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

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.