dare you read it first, your job as a librarian is effectively cancelled— Digory and Jane (?) remarkably good protagonists
Treader is good because Eustace is a great character
Wardrobe is my favourite after Horse— so weird that Santa shows up but I like the anachronism in fantasy— imagine if Krishna was a random character in Dune that’d be sick

great piece mark, lol @ this:

I like to think that Professor Digory Kirke lost his nice house when he lost his job as a professor — after the school inspectors who’d been at Experiment House audited one of his lessons and realised he’d never actually read The Republic…

the deposed Head becomes an MP, iirc, so odds are good

experiment house btw is such a strange satire. from wiki

Created by the author to express his disdain with modern educational methods, it is co-educational where children are allowed to do as they please and can feel free to bully other children. It is run by a female Head who devotes her attention more to bullies, whom she sees as interesting psychological cases who she does not punish, than well-behaved children.

you'd think your average grumpy conservative constructing a progressive-school strawman would lament the loss of bullying's darwinian power to improve, or maybe i am thinking too modern-US; maybe there's a contemporary body of education-policy criticism EH fits snugly into, but lewis' political/religious idiosyncrasy in general makes me think prob not. regardless my understanding is that the nonprogressive UK school system of his day was not exactly institutionally bullyfree.

anyway the absurdity of this picture of an entirely upside-down hell-school-- presumably the top of the class is all the most consistent truants-- has made it always stick w me in a way a more trad "eustace had received an alligator in mathematics" would not. (for example my personal image of the opening of silver chair has always been reused for YOU! YOU BEHIND THE BIKE SHED!!! even tho this is not actually appropriate at all, or is it.)

i have consulted the text and darragh is (of course) correct

Reshpeckobiggle

also pretty rude that no one complimented me on my cuteness reading prince caspian above

guess i'll put a bold face on it

you'd think your average grumpy conservative constructing a progressive-school strawman would lament the loss of bullying's darwinian power to improve, or maybe i am thinking too modern-US; maybe there's a contemporary body of education-policy criticism EH fits snugly into, but lewis' political/religious idiosyncrasy in general makes me think prob not. regardless my understanding is that the nonprogressive UK school system of his day was not exactly institutionally bullyfree.

no wonder Aslan instructs Caspian, Eustace, and Rilian to slap'em with the sides of their swords.

Prince Caspian suffers from the structural tediousness of telling yet another origin story, only the Pevensies are marginalized. Yet I get a thrill when Caspian watches in awe as Trufflehunter (great character), and Trumpkin (same) confirm the existence of Old Narnia, one character at a time: Glenstorm, Patterwig, the Three Bulgy Bears, and, of course, Reepicheek.

and no Narnia chronicle is complete without a wtf sequence: the awakening of the River God and his daughters and the appearance of Bacchus.

that wtf sequence explored*: http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2008/07/the-chronicles-of-narnia-part-2-prince-caspian-or-whos-got-the-horn
also (since i'm apparently doing this) why the dawn treader is good not bad
film: http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/01/narnia-week-what-you-see-is-what-you-get
book: http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2014/06/narnian-origins-imagined-islands-in-the-great-green-sea-of-gloom

*some of this one reads a bit FT in-jokey in retrospect so apologies for that in advance, i wasn't on ilx at this time or caring much abt the "wider reader"

The problem of the Telmarines: book-Telmarines are Puritan colonisers, Early Americans if you will, pirates-turned-moralisers out of sync with the nature they’ve invaded. They had excellent pointy helmets and nifty mini-skirts. Film-Telmarines are Spanish Conquistadors extpriating the Aztecs, proud and treachorous all, except for tyrant-usurper Miraz, who is Hitler obv, and therefore Iranian.

man that movie -- to quote TSC's Glimfeather, "Too true, too true!"

I liked PC-the-film's concept of a High King Peter who's not so High King after all when called upon to recall his old moves. Lewis does mention Peter's putative strategy and Magnificence in those allusions to endless wars with the Giants of the North.

Back to PC: it's as credible that flop-haired Cesar Romero Caspian would think, "Who the fuck are you, High King? I'm in charge now, you're an illustration in a book" as it would be credible for "The High King in Command."

Shout out to the King Edmunds. Edmund I of England, and Edmund Pevensie from The Chronicles of Narnia.

— wikishoutouts (@wikishoutouts) September 4, 2019

love how Eustace does not get less unlikeable as the series proceeds.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, May 21, 2015

I need to reread these. Remember really liking The Silver Chair, though, and the descriptions of Charn still stick with me even now. Know it’s basic af, but the ending of TLB really knocked me sideways - it just feels so casually cruel! Millions of people have said about this, but honestly, the thought of being a parent having to explain that...nah

TLB's underlying ethos is a facer ("dying young in a horrible railway accident is good and here's why") but it absolutely has some of the best-realised and and most startling tableaux along the way

Started reading these on a whim with my 8-year-old, in the correct order. So far halfway through TMN and it's just as good as I remember, perhaps even better.

My opinion as a kid was TH&HB > TMN >>>> TSC > TVOTDT > THTW&TW >>>> PC >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> TLB - so will be interested to see if I still agree with myself aged 10.

It’s been too long since I’ve read these.

xp -- re yr placing of TLB: yrself aged 10 was nuts and very wrong

I was a 10-year-old Catholic kid and I genuinely think it may have been one of the first cracks that led to my atheism by the age of 15, just "what kind of sick fuck thinks this is a good thing to publish as a kids' book and do I really want to be in their club?:

That was kinda about my reaction too at 10. (Even if I was more of a relaxed but earnest Anglican.)

I took the Devil and His Works very seriously at that point, remember being equally traumatised by the end of Time Bandits and listening to REM's "Star Me Kitten" on headphones on holiday in France (I had the idea that the cassette had been somehow possessed, really a very good job I lost the religion before I started on the drugs)

what kind of sick fuck thinks this is a good thing to publish as a kids' book and do I really want to be in their club?

The best part.

yrself aged 10 was nuts and very wrong

new borad description

tash! tash! inexorable tash!

I mean in my case it wasn't helped by the fact that my babysitter had apocalyptic Jack Chick tracts around, which I inevitably read. I didn't suddenly renounce theological belief but as the years went by I could pinpoint where the disenchantment derived from. (Certainly there's arresting imagery in The Last Battle, the squeezing out of the sun and so forth, but...)

Respectowiggle.

i don't remember having any inkling about the christianity when i read these as a kid

I was aware of it but loving Aslan was cooler than loving Jesus.

the last battle is good not bad, few know this

― mark s, Thursday, October 3, 2019

otm

the religion in TLTW&TW is so heavy-handed that it would take an idiot child not to spot it, and I was absolutely that idiot child

i do remember loving TLB because i was already a very depressed child

come further up, come further in!

I took this as gospel as a newly gay man.

i never got around to reading the books, just saw the BBC series in 5th grade (well, as far as they got into it).

for years I thought "Cair Paravel" was someone saying "Camp Parallel" with an accent

coincidentally i have also just started (re-)reading these w my 11 yo and yeah MN's is just tremendous. the way he makes the reader a confidante is just irresistible. i think it flags a little in the second half but comes back pretty strong at the end.

as a kid i remember thinking TH&HB was VERY boring so it's wild to see it's your favourite CAL. looking forward to it now!

You “order of composition” rather than “chronological in-universe” fanatics are weird as fuck. TMN is the first book and TLB the final one. How could it be any different?

When I was a kid, TH&HB was the clear dog of the series, although there was so much in it that was great (Aravis; the jackals & the tombs; the phrase “O my father and o the delight of my eyes” which I briefly required my kids to address me with). Later, the heavy-handedness of TL,TW&TW and TLB put them way down the list. Sometimes I wish Aslan would just fuck off. I’ve always had a soft spot for the gloomy Silver Chair (reshpeckobiggle being a joek for the ages) — the true Prince being revealed in a desperate moment of clarity but everything had primed you and the characters and even himself to distrust and dismiss his realness — there’s something deep as hell about that motif.

order of composition is correct. lion witch is the first book and everything else pivots around it

Didn't vote in this, huh! Top 2 are correct because trippy Narnia is the best Narnia.

the religion in TLTW&TW is so heavy-handed that it would take an idiot child not to spot it

Bssed on my experience as a kid, it suffices to not be Christian

Ditto. Aslan's submission to his fate and his resurrection baffled me - "so he just comes back to life? huh." I wasn't judgemental enough to call it lame but I definitely found it lacking in narrative justification.

I've only actually read that one and The Magician's Nephew. Should I read the rest now, in my 49th year?

reason I don't like order of publication is that TLTW&TW is so worthy and moralistic, it's a poor start and worth getting past as track 2, not as an opener

H&HB was a favourite as it took place entirely within the world and explored different cultures (not sure how I will feel abt this now of course), also I had just been to Mont Saint-Michel and imagined the city as being like that, I have always been more interested in setting than in plot or characters.

Bssed on my experience as a kid, it suffices to not be Christian

the bolt of tash falls from above

Another reason for TMN to be canonically Book One is that it would mean they finally make a film of it next time they get around to it, instead of getting bogged down in the final third of TLTW&TW again.

Ha! It would be good finally to get a film that far into the series...

I've always been in the 'order of composition' camp. Any other way and you lose all those 'aha!' moments that I found so enchanting as a child. You're discovering things about a world as Lewis is inventing them, and that's a wonderful way to read fantasy.

I've only actually read that one and The Magician's Nephew. Should I read the rest now, in my 49th year?

― ledge,

If not, the bolt of Tash will hit you from above.

I guess I don't mind The Lion. The first volumes in a series are often the most awkward; the writer's creating a world and he hasn't figured out every detail (e.g. the White Witch as descendant of Lilith and the Djinn instead of, as we learn later, the queen of Charn).

all his books are basically nifty tableaux with trudge as connective tissue, and from dawn treader onwards CSL just got better at cutting back on or sparking up the trudge (yr walking thru a wood but it's the WOOD BETWEEN THE WORLDS) (yr walking thru a wood but uh oh calormenes are SHOOTING AT YOU plus oh no there's TASH)

the last battle is good bcz it's basically all jumpdoors all the time (no trudge)

order of composition is correct. lion witch is the first book and everything else pivots around it

^^^

I loved the opening setup of The Last Battle is great, the unique way in which the human characters are drawn back to Narnia. Same reason I really loved the opening of Prince Caspian as a child: the way the reader uncovers the "mystery" along with the returning characters is almost Lovecraftian and the passage of time lends a certain weight and reality.

is great

Like, as a child I too might get older some day.

we finished TLTW&TW, it was better than I had remembered, tighter in the action, less obviously religious. I want more of their life as adult kings & queens, diplomacy, working out a longer term plan for the country. I would have had Peter marry and have grandchildren by the time they return, that would set up the sequel better

occurred to me this time - it is always winter, and it frequently snows, so

* why isn't the snow tens of metres high and impossible to get past?
* what source of food could there possibly be in such an environment?
* when it suddenly thaws wouldn't there be catastrophic flooding?

also

* there are many sons of adam and daughters of eve in the kingdom just to the south, have none of them ever wandered north a bit?

I'm fine with father christmas being there, it's a land of mythical creatures, why not?

Lewis hadn't worked out the narrative yet; later novels show that, yeah, the descendants of King Frank and Queen Helen dwelled in Narnia, not to mention Archenland and Calormen.

I also wish Lewis had written a novel during the reign of Peter, but I suppose leaving the Golden Age to the imagination is the point.

That said, the White Witch would've killed any humans: she can't have potential claimants to the thrones of Cair Paravel, right?

* what source of food could there possibly be in such an environment?

turkish delight!

I'm reading these w my 11yo right now and we're doing them in the "suggested" order rather than publication order. We just finished Horse and His Boy - just as racist and orientalist as I remembered, v difficult to deal with, honestly, but actually way less boring than I remembered so I guess there is that.

We're currently on Prince Caspian which is great. So many awesome names I had forgotten. Nikabrik! Reepicheep!

Re: the Golden Age of King Peter (and Queens Susan and Lucy, and King Edmund), didn't it only last a year? I swear I remember that's what they said at the beginning of Prince Caspian. And then when they're tugged back into Narnia it's hundreds of years later?

I think the reign lasted about a dozen years.

At the end of The Lion Lewis writes that they matured into young men and women.

I define post-punk as music inspired by the energy of punk but catholic by necessity and as amorphous as the tenuous articulations of its makers.

Also: boo.

towards the close of tLtWatW there's a pauline baynes pic of the of the four kings and queens as tudor-style dandies and lady dandies, on horseback and such -- ok it's turkish-delightland but i think the implication is that it's several years later (but only an hour in our-world time)

(caveat: my books are all in boxes currently so i may have hallucinated this pauline baynes pic, or transposed it from some other work she illustrated)

The film also straight up shows this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1UafcfmKOg

i believe the "year" mentioned in prince caspian is an our-world year for the pevensies since their wardrobe adventure (same caveat as above)?

lol "professor" kirke is such a creepy weirdo in the film version, read some effing actual-real plato digory you pill

Whenever I think of horrific things in this series (besides the ambient racism as described above and such), I think of two things:

1) the fact that they were adults and grown and were suddenly thrust back into childhood with all those memories and experience. I don’t think CSL actually addresses the implications of that much on them in the real world does he? (Nb I have not read these books in 15 years)
2) ofc the absolute horrific real-world ending for most of the characters (which Neil Gaiman fleshed out the implications of in his absolutely horrific short story The Problem of Susan). And when I say that story is horrific, I’m not exaggerating.

Also re The Horse and His Boy, I found this piece about the grown up Penvensies in Narnia, which I didn’t remember at all, mainly cos I have totally forgotten that book and everything that happened in it apparently.

So I found The Problem of Susan posted on a blog and here’s the bit I was thinking of re The Last Battle ending, and I’ll hide text about it cos it’s kind of fucked up:

The professor cuts herself a slice of chocolate cake. She seems to be remembering. And then she says, “I doubt there was much opportunity for nylons and lipsticks after her family was killed. There certainly wasn’t for me. A little moneyless than one might imagine, from her parents’ estate, to lodge and feed her. No luxuries …”

“There must have been something else wrong with Susan,” says the young journalist, “something they didn’t tell us. Otherwise she wouldn’t have been damned like that, denied the Heaven of further up and further in. I mean, all the people she had ever cared for had gone on to their reward, in a world of magic and waterfalls and joy. And she was left behind.”

“I don’t know about the girl in the books,” says the professor, “but remaining behind would also have meant that she was available to identify her brothers’ and her little sister’s bodies. There were a lot of people dead in that crash. I was taken to a nearby school, it was the first day of term, and they had taken the bodies there. My older brother looked okay. Like he was asleep. The other two were a bit messier.”

“I suppose Susan would have seen their bodies, and thought, they’re on holidays now. The perfect school holidays. Romping in meadows with talking animals, world without end.”

“She might have done. I remember thinking what a great deal of damage a train can do, when it hits another train, to the people who were travelling. I suppose you’ve never had to identify a body, dear?”

“No.”

“That’s a blessing. I remember looking at them and thinking, What if I’m wrong, what if it’s not him after all? My younger brother was decapitated, you know. A god who would punish me for liking nylons and parties by making me walk through that school dining room, with the flies, to identify Ed, well … he’s enjoying himself a bit too much, isn’t he? Like a cat, getting the last ounce of enjoyment out of a mouse. Or a gram of enjoyment, I suppose it must be, these days. I don’t know, really.”

from gyac's piece:

The king has a gentle way with others because of his own history, too. When Shasta desperately assures Edmund he’s not a traitor, he puts a hand on Shasta’s head and tells him, “I know now that you were no traitor,” but advises that he should work harder not to eavesdrop if he wants to avoid that appearance. Even the evil Rabadash is seen as worthy of a second chance from Edmund’s point of view: “Even a traitor may mend. I have known one that did,” he says, and then, Lewis tells us that Edmund “looked very thoughtful.” I love that after all these years Edmund is still remorseful for his actions, and that remorse causes him to be kind and forgiving to those around him.

aw

Yes I just looked again and it’s been a dull real-world year since the adventure. While in Narnia they “seemed to reign for years and years” which would explain the sheer volume of memories the treasure stores under Cair Paravel awaken in them

xpost yes there is this weird slippage between being adult kings and queens in Narnia and being kids in the real world, and there’s a kind of truth to it, to do with growing up and still feeling like a kid inside, and vice versa, but yes the actual diegetic consequences of these jolts don’t get talked through at all

Yeek I will read the Gaiman piece when we’re done w Last Battle I guess

From one of the comments:

@9, while I have a different version of Susan’s reconversion, it happens during the funeral service and end with her embracing and comforting Eustace’s parents. Queen Susan the Gentle knows all about grief, she comforted the wounded in Narnia’s wars and the families of the dead over and over.

The important point imo is that Aslan doesn’t cut her off, she cuts him off. Her head is turned by the temptations offered to a young and exceptionally beautiful woman. She is not rejected, she is never rejected. The choice was and is entirely hers. And Lewis wrote that he expected Susan to get back to Narnia. In her own time and her own way.

When did Lewis write that about Susan?

Yeah. There’s a nice aspect to some of CS Lewis’s religious views in the text, like the importance of penance and forgiveness for past behaviour, and that read very much like that to me. It’s a very touching description.

xp he wrote that in a reply to a young fan who was upset about the ending

oh okay

The relevant part of the letter is here:

In an early 1955 letter to a girl named Marcia, Lewis first revealed his decision to have Susan lose her way in The Last Battle. “Peter gets back to Narnia in it. I am afraid Susan does not. Haven’t you noticed in the two you have read that she is rather fond of being too grownup? I am sorry to say that side of her got stronger and she forgot about Narnia.”

“The books don’t tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having been turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there is plenty of time for her to mend, and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s country in the end—in her own way. I think that whatever she had seen in Narnia she could (if she was the sort that wanted to) persuade herself, as she grew up, that it was ‘all nonsense’”

Though, contrary to a popular internet rumor, Lewis never planned to finish writing Susan’s story himself. In another letter, he wrote: “I could not write that story myself. Not that I have no hope of Susan’s ever getting to Aslan’s country; but because I have a feeling that the story of her journey would be longer and more like a grown-up novel than I wanted to write. But I may be mistaken. Why not try it yourself?”

I at once cringed at the assumption that young women are prone to conceit and silliness, smiled at Lewis' humility ("But I may be mistaken."), and chuckled at his Christian generosity, as if it didn't matter who wrote these books ("Why not try it yourself?")

I think the conceit and silliness thing is something that troubles me about the children going from adulthood back to childhood in an instant. Maybe Susan found it harder to go back to being a child than the others? I’ve read some good analyses of this ending over the years and I get what he was going for ito the overarching theory of his series, but that aspect upset and pissed off lots of people over the decades, and probably still does if they are reading it now!

there's an avoidance (maybe a fear) of not just sex but adulthood in the narnia books which is of course typical of 50s children's books - and complete avoidance is infinitely preferable to the icky way jk rowling deals with adolescence - but you do have to wonder, if jack had survived to see the 70s or even the 80s would he have tackled these questions, if just for his now-grown-up fans?

chuckled at his Christian generosity, as if it didn't matter who wrote these books ("Why not try it yourself?")

What about Rabadash's lust for Susan? It is of course telling that it's the dark-skinned Calormen whose clear about his rape fantasies.

I have a memory of Tirian hitting on Lucy in The Last Battle.

_chuckled at his Christian generosity, as if it didn't matter who wrote these books ("Why not try it yourself?")_
Narnia officially open-source! can you imagine the fan fiction if these books were first published in the 21st century?

I remember now there being quite a good bit about adult life & relationships right at the end of TH&HB but will hold off on it until we've read that.

xp not really familiar with eo3 or fanfic world so went to check this out, this was the second result, so a yikes and a nope here

https://i.postimg.cc/pLWzMPwR/Screenshot-20230320-122138.jpg

Yeah, people will post stuff like that, there’s plenty of tools to avoid seeing content you want to avoid too.

This is quite obvious but I liked it, and I think it is the kind of thing CSL was nudging his young readers to explore.

it's good but seven years of catholic schooling has left me with a revulsion towards any kind of explicit religious parable, so uh guess I'm reading the wrong books.

Ha! I went to Catholic school for six years and we treated the Bible like a dead snake in the road, so these stories fascinate me.

Yeah I genuinely could probably quote more of this series than I could the Bible.

I read the Bible on my own and was regarded as a dead snake in the road.

any good deed performed in tash's name is aslans and any evil deed in aslans is tash's is how i prepare for job interviews

nah I just shout "Beware, the bolt of Tash falls from above!" when students ask for assignment extensions

Searched for a virgin Aslan/chad Tash meme but no joy

However!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EYao6AQX0AAFmjC?format=jpg&name=large

lol

I always assumed that they'd been kings and queens in Narnia for like fifty years, I mean when they are hunting the white stag and come across the lamppost in the woods none of them even remember what it is at first!

It's an entirely different sense of narrative that we seem to be kinda incapable of dealing with today. Yeah, if you think about it of course as a king or queen of Narnia you're going to repeatedly go see if you can still get back to Earth through the wardrobe (like... you would probably want to check in with your parents?) but Lewis clearly shows that once they got crowned, they didn't even think about their life in Earth ever again.

it isn't like they don't have anyone to talk about their old lives with either. the "returning as a child having lived an adult life" thing seems like a rich seam, left entirely untouched.

I don't mind that it doesn't make "rational" sense, because it follows its own fairy tale/dream logic.

Yeah, and I think part of the Narnia thing is that it’s more “real” than the “real world” bcuz, y’know, it’s God’s country, quite literally. So when you’re a kid there and you’re a king or queen, makes sense that you’re living in that moment an not in this one.

I think there’s some indication that they mostly forget what happened while they were reigning — like as though it had been a dream — and so they don’t end up as adults in kids’ bodies.

did none of ye ever go to yere cousins for summer holidays at that age

by mid october its as well never to have happened

i this lewis captures the dreamy immediacy of it all well enough for nolanesque forensic questioning of the timelines to be handily enough dismissed tbh

Yeah but I like the between the two worlds thing, as both a Gemini and a person with bad opinions in general.

Wet Hot Narnian Summer

Not even visiting your cousins -- it's like remembering a summer trip to Disney World in the middle of taking finals.

xps

as a midlander

xp look some of us have cousins in nicer places than others i dont mean to brag

Wet Hot Narnian Summer

― the absence of bikes (f. hazel),

i.e. Eustace + Jill visiting Puddleglum.

The Perks of Being a Marsh-wiggle

Lev Grossman “The Magicians” is pretty much the Narnia for adults

i just read all of these again. while he spotted the many obvious ones, i appreciated pointing out to my son the less obvious biblical allusions, because whatever their value, that aspect does allow an early lesson in a certain style of reading, which i didn't get until much later, and which is rewarding and mind expanding. the horse and his boy is the worst one. the last battle is a letdown.

not otm

i was pretty disappointed with the “experiment house” shade, and its “headmaster, who was a woman” and jill just kind of standing by and trying not to cry while rilian and eustace and puddle-glum use their swords

last battle is next and my son is psyched “because all the OGs will be there”

Susan's pretty deadly with her bow and arrow tho

tash tash inexorable tash

^^the most og of all

Started these for bedtime reading to the kids and finished Nephew last night. As a lapsed Catholic whose sick mother did die, I found this story uncomfortable.

also, fuck this inheritance ending. These people are always finding old bank stock notes in the attic or inheriting some great uncle's fortune.

tbf I'd probably be all Catholic mystic, too, if that shit happened to me

Former Catholic, same, though Aslan was never gentler than in this book. Lewis at his best writing those Aslan speeches about Jadis, the tree/fruit, and suffering.

also, fuck this inheritance ending. These people are always finding old bank stock notes in the attic or inheriting some great uncle's fortune.

― Enumerated funks of Walsh, Joe. (Sufjan Grafton), Saturday, 10 June 2023 17:33 (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yes but this was prob p true for the likes of c s lewis et al tbf

we recently finished The Horse and His Boy, yes it is still my favourite, have to say my son didn't care for it at all though. I think there are maybe too many passages of dialogue, and using impenetrable old-fashioned language too, though I still enjoyed those. think the runaway kid adventure is a genre I generally love, and Tashbaan reminded me of Mont St Michel (I went there when I was 10 and read the book later the same year) - it just seems to have more possibilities outside the text than the other books in the series, a world barely glimpsed.

I did remember fondly the last paragraph - "..years later, when they were grown up, they were so used to quarrelling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently..." - but if I'm going to be honest there wasn't a lot of quarrelling and making up in the book, so maybe CS could have spent a bit more time on that and a little less on the heavy-handed parable stuff, idk.

yeah it is a bit racist too.

it just seems to have more possibilities outside the text than the other books in the series, a world barely glimpsed.

otm -- and why I love ....The Dawn Treader too.

Interesting: https://www.tor.com/2021/05/12/the-problems-of-susan/

Not totally sure about the fanfic, but I do appreciate the wider delve.

all critical activity is fanfic

Where is your Middle-earth novel

it's behind you

*ducks*

I just

Lol

Just finished Prince Caspian. It was interesting in that for 60% of the book it was just the four kids (& one dwarf) walking for ages and getting lost. By interesting I mean dull. Why didn't they trust Lucy when she saw she said Aslan? I mean people being irrational and wasting time doing nothing is at least realistic, so let's credit Jack for that at least. The action sequences are quite harsh, lots of death, but all seem to be crammed into a few chapters. And after getting to know Prince Caspian we basically just abandon him until he puts in a couple of cameos at the end. Easily the worst so far I'm afraid.

Why didn't they trust Lucy when she saw she said Aslan?

Why would they? They're out of practice, only one visit.

The next book is much better.

I do kind of appreciate that, despite all of their experiences, Peter and Susan are already growing up to be pompous English prigs, because of course they are. Typical British colonialists.

lucy is very tiresome! she is a suck-up and i hate her!

(she does have a good extended scene in the next book -- if it's dawn treader -- but it's the scene that's good not her)

aslan is being such a dick in the lost-in-the-woods section

isn't Scrubb the suck-up?

scrubb constantly says they're all mad idiots who are trying to kill him!

he is not aslan-pilled

I’m at the beginning stages of a fiction thing and have already introduced a character named “Aslan”.

Also, still don't know why anyone is supposed to give a fuck about the Bulgy Bears, or what they are doing in this book.

lol you're cranky

One of the Bulgy Bears sticks his paw in his mouth in the lists, greatly offending Peter. That's the only purpose they serve.

i mean they are definitely another dreary digression in an overlong book but they are there to be the talking bears which DON'T eat children bcz "old narnia" is nice (twee) but can also front some troops which might give the telmarines pause once nikabrik's alternative is decisively squashed ("light the blue fire!" = best scene)

blue fires are pretty

I love fantasy books where people walk for ages (and maybe get lost). The best bits of Lord of the Rings are them walking.

CS introduces them like "here are some great new comic characters, lads you're going to love their hilarious antics" and then in several mentions it's just a paw in a mouth, which to be perfectly frank is not going to make much difference to people who have never encountered a talking bear before.

xp lots of my favourite things scenes in things are nothing happening on the surface, but all the time we're finding out about the characters. this is not the case here, everyone just acts like pricks.

like britishes

to be perfectly frank is not going to make much difference to people who have never encountered a talking bear before.

the last bear I talked to had hella attitude and wouldn't even bottom idk

a lot of it is wild shit given this guy is meant to be some kind of xtian: like unleashing bacchus and silenus and getting them to coax schoolgirls into taking half their clothes off

now that's the part of the novel where things get unwieldy

yeah the tree orgies were odd

hot entwives in your area

Prince Caspian is better than the Silver Chair, which is irritating and not very good

tbf Tom Baker is in The Silver Chair. Probably not in the book though.

Prince Caspian is better than the Silver Chair, which is irritating and not very good

― the absence of bikes (f. hazel), T

respectowiggle

i really like silver chair: puddleglum is a good character to have in a kid's book i think

anything would be a letdown after Dawn Treader though

dawn treader has too much aslan in it

courage, dear heart

the Emerald Witch plucking at her koto surrounded by clouds of incense = so metal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh55SzhLkmc

hoping there’s a metal band called bism

also mudfilth

I love fantasy books where people walk for ages (and maybe get lost). The best bits of Lord of the Rings are them walking.

Prince Caspian is better than the Silver Chair, which is irritating and not very good

― the absence of bikes (f. hazel), T

respectowiggle

This is 90% of why Fellowship is the best. It’s basically a travelogue of a long walk without a ton of other plot going on.

― The land of dreams and endless remorse (hardcore dilettante),

*cough* The Silver Chair: the trek through Ettinsmoor, etc.

in the silver chair it bothered me all out of proportion that scrubb didn't get to say hi to the elderly caspian

also: repectabiggle

amidst all the bad takes in this revive, and they're not few, the idea that fotr lacks plot is a real doozy

we have a good thread where we do in fairness surmise that it is a book about walking in the main so points for that

mark otm about why not listen to lucy, the portrayal of the character in the british tv tltwatw in the nineties was shockingly annoying and very accurate

we just finished the horse and his boy. Aslan saved the boy so the Aslantians would win the war years later. Main kid(s) always become rich at the end, in one world or another.

the bolt of Tash falls from above

― mookieproof, Wednesday, August 3, 2011 9:56 PM (twelve years ago)

the bolt of tash falls from above

― mookieproof, Wednesday, February 1, 2023 3:56 AM (eight months ago)

sorry for duplication, but i just wanted to point out that i was otm

amidst all the bad takes in this revive, and they're not few, the idea that fotr lacks plot is a real doozy

"Lack" implies it's the worse for it, though.

Silver Chair and Dawntreader are my absolute favourites. It makes me a little sad that KIDS TODAY don't read these books. I loved them so much. I still do. I don't care if CS Lewis was trying to indoctrinate me into Christianity by stealth. It's not like he did a very good job of it.

. It makes me a little sad that KIDS TODAY don't read these books.

They don't?

Cobbles and kettledrums!

i really like silver chair: puddleglum is a good character to have in a kid's book i think

They don't?

I might be extrapolating a bit from my own experience, but no, none of the younger readers in my orbit have ever mentioned the Narnia books. My sister-in-law, bless her, tried to get my niece interested in TLTWATW for my sake when she was the right age, but no, absolutely no interest. Which suggests to me that they're not on the radar of kids that age at all.

last battle is next and my son is psyched “because all the OGs will be there”

Come further up, come further in!

the Narnia boxed set is sold at Costco next to the Dogman and Wimpy Kids, so I'd guess they are still popular in the US.

I like Shasta (his highness, Corn) and Aravis in A Horse and His Boy more than the other kids. They risked more to earn their happy outcomes. I like Aslan the war-fixer less. Aslan is coolest when a mysterious and intimidating creator in Magician's nephew. He is always showing up in Horse Boy, scratching little kids. It feels like Narnia's own "when there was one set of footprints, that's when Aslan carried you".

the godly manifestation of corporal punishment

courage, dear heart

Aslan's constant meddling is a very pagan sort of behavior for a deity, I think Lewis ultimately wrote these books because he wanted kids to abandon Christianity when Jesus failed to get involved in their lives in any obvious way. Take up with ancient Greek gods, he is saying, there's fauns and talking animals and the gods are all up in your business all the time.

That…is a take

yeah, Bree says "he's probably not really a lion. he's beyond our understanding, a mystery." Then he is exactly a lion that turns people into donkeys for joeks.

Lewis had to have known he was setting Christianity up for failure in his child audience by having Aslan take such an active and explicit role in the Narnian protagonists' lives, I choose to believe it was intentional

lol. I feel the same about the ending of TLB. “Oh cool we’re in heaven…But we all died horribly in a train crash? What???”

what's weird about it?

The stuff with the doorframe was weird (and cool).

I guess the stuff of the real-Narnia-inside-the-real-Narnia is Lewis the amateur Platonist addressing ideal forms or some shit

Mostly a Netflix higher up interview here:

https://variety.com/2023/film/news/greta-gerwig-narnia-plans-netflix-1235785562/

But there is this:

Q I want to ask you about some upcoming films. You have Greta Gerwig adapting C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books. Why did you decide to make that deal? What about her as a filmmaker made you feel like that was a good fit with that material?

A Greta’s been a friend for a while. Her husband, Noah Baumbach, we’re close to, we’ve made I think three films. We’re starting another one. We have a big deal with them. If you don’t know her, she’s truly one of the greatest people, not an artist, but a human being. She’s just got this great soul. When we had 2019’s ‘Marriage Story’ and she had ‘Little Women,’ we all spent quite a bit of time on the awards trail together at dinners.

Gerwig grew up in a Christian background. The C.S. Lewis books are very much based in Christianity. And so we just started talking about it. And like I said earlier, we don’t have IP, so when we had the opportunity to license those books or the Roald Dahl Co. we’ve jumped at it, to have stories that people recognize and the ability to tell those stories. So it was just a great opportunity and I’m so thrilled that she’s working on it with us and I’m just thrilled to be in business with her. And she’s just an incredible talent.

Q Is she writing many of these adaptations? What is her commitment to this?

A Obviously, ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ is kind of the preeminent one, but there’s such an interesting narrative form to the Narnia series if you read all of them. And so that’s what she’s working on now with producer Amy Pascal and trying to figure out how they can break the whole arc of all of it.

i would def sign up for a gerwig-directed 'the magician's nephew'

love gerwig and no shade but very funny to answer "What about her as a filmmaker made you feel like that was a good fit with that material?" with "she's really cool and I like to hang out with her"

Wild takes from hazel!

I’m an “read these in order of publication” hardliner, or at the very least read TMN second last (or even entirely last), stylistically it is written like a flashback, not an exposition.

TLB is the best-written of all of them, the most intensely plotted and sinister, Shift is one of my favourite characters. As a kid I didn’t pick up on the racism but that Susan stuff was really messed up

What is way worse than TLB tho is all the responses to it— specifically the final volume of His Dark Materials, which is way more fucked up and awful than anything Pullman was attempting to “correct”

I’m a “read these in order of publication” hardliner

thats right

It's interesting to see the Narnia books lose the context of mid-20th century British kid's literature, where it was almost required to write books where absolutely nothing happened... in comparison, Price Caspian is a nonstop rollercoaster

f.hazel i love you but that is complete nonsense

let's not pretend the canonical British children's book in 1950 isn't "child sent to country house during war and befriends ghost child, decides eccentric grandparent is all right after all, goes home"

16 “canonic” british authors active 40s-60s who don’t fit that template

joan aiken
pauline clarke
roald dahl
leon garfield
alan garner
eric linklater
mary norton
sheena porter
arthur ransome
ian serraillier
catherine storr
rosemary sutcliffe
john rowe townsend
geoffrey trease
henry treece
t.h.white

(excluding john christopher and peter dickinson as they don’t start till the late 60s so count more as a bookend)

2 who kinda do fit that template

lucy m. boston (this is who you mainly have in mind guess)
philippa pearce (not very like boston, and also just one book of several not in template)

I never read the flambards books, maybe they fit too

none of them count

(I'm being silly, you're right of course)

lol yes, i just got into it bcz i think it's an interesting issue! CSL *does* kinda stick out in this company, i think his sensibility was formed decades before most of those other guys

(tolk's too, though he's always a bit of a special case) (like denys watkins-pitchford didn't spend 20 years proving the the little grey men with not one but three languages alphabets and names of months etc)

This thread revive lead me to read the Wiki entry on Pauline Baynes. Didn't know before that Lewis (who does not come out of this well) privately expressed severe reservations about her work, particularly in a letter to Dorothy L Sayers:

Lewis gave his fullest account of his opinion of Baynes in a letter that he wrote to his friend Dorothy L. Sayers on 5 August 1955. "The main trouble about Pauline B. is [...] her total ignorance of animal anatomy. In the v. last book [the fifth in the series] she has at last learned how to draw a horse. I have always had serious reservations about her [...]. But she had merits (her botanical forms are lovely), she needed the work (old mother to support, I think), and worst of all she is such a timid creature, so 'easily put down' that criticism cd. only be hinted [...]. At any real reprimand she'd have thrown up the job, not in a huff but in sheer, downright, unresenting, pusillanimous dejection. She is quite a good artist on a certain formal-fantastic level (did Tolkien's Farmer Giles far better than my books) but has no interest in matter – how boats are rowed, or bows shot with, or feet planted, or fists clenched. Arabesque is really her vocation."

Hideous sexism aside, I ... sort of agree with Lewis - or rather, I really like her colour cover paintings, but find her interior line drawings a bit stiff and really quite unattractive.

it's odd given the mode of baynes's illustrations for farmer giles of ham -- which are witty and stylised and pull in the bayeux tapestry and the marginalia of illuminated manuscripts, and medieval illustration generally, and in 1948 she's drawing horses (there are plenty in and around ham) perfectly well -- that she was then bundled into an approach that worked much less well for her in the CSL books (1950-56)? like the image of the children all tumbling out of the wardrobe at the end of tLtWatW: it's inept goofiness is actually kind of engaging, but it's objectively not good realism!!

a book baynes worked on that i loooove is amabel williams-ellis's* fairytales of the british isles (1960)

meet beelzebub!
https://www.paulinebaynes.com/_gallery_images/fiomiz57w95o.jpg

*married to the architect who designed portmeirion

really good revive this! and tho mark is obv absolutely right, i totally saw where f.hazel was coming from, and I was trying to work out why.

I think in my v uncategorised childhood mind (not recognising these come from different periods and strands), Tom's Midnight Garden, The Secret Garden, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Five Children and It, The Box of Delights and The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (and a number of others eg Over Sea, Under Stone) were quite similar. all involve displacement through illness, war, parental absence and the discovery of magic of some form (the form is important though: myth, ghosts, ancient immanent magic.

The city/pastoral division is probably important (puck and a midsummer night's dream is really not very far away in some of these). Purely mechanically it gives the child or children somewhere to explore and time on your hands to do it.

uhhh what has Amazon done now? All I saw was a single still of "The Pevensie Era" and I am terrified of what they may have wrought

fucking nikabrik

re-read the lion, the witch today for the first time in decades and was stunned to see the vulpine SS chief named maugrim rather than fenris ulf

which is fine, if vaguely disturbing to me personally -- nowhere near as terrible as ordering 'the magician's nephew' first

was also struck by how short it is, as it seemed so vast for me as a child. the christian stuff was obvious in aslan's sacrifice but hardly seemed overwhelming. although i do question the deep magic from *after* the dawn of time giving one the right to kill anyone who turned traitor *in their favor*!

Us Lions guy ruled

We achieved the apex of comedy in 1987 when we created a werewolf with a DEX of 3 in our D&D game and named him Fenris Oof

nice

also the pauline baynes illustrations were better in black and white imo

The last 15 pages of ...Dawn Treader contain some of Lewis' loveliest writing imo

mark s otm:

WHAT YOU DO SEE: is a quite small boy cast into a world he REALLY HASN’T ASKED FOR OR BEEN EXPECTING fighting against the seemingly insane groupthink of the not-really-adults who are meant to be looking after him. No one sits down and explains Aslan or Narnia to him. The plan everyone but him is following is SAIL TO THE ISLAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE AND THEN OFF THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, at the behest of a magician they’ve only just met, who admits he is holding the Dufflepuds (for their own good) in a web of magic they don’t really like

Coriakin's rather idle explanation for why he controls the Dufflepuds stood out this time.

i never read these when i was myself a child but am reading "the magician's neph" to the kidz right now. it's pretty good!

I'm reading them for the first time - I was surprised how sweet and moving and just, well, good, Dawn Treader was. And the scene with the dragon, that crawls out of his hole to die and decompose... what an horrifying image to chuck in the middle of a kids's story.

Also, yes, enjoyed the use of Eustace's OTM diary as a way of gently mocking the heroes

Definitely need to read these again at some point

Eustace eating the drqgon

This was an awesome thread to read through.

nah I just shout "Beware, the bolt of Tash falls from above!" when students ask for assignment extensions

― the very juice and sperm of kindness. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, March 20, 2023

I did this yesterday.

<3

I've previously only read The Lion and The Magicians Nephew. Fortyish years later, just got Prince Caspian from the library (children's library, sorry kids).

Perhaps it's unfair to judge it (Prince Caspian) after reading it for the first time in my fifties, but what a load of rubbish. Caspian's backstory just comes across like an infodump, the journey through the wood and the fucking gorge is infinitely more tedious than Merry and Pippin's forced march (which is not tedious at all), Aslan is a massive prick, directly in the story and by implication for the last few hundreds or thousands of years. (Seems PC ranks low in most people's lists so I'll maintain higher hopes for the next ones.)

!

Forgot to mention the fat shaming.

My post on PC upthread -

It was interesting in that for 60% of the book it was just the four kids (& one dwarf) walking for ages and getting lost. By interesting I mean dull. Why didn't they trust Lucy when she saw she said Aslan? I mean people being irrational and wasting time doing nothing is at least realistic, so let's credit Jack for that at least. The action sequences are quite harsh, lots of death, but all seem to be crammed into a few chapters. And after getting to know Prince Caspian we basically just abandon him until he puts in a couple of cameos at the end. Easily the worst so far I'm afraid.

Why didn't they trust Lucy when she saw she said Aslan?

And why didn't Aslan just show himself to all of them? And then telling Lucy it's all her fault!(*) Absolutely typical (non) interventionist arsehole deity behaviour, kudos to Lewis.

(*) On reflection this might be the single worst part of the book.

Is PC the one with the fucking bulgy bears?

haha yes

would have liked them to be substantially more haha

PC is just weirdly poorly structured: it has a small handful of genuinely strong scenes & an endless needless fvckton of trudging by all & sundry -- you the reader will believe it's several hundred years since the pevensies were last in narnia bcz that's how long it takes the plot to get anywhere…

and when it does it's rompingly pagan (👍🏽) -- by revealed preference CSL despises the lion and thus christianity

I didn't like Prince Caspian. Dawn Treader is next and it is EXCELLENT, imo

Caspian is still a prick in it, though

Caspian fades as a character as soon as Peter asserts himself; one chapter's even called "The High King in Command." One thing the awful movie got right: Caspian and his people called upon the Royal Children; the Royal Children have arrived; now Caspian's got two more kings to deal with. Caspian, a late teen from my understanding, would quite properly have been miffed about giving up prerogatives.

I love Prince Caspian, as a kid it delighted me every one of the many, many times I read it (unlike the Silver Chair, which is the book that contains the REAL slog). Cornelius revealing all in the tower, Caspian being woken up and having to flee, the Pevensie kids slowly reasoning out where they are. I love how it reckons with the mechanics of moving between worlds, time passing, etc. They don't recognize their home, they get sad, Trumpkin is like "you're a bunch of useless kids". I was riveted. And the battle at the end is the perfect example of Lewis' taste for Christianity revealing a lust for pagan joy. The battle is won by an army of trees and a river god! As a kid naturally the adult characters being stern, inscrutable, and constantly telling me I fucked up seemed absolutely normal.

Yeah, Master Cornelius is the best character.

As true believer, Lucy would besr thr heaviest burden.

Yep. People not believing you when you say things? Check. Always being somehow bored and thirsty and hungry? Check. Very relatable when I was whatever age I was when I read this. And the shock, as well, of things having changed and decayed and so many years having passed. I think this might have been the first series of books I ever read (like proper series, not Famous Five or whatever where nothing ever really changed) and to see beyond the happily-ever-after into the next stage was kind of mind-blowing.

Also Edmund's redemption arc made it necessary for Lucy to assert something important that nobody else believed so he could stick up for her this time

Alfred is right too... poor Lucy, rewarded for her devotion by always being tested by Aslan and found wanting

Also: I like how Telmarine-conquered Narnia still has ogres, hags, and werewolves.

the dialog from the werewolf and the hag are absolutely classic exchanges

I hunger. I thirst.

This:

the Pevensie kids slowly reasoning out where they are.

and this:

And the shock, as well, of things having changed and decayed and so many years having passed.

Made such a huge impact on me when I read Prince Caspian as a kid.

the dialog from the werewolf and the hag are absolutely classic exchanges

Yeah but it's a bit weird how Peter and Edmund are waiting outside the whole time, while inside they're arguing about why the help from the horn hasn't arrived and giving Peter and Edmund about a dozen chances to jump in and say "here we are"!

Absolutely no shade on anyone who enjoyed this as a kid and still does, of course.

They're gathering intel, figuring out who's who.

I kinda agree with everything people have said above, on both sides.

no judgement in Narnia

Judgment = the Deplorable Word

you could put half of Caspian's supporters into what I call the how of deplorables

and how!

v amused to learn that the cunty italian cardinal in conclave played a king in the movie of this

but not amused enough to watch it

oh you poor Rabadash!

the movies were disappointing, although not as much of a hate crime as the Dark is Rising movie was

was bothered by how in PC (and dawn treader) aslan tells lucy 'no one is to know what *would* have happened' and then in the magician's nephew he straight-up tells digory what would have happened had he stolen an apple for his mother!

but tbf, he's not a tame lion

is Jesus a tame human? presumably this is addressed in the screwtape letters

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiEMeDV8Ej0

Aslan crying when he learns about Digory's mom tears me up though

/the movies were disappointing, although not as much of a hate crime as the Dark is Rising movie was/

Ken Loach’s The Dark Is Rising

had no idea there was a 'dark is rising' movie

props to me

is Jesus a tame human? presumably this is addressed in the screwtape letters

this is among the reasons why aslan is a far more appealing messiah imo

the sun of mane

that time jesus gored then feasted on the flesh of the moneylenders in the temple

https://winteriscoming.net/greta-gerwig-shares-passion-narnia-film-netflix-theatrical-strategy

i daren't

Ranked from memory:

#1 The Horse And His Boy (I would’ve been the lone voter); I loved the structure and storytelling and the characters and The Big Reveal

#2 The Last Battle; completely energized prose style, intense suspense as the reader realizes that shit is seriously hitting the fan, comeuppences, utterly bonkers plot devices (P.S. The Pevensies died on the way back to their home planet), bracingly ugly misogyny and Islamophobia, completely bizarre re-reading of Revelations— it blew my mind as a kid

#3 Dawn Treader; I found shithead Eustace to be an appealing anti-hero and the episodic format of the narrative to be appealingly Odyssean

#4 Lion Witch Wardrobe; it’s patronizing kid-lit in restrospect and honestly I found the Asian resurrection to be kinda dumb, bonus demerits for Father Christmas, but it originated the White Witch and Lantern Grove and everything else

#5 Prince Caspian; idk I liked it, exploring the ruins of Cair Paravel and the dwarf drama.

#6 The Silver Chair; bad sequence at Harfang, bad final conflict, generally not great but we must respectabiggle

#7 Nephew; awesome concept that is tedious in execution. Which in London is the only compelling sequence. Also ranked last to spite anybody who insists it should be read first.

That’s the Aslan resurrection obv
And “retrospect” not “restrospect”
And “Witch in London”

My Eustachian tube has been plugged with crud for the past three weeks and I’m not myself

your Eustacian tube, surely

I'd rank thusly

1 Dawn Treader - Thrill ride start to finish
2 TLTWTW - Like Over Sea, Under Stone it is an first book that is twee as hell and freewheeling in a way none of the other books are
3 Prince Caspian - A very cool plot twist for a second novel in a series of kid's books written in 1951, and narratively speaking a much better way of historical recounting than Magician's Nephew
4 Horse and His Boy - Like Dawn Treader, a thrilling adventure although heavy on the moralizing and xenophobia
5 Magician's Nephew - Ambitious and some great set pieces but ultimately like the Silmarillion, good lore but not a great read
6 Silver Chair - Baroque and medieval in flavor, but old and dying King Caspian sets a glum tone and it never gets fun although admirably weird... Bism? What?
7 Last Battle - I'll grant the last chapter blew my mind as a kid, but overall it's just unrelentingly grim and too many friends (Susan, dwarves) get fucked over

Considering how Screwtape was such a complex and satisfying dissection of “the nature of sin” it is comparatively bonkers that tribal nationalism and party invitations are what got the dwarves and Susan sent to Uncle Screwtape

but dwarves are for the dwarves!

btw the condemned dwarves in TLB are a small faction who refused to believe in Aslan after the Tashlan nonsense.

Or maybe not, my memory just flashed with the passage of the gluttonous woman (“cup of tea, weak but not too weak, and the teensiest weensiest piece of toast”)— Lewis was probably always an asshole

Are those Martian books good? I must’ve been nine when I attempted Out Of The Silent Planet and I got bored and aborted but I do recall there being an alien that peed

I read Screwtape and the Martian books and a lot of CSL when I was much too young to understand it. Perelandra et al made little impression on me at the time.

I loved these books so much but now in my 50s I am more than ready to see them taken off their pedestals and played with. Bring on the 80s Pevensies imo

Tina Turner as Jadis.

Are those Martian books good? I must’ve been nine when I attempted Out Of The Silent Planet and I got bored and aborted but I do recall there being an alien that peed

― well damn, Jackie, I can’t control the CIA (flamboyant goon tie included), Monday, March 23, 2026 11:00 AM (thirty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i did my senior year AP English thesis on that series and now i couldn't tell you anything about it!

I found Out Of The Silent Planet stodgy. No one walks through Ettinsmoor or across the Calormene desert.

I was not then, and still am not, particularly interested in fiction that's written more to test an idea(s) than to present a believable experience as the protagonist and a good story with a satisfying narrative arc + logic.

#6 The Silver Chair; bad sequence at Harfang, bad final conflict, generally not great but we must respectabiggle

#7 Nephew; awesome concept that is tedious in execution. Which in London is the only compelling sequence. Also ranked last to spite anybody who insists it should be read first.

otm

absolutely *hate* how eustace could maybe have said hi to caspian but never got a chance to in the silver chair

(not pole's fault tho!)

What works in The Magician's Nephew: Uncle Andrew's explanation of how he acquired the rings (the fairy godmother); the walk through the palace of Charn; the First Joke; Fledge, Digory, and Polly's journey to the garden; Jadis and Digory's final face-off.

I did want more of Frank and Helen as monarchs.

At a bookstore yesterday and saw TLTWATW with a big number '2' on the spine. It's enough to ruin your day...

no it's okay it's not the second book in the series that's the actual sequel to TLTWATW, TLTWATW 2, it has a mysterious child with telekinesis

The Phantom Jadis

Did George Lucas ever presume to state that he wanted SW watched in chronological sequence? Actually… never mind, I don’t care

Dawn Treader >>> Caspian, the episodic nature is pretty basic but a vast improvement on Caspian's "obvious where it's going and takes a tedious age to get there"; I enjoyed not knowing what on earth was coming up next, even if it wasn't always a success (the monopods, wtf). Eustace is good fun and he makes some good points! I half wanted him to be proved right that there were no more lands to the east and they would all starve to death. Yet his transformation does come as a relief - my own insufferable pevensian priggishness must be showing itself there.

On to The Silver Chair:

"The Head said they [the bullies] were interesting psychological cases and sent for them and talked to them for hours. And if you knew the right sort of things to say to the Head, the main result was that you became rather a favourite than otherwise."

Lewis with a classic "pics or it didn't happen" opener.

some classic Lewis ax-grinding that got past the editor

"The Head said they [the bullies] were interesting psychological cases and sent for them and talked to them for hours. And if you knew the right sort of things to say to the Head, the main result was that you became rather a favourite than otherwise."

can attest to the effectiveness of sweet-talking a dumb private school bureaucrat

Lewis throwing shade on modern education is what I expect from a guy who went to school in the era of beatings by headmaster and male rape in bedrooms.

I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.

From a link upthread re Gerwig's apparently 50s set Nephew:

It’s added onto by comments from producer Amy Pascal about the film having a “rock 'n' roll” take that goes against the book’s style.

Ergo, Aslan is in fact Elvis.

Dawn Treader remains my favorite of the seven. I still remember not being sure what the one guy meant by his baccy getting low.

Based on my rereading of the seven novels this month, I'd agree. I'll make allowances for the Dufflepuds. All that's mysterious about the Coriakin chapter (Lucy opening the book of spells; making Aslan visible; Coriakin's origins) could've worked without them.

Yeah, not perfect, but overall the most properly atmospheric -- and at the time of writing the smart move to take the story *out* of Narnia elsewhere, and to have the most familiar thing be the Lone Islands, never portrayed until then, and to have that be in the opening chapters. A real sense that we're going somewhere new and unexpected. It's the RLS gambit of Treasure Island and any sea adventure as such, and it works.

Dawn Treader was far and away my favorite as a kid, for all the reasons discussed. Even if some of the episodes are better than others, you're not stuck with any one thing too long, and some are fantastic. Eustace's arc from prat to good lad is somehow more satisfying than Edmund's escape from being tricked into evil. The Secret Garden, which I also liked a lot, hits some of the same notes.

Reepicheep's little Grail quest is also satisfying; iirc they arrive at a place where the sea essentially isn't sea anymore, or there's no wind or something, and that's when he discovers it's the prophesied place "where the waves grow sweet." Appealingly surreal and unearthly. I was probably at the exact last age where I could have accepted a dashing mouse knight as a character with real pathos - sorry, Redwall, you came too late - but I did and it was great.

I remember Caspian and Horse as the true duds, Nephew as being cool as an origin myth but without a story that stuck with me, and Last Battle as having an impressively apocalyptic end-point (but little else about it beyond chanting about "inexorable Tash").

I think I liked Silver Chair, or at least parts of it, but I also may be mixing it up with The Castle of Llyr, in the Prydain series, which in my hazy imagining shares some of the same DNA.

They are both middle books of their series.

Silver Chair has a lot of great moments that don't entirely gel, but the images can be good (and of course, Puddleglum). I always liked the description of the gems nearer the surface being the dead remains of living jewels like fruit.

I think I liked Silver Chair, or at least parts of it, but I also may be mixing it up with The Castle of Llyr, in the Prydain series, which in my hazy imagining shares some of the same DNA.

Well since you've invoked that, a reminder of another thread:

Taking Sides: Narnia vs Prydain

goddamn Lewis promised in a parenthetical to write a novel about how the Lone Islands came into Narnia's possession but never did; all we get is a one-line reference in Jewel's Narnian history lesson to Jill in TLB.

PBKR - ha, well, yes. I looked it up and they also both deal with royal heirs kidnapped by sorceresses (who hope to rule the kingdom by mind-controlling their captive), a long search-party journey by a motley crew, a stop at a place with giant-sized creatures, a descent into underground caverns, and the discovery that the captive heir's ensorcellement has led them to forget key information about who certain characters are. Admittedly some of that is kinda generic to a lot of fantasy stories, but I don't think my vague memories from 1992 were *totally* off base.

I do admire how Lewis gave The Lady of the Green Kirtle no background other than "she's one of those Northern witches" in the same way one would refer to Jessica Fletcher as "one of those Maine sleuths."

Finished it, perfectly middling, not as magical as TLTW or as intriguing as VODT but not a slog like PC. Puddleglum is great obviously. Maybe it's reading them in quick succession but Lewis' utterly artless prose did start to grate a little.

Aslan theologically accurate as usual, making me ponder on the gulf between those who see him/God as wise, benevolent, and worthy of worship, and those who see them as jerks who love to put people in horrible situations, give them impossible tasks to perform, and then criticise them when they fail.

Is this where Rowling picked up her habit of naming books after things that scarcely make an appearance in them?

I didn't know the BBC televised this, or the previous two, I don't know how I missed that. I was 15 when I watched TLTW, I doubt I'd completely aged out of that kind of thing by the next year but maybe.

I'm guessing no one else here read the ersatz-Narnia books The Tower of Geburah and The Iron Sceptre, which my parents got for fantasy-starved me at the Christian bookstore after I devoured the Narnia series. If you think Lewis is not didactic and Christian enough, you should grab these books. The good king character is killed off at the end in battling the evil witch/dragon explicitly as punishment for earlier showing the evil witch/dragon mercy and thereby disobeying the "good" Shepherd/Aslan character. Even as a kid I thought that was kind of fucked.

Reepicheep's little Grail quest is also satisfying; iirc they arrive at a place where the sea essentially isn't sea anymore, or there's no wind or something, and that's when he discovers it's the prophesied place "where the waves grow sweet."

Having not read any of these in 35 years - this little sequence is my strongest memory of the whole series.

Dunno why Horse gets so much shit, I remember thinking “this is Paul Bowles for kids”. I’ll re-read tonight, maybe it’s worse than I recall

The part where they maneuver through Tashbaan is A+.

Having not read any of these in 35 years - this little sequence is my strongest memory of the whole series.

Mine too, except that nowadays I think more and more about the Shift the ape bringing Puzzle the donkey out in a ratty lion skin and how they are both then exploited by even worse actors and the whole Tashlan things comes about. I wonder what could possibly make me think of that, hmm.

I vividly remember how the cover illustrations (the Collier editions, cover art by Roger Hane c1970) captivated me at the library even before I read them, perusing the spinner racks of mass market paperbacks in the kids' section.

Of course Prince Caspian's cover is funny because one you read the book you realize it's not even Prince Caspian, it's High King Peter!

yeah lol that cover confused me too

Narnia's version of the Two Towers title confusion

I'm going to keep on with this liveblogging until I'm done, unfortunately. So, A Horse and His Boy - leaps into second place behind TLTTTW. It's yet another journey, get a new idea Lewis! But as Camaraderie says upthread, it's a glimpse into a wider world. Yes it's a racist world but I don't think that makes it irredeemable and it wouldn't take too much to fix - dial down the obvious Arabic parallels, add a sympathetic Calorman or two, don't say all the white people have nicer faces and voices than the Arab stand-ins. Just bring in Le Guin for a rewrite basically, to lift the flatter than flat prose and add nuance to the Calormen.

I found it hilarious that one of the first things the boy who has been brought up his whole life by a poor Arabian fisherman says to Aravis after he discovers his true identity is "Father's an absolute brick". Granted he does speak like that pretty much from the beginning.

Aslan being all "it was then that I carried you" is far preferable to his prickish behaviour in the other books.

I can't believe I never noticed the reversal in the title till it was spelled out in the book.

I've read most of the thread now, many people are otm.

narrator: he does not get a new idea

Would probably be difficult to name many fantasy novels that don't involve a journey/quest of some sort

Gormenghast springs to mind

Thanks to this thread, Phish's 1996 album-closer "Prince Caspian" has been stuck in my head all week. Apparently, Phish Heads are divided on it. It's a concert staple, and it seems that for a long time they played it with very little variation, so die-hards who live for the unexpected variations and jams grew weary, derisively dubbing it "Fuckerpants" back in the days of Usenet and mailing lists. You can also find various online threads where Phans demand explanation for the peculiar lyrics: who is this Prince, why is afloat upon the waves, why does he have stumps instead of feet, and why don't any of these details appear in the Wikipedia summary for the book Prince Caspian?

I come at it from having much more lifelong affection for Narnia than Phish. I love the soaring, liberating vibe and pretty guitar tone, as on the album-opener "Free" (which pricked up my ears when it got a couple weeks of alt-rock airplay back in '96). But I'm really there for the yearning refrain of "oh, to be Prince Caspian," which I think captures something quite sweet.

The Magician's Nephew, the only other one I read as a child. I still remembered the bell, and the witch in London, more came back to me as I was reading but almost nothing from the Narnia bit. The first half is all great - Uncle Andrew, the wood between the worlds, Charn, the witch in London. It could be a great lead in to a story with the witch as the antagonist, jumping around between different worlds, maybe Uncle Andrew has his Edmund/Eustace moment. Instead we get a children's Genesis, some half arsed talking animal comedy, and the lamest fetch quest. A tough one to rank but definitely not top 3.

Stoked for the final madness.

fetch Fledge quest.

fixed

so here’s my list — least favourite first, on down to favourite last — based on how-often-reread-as-a-kid (as interpreted by an adult) (me)… but not (for now anyway) reread in the here-and-now. As we know, every single book is a journey yoking strong vivid memorable scenes via far less memorable trudge (= more or less clumsy transition), via CSL’s dated plain-man authorly voice (= ledge’s bete noir) and plus (not unrelated) the bickering company of the fkn pevensies, so DULL DULL DULL as an interacting family of siblings (actually a long-solved problem in kidlit) (e. nesbit’s sibling-gangs are not dull in like way). The task Lewis set himself: “flesh out a world that can contain this vivid poetic image I glimpsed” = a bescarfed faun in a snowy wood carrying an umbrella as he trots past a modern streetlamp (all but saying “oh my ears and whiskers late late late”). The streetlamp is eventually solved (good story, bro) but never the umbrella: pray where is its factory, analogy-boy?

horse-boy: I appreciate that ppl enjoy the simple chase of this but honestly as a kid I simply reread it far less often any of the others. The katty but korrekt grown-up kulturkritik is yes of course it’s a lazy orientalist cartoon: my disdainful child-mode version was “these farcical palace scenes are just panto aladdin, panto is for babies” & for me the narrative only came alive with the tombs scene: CSL does dread. Long desert chase is long desert chase. Battle feat.rabadash (humiliation mix) is entertaining. What else tho? The revelation (twins klaxon) only has force on very first read; despite Pauline Baynes’s best efforts, King Lune’s court is unexciting. The Pevensies? Even as fancy old-time royals & grown-ups they are DULL (sito)

caspian: casp discovering narnia, the revenant pevensies discovering they’re back in a v changed narnia, old narnia discovering its true self by (once again) throwing off tyranny… viz three different parties converging on the same spot, which is a lot to unroll, much too much of it dealt out as trudge (aslan even more of a manipulative prick than usual; lucy now is a tiresome twee suck-up, I hate her). Its structure is badly weighted towards transitional bickering (a lot of it’s very boring). Better is that the strong scenes manifest as contrast to this — and towards each other (old narnia good vs old narnia bad): the hag, the werewolf, the embittered dwarf and the BLUE FIRE vs the revolt of the trees, then bacchus, silenus & the maenads enticing schoolgirls to quit lessons, strip off and dance. Hurried climax piles atop a mid-battle trial-by-combat (enabled by the conspiratorial treachery of the upper telmarine officer class lol) (so hateful they wreck their own war aims) first the late-reveal backstory, then every son/daughter of adam/eve being magicked home except caspian. An allegory of xtian faith you say? OK the wooden-door portal is good business (baynes ftw), but the problems the book sets itself (not least why this adam/eve shit at all?) remain as unaddressed as the presence of satyrs, centaurs, naiads & dryads, their unleashed sexual energies hiding in plain sight. strip off yr elasticated clothes, girls, bcz NARNIA IS A PAGAN SPACE, there i said it

wardrobe: tbf the founding scenes are all p strong, this became a classic franchise for a reason: viz wardrobe itself, faun by streetlamp, turkish delight & treachery, stone knife stone table grisly execution of a lion, deeper magic from before the dawn of time — but then again the beavers are feeble and father xmas is worse. whose birth does christmas celebrate? in narnia the festival is all about presents and nothing about little baby lioncub jesus! v lumpy in shape (= worst book for trudge)

nephew: origin story klaxon, yes of narnia as this magical new land of plenty straightaway ruined, of a witch who thrillingly destroys worlds while remaining very opaque (she’s bad ppl), and of the professor from wardrobe as a child called DIGORY (the professor to me is an enormously boring character talking nonsense abt plato; which I fully blame on growing up with this name). v strong scenes include wood between the worlds, fall of charn, witch in london, absurd uncle andrew, the hippie song circle & high-speed narnian agriculture. Plus a scene where the apple in eden is actually just an apple you shouldn’t just eat (lol get a grip allegory-boy), and the moment when the victorian toffees became the delicious juicy fruit of a little bush which as a kid I associated with mackintosh’s TOFFOS, which are provably the fruit of that very tree which I enjoy to this day

treader: life aboard ship bickering is more entertaining than life trudging through a wood while bickering (is how the ocean-voyage book addresses the dreary trudge factor). my take on eustace is discussed earlier in the thread (tldr is yes he’s a twerp but his companions use him poorly: author always here for character-building corporal punishment), so instead I’ll cut to a cheat = a thing I did NOT know as a kid viz the extent to this book draws on the atlantic islands of the medieval imaginary (viz the isle of demons, the intermittently visible hy-brasil, the allegorical voyages of st brendan… ) which gives CSL plenty of meaty concrete lore to re-purpose (discussed here, as is the true source of the dufflepuds). best scene in the entire hepatology is lucy’s brave incursion into the wizard’s house (I like her much better here); as others have indicated, reepicheep’s grail side-quest as the waters grow sweet is also very vividly lovely

chair: mildly surprised this falls so low on lists because as a kid it was my runaway favourite, I reread it FAR more often than the others. Why exactly though? Well, for one thing, its solution to the trudge is “when travel, travel with puddleglum”: he’s funny two ways (he knows ppl think him absurd & fashions damp-dry jokes to play up to this). As with treader this is a quest through levels, starting high up in aslan’s land via the wiggle-marshes, giant cockshy yoot, harfang (“how to eat forty humans” 👍🏽 ) and down under the ozymandias-fragment into the underlands, a vast and intensely (to me) evocative cavern full of everything from sleeping dinosaurs to its own dark sea, a pleasing repository of unredeemed LORE (bism!) and baynes as MVP — not least for her depiction of VERY SAD GNOMES!

battle: cheating a bit in terms of kid-rereads putting this here (see chair). But it’s just the best, then and now: portray your lovely imagined fantasy land as it closes up for good! The harshness and ugliness of ppl letting you down here at the end everything swerving and then accelerating into the joy of perfect bliss. Are the heaven bits a persuasive imagining? No! They’re nutso — but I love that CSL attempted it on the page, vulnerably courageous as lucy walking thru the wizard’s lair)! We get what we most desire FOREVER is going to be one big paradox puzzle, quite silly and quite contradictory!! Including the reverse problem of susan, which is her parents (who never heard of narnia before being violently spirited into narnia -adjacent heaven) wounded puzzlement at the explanation of her absence: “no longer a friend of WHAT NOW?” I talk a bit more about all this here. Book has excellent characters (even the evil shift) (apes are evil) and very memorable scenes: like when tash turns up (twice)! And father time reaching up to squeeze out the sun, lights out and we all go home to aslan’s land (except susan)!

A new thing to explore: wikipedia sez CSL was a massive fan of david lindsay’s voyage to arcturus, which I must now also reread

adding (re the strike-the-bell rhyme) that alongside vivid scenes CSL also has a gift for apothegms: though under earth and throneless now I be yet while I lived all earth was under me

A+ post, enjoyed that.

Yes lovely stuff, you sell Chair very well. (Did not read your Last Battle one yet.) I wonder how I would have rated them as a child, it's too easy as an adult to miss the wood for the trees (of flat prose and bad allegories). Also I didn't re-read Wardrobe, in my memory it's best because of, as you say, strong setting and imagery, and a variety of settings and scenes centering on different characters - i.e. actual dramatic structure, not just one group on a single journey. I don't remember a long trudge in it!

(minor correction: when it says "CSL does dread" in horse-boy it shd be "CSL does dread well")

"Father's an absolute brick".

Cor as David Niven.

Nobody gets called a brick these days, Broken Britain Archenland