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Apr. 16th, 2025 07:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsFor many years I have been saying 'I must reread the Narnia books,' a thing I somehow have not done in the seventeen or so years I've been actively keeping track of my reading habits. I said this in the late 2000s when the new movies were coming out, and I said it again a couple years ago when I read Til We Have Faces for the first time, and then I said it several times over the past few months while I was rewatching all the 1980s BBC Narnia adaptations with local friends, and then last week my friend was doing a blitz reread of the whole series for a con panel and I had finally said it enough times that I decided to join her instead of just talking about it.
For background: yes, the Narnia books were some of my favorite books when I was a child; they're the first books I actively remember reading on my own, that made me go 'ah! this thing, reading, is worth doing, and not just a dull task set to me by adults!' (This goes to show how memory is imperfect: my parents say that the first book that they remember me reading, before Narnia, was The Borrowers. But they also say that I then went immediately looking for Borrowers behind light sockets which perhaps is why I do not remember reading it first.)
I also cannot remember a time that I did not know that the big lion was supposed to be Jesus. This did not really put me off Narnia or Aslan -- I had a lion named Aslan that was my favorite stuffed animal all through my childhood -- but I did have a vague sense As A Jewish Child that it was sort of embarrassing for everyone concerned, including the lion, C.S. Lewis, and me. My favorites were Silver Chair, Horse And His Boy, and Magician's Nephew. I reread The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe often simply because it was the first one; Prince Caspian didn't leave much of an impression on me and I only really liked Dawn Treader for Eustace's dragon sequence; The Last Battle filled me with deep secondhand embarrassment.
Rereading, I discover that I had great taste; Silver Chair simply stays winning! The experience of reading the first three Pevensie books is a constant hunt for little crumbs of individuality and personality in the Pevensie children beyond their Situations and how willing they are to listen to advice from Big Lion; Jill and Eustace and Puddleglum, by contrast, have personality coming out their ears. I cherish every one of them. The dark Arthuriana vibes when they meet the knight and his lady out riding ... the whole haunted sequence underground .... Puddleglum's Big Speech .... this is, was, and will ever be peak Narnia to me. For all the various -isms of Horse And His Boy, it feels really clear that Lewis leveled up in writing Character somewhere between Dawn Treader and Silver Chair; Shasta and Aravis and the horses and Polly and Diggory all just have a lot more chances to bonk against each other in interesting ways and show off who they are than the Pevensies ever do.
However! I also had bad taste. I did not appreciate Caspian as it ought to have been appreciated. Now, on my reread, it's by far my favorite of the Pevensie-forward texts -- and partly I suppose that, as a child, I could not fully have been expected to appreciate the whole 'we came back to a place we used to know and a life we used to have and even as we're remembering the people we used to be there we're realizing it's all fundamentally changed' melancholy of it all. It's good! The Pevensies also just get to do more on their own and use more of their own actual skills than they do in either The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, where they're mostly led around by the nose, or Dawn Treader, where they're mostly just having a nice boat trip. Just a soupcon of Robinsoniad in your Narnia, as a treat.
I also came away with the impression that Dawn Treader -- which really is primarily about Eustace and Reepicheep -- would be a better book if either Edmund or Lucy had gone on that trip but not both of them. The problem with Dawn Treader is that Edmund/Lucy/Caspian all kind of blob together in a cohort of being Just Sort Of Embarrassed By Eustace -- Edmund and Caspian particularly -- and don't get a lot to individuate them or give them Problems. Edmund and Caspian's dialogue is frequently almost interchangeable. But an Edmund who has Lucy's trials at the magician's tower and has to deal more with his existing/leftover issues from the first book is more interesting, and a Lucy who is stuck more in the middle of Caspian and Eustace without Edmund to over-balance the stakes is more interesting. I expect people will want me to fight me on this though because I know a lot of people have Dawn Treader as their favorite ....
Other miscellaneous observations:
- obviously I am aware of the Susan Problem but man, reading for Susan and Lucy through the later books it is clear how much the gradual tilting of the scales to Lucy Good/Susan Bad does a disservice to both characters. This is especially noticeable IMO in Horse And His Boy; it makes no sense for Lucy to go to war with a bow while Susan stays behind in context of anything we know about those characters from Lion and Caspian, it is so purely an exercise in Lucy Is The Designated Cool Girl Now. Anyway, what I really want now is an AU where Susan does marry out of Narnia sometime in the Golden Age and instead of becoming the One Who Never Comes Back becomes the One Who Never Leaves
- it is very very funny that every King or Queen of Narnia talks like Shakespeare except for Caspian, who talks, as noted above, like a British schoolboy. My Watsonian explanation for this is that the Pevensies were like 'well, kings talk like Shakespeare' and consciously developed this as an affectation whereas Caspian, who met the Pevensies as schoolchildren at a formative age, was like 'well, kings talk like British schoolchildren' and consciously developed it as an affectation --
- if you are on Bluesky you may have already seen me make this joke but it is so funny to be rolling along in Narnia pub order and have C.S. Lewis come careening back in for Magician's Nephew like 'WAIT! STOP!! I forgot to mention earlier but Jadis? She is hot. You know Lady Dimitrescu? yeah JUST like that. I just want to make sure we all know'
- Last Battle still fills me with secondhand embarrassment
For background: yes, the Narnia books were some of my favorite books when I was a child; they're the first books I actively remember reading on my own, that made me go 'ah! this thing, reading, is worth doing, and not just a dull task set to me by adults!' (This goes to show how memory is imperfect: my parents say that the first book that they remember me reading, before Narnia, was The Borrowers. But they also say that I then went immediately looking for Borrowers behind light sockets which perhaps is why I do not remember reading it first.)
I also cannot remember a time that I did not know that the big lion was supposed to be Jesus. This did not really put me off Narnia or Aslan -- I had a lion named Aslan that was my favorite stuffed animal all through my childhood -- but I did have a vague sense As A Jewish Child that it was sort of embarrassing for everyone concerned, including the lion, C.S. Lewis, and me. My favorites were Silver Chair, Horse And His Boy, and Magician's Nephew. I reread The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe often simply because it was the first one; Prince Caspian didn't leave much of an impression on me and I only really liked Dawn Treader for Eustace's dragon sequence; The Last Battle filled me with deep secondhand embarrassment.
Rereading, I discover that I had great taste; Silver Chair simply stays winning! The experience of reading the first three Pevensie books is a constant hunt for little crumbs of individuality and personality in the Pevensie children beyond their Situations and how willing they are to listen to advice from Big Lion; Jill and Eustace and Puddleglum, by contrast, have personality coming out their ears. I cherish every one of them. The dark Arthuriana vibes when they meet the knight and his lady out riding ... the whole haunted sequence underground .... Puddleglum's Big Speech .... this is, was, and will ever be peak Narnia to me. For all the various -isms of Horse And His Boy, it feels really clear that Lewis leveled up in writing Character somewhere between Dawn Treader and Silver Chair; Shasta and Aravis and the horses and Polly and Diggory all just have a lot more chances to bonk against each other in interesting ways and show off who they are than the Pevensies ever do.
However! I also had bad taste. I did not appreciate Caspian as it ought to have been appreciated. Now, on my reread, it's by far my favorite of the Pevensie-forward texts -- and partly I suppose that, as a child, I could not fully have been expected to appreciate the whole 'we came back to a place we used to know and a life we used to have and even as we're remembering the people we used to be there we're realizing it's all fundamentally changed' melancholy of it all. It's good! The Pevensies also just get to do more on their own and use more of their own actual skills than they do in either The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, where they're mostly led around by the nose, or Dawn Treader, where they're mostly just having a nice boat trip. Just a soupcon of Robinsoniad in your Narnia, as a treat.
I also came away with the impression that Dawn Treader -- which really is primarily about Eustace and Reepicheep -- would be a better book if either Edmund or Lucy had gone on that trip but not both of them. The problem with Dawn Treader is that Edmund/Lucy/Caspian all kind of blob together in a cohort of being Just Sort Of Embarrassed By Eustace -- Edmund and Caspian particularly -- and don't get a lot to individuate them or give them Problems. Edmund and Caspian's dialogue is frequently almost interchangeable. But an Edmund who has Lucy's trials at the magician's tower and has to deal more with his existing/leftover issues from the first book is more interesting, and a Lucy who is stuck more in the middle of Caspian and Eustace without Edmund to over-balance the stakes is more interesting. I expect people will want me to fight me on this though because I know a lot of people have Dawn Treader as their favorite ....
Other miscellaneous observations:
- obviously I am aware of the Susan Problem but man, reading for Susan and Lucy through the later books it is clear how much the gradual tilting of the scales to Lucy Good/Susan Bad does a disservice to both characters. This is especially noticeable IMO in Horse And His Boy; it makes no sense for Lucy to go to war with a bow while Susan stays behind in context of anything we know about those characters from Lion and Caspian, it is so purely an exercise in Lucy Is The Designated Cool Girl Now. Anyway, what I really want now is an AU where Susan does marry out of Narnia sometime in the Golden Age and instead of becoming the One Who Never Comes Back becomes the One Who Never Leaves
- it is very very funny that every King or Queen of Narnia talks like Shakespeare except for Caspian, who talks, as noted above, like a British schoolboy. My Watsonian explanation for this is that the Pevensies were like 'well, kings talk like Shakespeare' and consciously developed this as an affectation whereas Caspian, who met the Pevensies as schoolchildren at a formative age, was like 'well, kings talk like British schoolchildren' and consciously developed it as an affectation --
- if you are on Bluesky you may have already seen me make this joke but it is so funny to be rolling along in Narnia pub order and have C.S. Lewis come careening back in for Magician's Nephew like 'WAIT! STOP!! I forgot to mention earlier but Jadis? She is hot. You know Lady Dimitrescu? yeah JUST like that. I just want to make sure we all know'
- Last Battle still fills me with secondhand embarrassment
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Date: 2025-04-17 01:11 am (UTC)You should totally write that!
A Horse and His Boy was always my favorite because of Aravis and Lasaraleen, but I've been afraid to reread it because of the -isms.
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Date: 2025-04-23 01:18 am (UTC)I was really excited to get to Aravis and Lasaraleen, and I do still love Aravis, but wow, Lewis is meaner to Lasaraleen than I remembered. My recollection was that this was an affectionate portrait and That Was Not Correct.
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Date: 2025-04-17 01:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-23 01:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-17 02:18 am (UTC)I also cannot remember a time that I did not know that the big lion was supposed to be Jesus.
I feel it is telling of my childhood understanding of comparative religion how much of the death and rebirth of Aslan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe I accepted as solstitial myth and how few of the Christian implications registered on me until some re-reads later. Obviously I had encountered Christianity because who in this country gets to miss it, but thanks to Lewis' modus operandi of throwing all the mythologies and literary influences that resonated with him into a blender and dumping the results out on the page, the layer of sun-slain-by-winter-rising-after-the-longest-night got there first and was so clear to me: thus if it was supposed to acclimate me to the concept of the Passion, sorry, Jack.
(By the time the Lamb came around in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, however, come on.)
Jill and Eustace and Puddleglum, by contrast, have personality coming out their ears. I cherish every one of them. The dark Arthuriana vibes when they meet the knight and his lady out riding ... the whole haunted sequence underground .... Puddleglum's Big Speech .... this is, was, and will ever be peak Narnia to me.
The Silver Chair was my light-years favorite as a child. It was superseded in adulthood by The Magician's Nephew on account of that book's head-snapping combination of pastiche Nesbit, full-throttle weird fiction, numinous creation myth, and one of the veneers of metafiction it took me decades to look at properly, plus some eerily beautiful images which Lewis intermittently kneecaps with his notion of comic timing. But I continue to love Puddleglum, in other predictable facts about me, and as a child the scenes of Rilian in the Silver Chair upset me incredibly.
the whole 'we came back to a place we used to know and a life we used to have and even as we're remembering the people we used to be there we're realizing it's all fundamentally changed' melancholy of it all.
The deep time of Prince Caspian is one of the parts of that book that has always stayed with me: the Pevensies' realization that Cair Paravel has been ruined a thousand years and they are haunting it like an Arthurian quartet in knee socks. I love also the waking of the trees and the breaking of the river-god's chains, although the last time it came up in conversation
I expect people will want me to fight me on this though because I know a lot of people have Dawn Treader as their favorite ....
Alas, I love the Lewtonesque island of dreams and the glass-shining eastern sea in which Lucy has her one moment of wordless connection with the sea-girl and the immram style of the whole thing. And although nothing more is ever done with it, I really love the reality check of Edmund's "You were only an ass, but I was a traitor." (I would read your Edmund at the magician's tower stat.) I can take or leave a bunch of the other bits.
Anyway, what I really want now is an AU where Susan does marry out of Narnia sometime in the Golden Age and instead of becoming the One Who Never Comes Back becomes the One Who Never Leaves
I'll read it.
- Last Battle still fills me with secondhand embarrassment
I unironically love the four-armed apparition of Tash even though it does an immense disservice to Assyrian apkallû and the astronomically apocalyptic image of Time squeezing out the red supergiant sun like an orange. Otherwise The Last Battle has always been somewhere from nonsensically confusing to dead to me, it contradicts its own series theologically, and I will kick Lewis in the shins over Emeth if I ever meet him in this life or its supposedly better substitute I don't believe in and actually find rather frightening as an ideal for all the inescapably obvious reasons.
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Date: 2025-04-23 12:33 pm (UTC)The Magician's Nephew was jostling at the heels for favorite at certain points of my childhood. I'd remembered Polly-and-Diggory Nesbit pastiche taking up a much greater percentage of the book than it does, and the creation sequence hardly at all; for all that I dislike Last Battle, the rhyming of Narnia's creation and destruction does hit in the pure imagery of it. Those two books are a thematic pair, and they're talking to each other in interesting and sometimes beautiful ways.
I love the idea of the Narnian Dionysiac pouring back out into England -- I feel really sure that the first and second books of Narnia were at least in part inspired by a really long wander through the British Museum looking wistfully at statuary and thinking about wild wonder as relegated to history; what if it didn't have to be, what if it could all come alive again?
You have hit on several of the bits that I also really love about Dawn Treader! There are two great Edmund moments in Dawn Treader, one is the wonderful line you call out and the other I really like is when they're all looking at the Star's Daughter and Edmund is like 'WAIT hang on a second. I have met beautiful magic women before. What if this one's evil?' He's wrong but I like that he worries.
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Date: 2025-04-17 02:28 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2025-04-23 11:41 am (UTC)(You are not wrong about Jewel/Tirian either.)
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Date: 2025-04-17 04:05 am (UTC)I concur with you about the value of The Silver Chair: I think it is the best narrative of the bunch, actually. Although I suspect that Puddleglum by himself would have been successful, and Eustace and Jill were just set-dressing by Aslan. It avoids the racism of The Horse and His Boy and the weird theology in The Last Battle.
Anyway, what I really want now is an AU where Susan does marry out of Narnia sometime in the Golden Age and instead of becoming the One Who Never Comes Back becomes the One Who Never Leaves
::cough::
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Date: 2025-04-17 07:10 am (UTC)w00t!
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Date: 2025-04-23 01:17 am (UTC)& WONDERFUL, thank you for linking!
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Date: 2025-04-17 05:12 am (UTC)Haven't reread Narnia in full in about eighteen years but these observations track. It feels completely unnecessary to say, based on who I am as a person, that The Silver Chair was everything to me, but I'll say it anyway.
The Last Battle was inexplicable and cringe even for my child self, who was used to reading Evangelical kid's lit. Theologically and ethically dubious and also just a bad book.
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Date: 2025-04-17 01:11 pm (UTC)Same. Well, I think it was less cringe then it was, "What is this nonsense? Why would you do this?" there's nothing to love in that book, from what I remember.
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Date: 2025-04-17 05:16 am (UTC)I read them fairly frequently in early elementary school, and I 100% did not know the lion was supposed to be Jesus. I had only the vaguest idea of what Jesus even was. (Bubbe, when asked: "A nice Jewish boy who loved his mother.") That was long enough ago that I remember very little except incredibly vivid image-memories of the lily-sea, the forest full of pothole lakes to other worlds, and a crystal-clear pool with a golden statue at the bottom. And I think, to be honest… maybe it is better that way.
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Date: 2025-04-23 11:51 am (UTC)Yeah, rereading the books was absolutely an experience of hitting evocative image after evocative image that I remembered word-perfect, connected with plot tissue that I did not remember at all. I don't at all regret rereading them, but sometimes indeed the images were enough!
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Date: 2025-04-17 06:07 am (UTC)Re: The Silver Chair, I mean, whoa, yeah. Eustace and Jill **do** have so much personality and gumption. And Puddleglum's Big Speech. It was something I latched onto like a limpet for--I think now--what it said about what you know by virtue of imagination. Imagination as more that whimsy or distraction.
And speaking of imagination, I love how vivid Lewis's imagination is in its many bits and pieces. The wood between the worlds. Bism. The dancing trees in Prince Caspian. The hot desert burning Shasta's bare feet. The toffee tree. And much more, but those are what come to mind just in the moment.
what I really want now is an AU where Susan does marry out of Narnia sometime in the Golden Age and instead of becoming the One Who Never Comes Back becomes the One Who Never Leaves --love this; what a great happily ever after!
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Date: 2025-04-17 01:13 pm (UTC)Most of my strongest memories of the series are just the incredible images he came up with. Lucy and the mermaid, the lily-sea, falling through the painting, the lantern in the middle of the woods, the statues melting, the Pevensies exploring their former home and their slow realization of what it is, etc. SO GOOD.
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Date: 2025-04-17 08:40 am (UTC)I never read Prince Caspian much because our copy was falling to pieces and it was awkward to handle. The Magician's Nephew was enjoyably batshit and The Last Battle was unenjoyably batshit.
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Date: 2025-04-23 12:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-17 09:41 am (UTC)My favourite thing about the books is the bit in Prince Caspian about how a thousand years have passed, and everything the kids knew has gone or mouldered or changed. It feels like a strangely adult theme but it's counterpoint to the bit in the previous where they return to England after, from their perspective, decades away. There's something really powerful about that idea, that nothing, not even magical adventures through the portal, lasts or goes unchanged. I don't know it fits into Lewis's cosmology, but I really like it. It also makes me think of the bit with Diggory as Narnia is created - where Aslan tells him, only you and I here know what grief is; in other words, only you and I know that nothing, not even this magical land we're creating today, will last forever.
Also enjoy that it is entirely unclear to me if Jadis and the Deplorable Word are a reference to the H-bomb. They should be. But Lewis was so wildly unworldly, who even knows.
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Date: 2025-04-17 11:58 am (UTC)That was not a happy moment. I can still remember that feeling viscerally. I can't see Lewis NOT having meant that.
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Date: 2025-04-23 12:11 pm (UTC)I feel one thousand percent sure sure that Jadis and the Deplorable Word are a reference to the H-bomb -- there's a part at the end where Aslan essentially looks at the audience and says BOY YOU GUYS SURE JUST INVENTED NUCLEAR WAR, HUH? MAYBE DON'T DO THAT. Which, one can't blame Lewis for being mad about it. (The friend I was reading with actually thinks everyone dying in the railway accident is also a metaphor for the H-bomb, which I think you have to make more of an argument for but absolutely can be argued.)
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Date: 2025-04-17 12:27 pm (UTC)(I got rid of way too many books back in the day and now that I've finally got my own roommate-free house, small as it is, I keep being like "Fuck, why do I no longer have X?" and then I go trawling for old '90s paperbacks on eBay.)
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Date: 2025-04-17 12:36 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2025-04-17 01:06 pm (UTC)I have been thinking for the last week or two that I want to reread them too, and I just downloaded TLtWatW onto my Kindle last night. It's fun to be (about to be) reading things at the same times others are!
what I really want now is an AU where Susan does marry out of Narnia sometime in the Golden Age and instead of becoming the One Who Never Comes Back becomes the One Who Never Leaves
I love this idea!
My Watsonian explanation for this is that the Pevensies were like 'well, kings talk like Shakespeare' and consciously developed this as an affectation whereas Caspian, who met the Pevensies as schoolchildren at a formative age, was like 'well, kings talk like British schoolchildren' and consciously developed it as an affectation --
This is SO FUN.
I am eager to see what I myself think on my reread; Silver Chair is definitely the one I'm looking most forward to!
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Date: 2025-04-19 01:39 pm (UTC)My entry into Narnia was The Horse and His Boy, bought at an airport shop because !horse!. I was relatively young. The Christian stuff passed me by, even with small-town-tiny-sect-born-again-fire-and-brimstone-preacher (no dancing, no playing cards type) grandparents and I'd certainly attended vacation bible schools with friends and gone to Sunday school with the grands.
At some point, I'd read an article discussing the Christianity connection and was able to write an essay that got me a scholarship offer to a university. Didn't attend that one though.
Years later, when reading LWW to my young twin boys, I was halfway through when one calmly stated, "the lion's going to sacrifice himself, right? It's obvious." We didn't bother to finish the book.
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Date: 2025-04-23 12:22 pm (UTC)