Revisiting His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass

Hi, everybody! I'm rereading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and blogging about each book. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

From the very beginning, The Golden Compass isn't coy about its relation to Narnia: less than ten pages into its first chapter, Lyra Belacqua, the novel's ostensibly orphaned 11-year-old protagonist, ducks into a wardrobe to avoid detection from adults after sneaking around an academic's labyrinthine lair, and you don't have to be a C. S. Lewis scholar to see this as a direct reference to the opening of Lewis's most enduring book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But it's not the cozy winter fantasy of Narnia that Lyra finds in the wardrobe; like Lucy Pevensie, Lyra, too is smart enough to not shut the wardrobe door completely, and through the crack she leaves, Lyra witnesses the attempted murder of her uncle [1], Lord Asriel. Welcome to His Dark Materials, guys.

The natural reaction to this opening gambit (or, at least, one of them) is, "This is children's literature?" And that's a fair question that becomes even fairer as the novel progresses and eventually involves not only dense mythology and a complicated web of characters but also castration, decently frank sexuality, and, my favorite, a vivid description of a bear's jaw being torn off and the "red tongue loll[ing] down, dripping over his open throat." And for the crowd who was already traumatized by the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, there's even a scary, evil monkey thrown into the mix. Toto, we're not in Narnia anymore.

Now, to be fair, what we mean by "children's literature" when we refer to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and what we mean by "children's literature" when we refer to The Golden Compass are two very different things, exacerbated, even, by the forty-five years that separate the two works' publication dates. Lewis clearly had young children in mind when writing Narnia, whereas Pullman is working with an intended audience who is, at youngest, pre-teen and therefore fits much more comfortably into YA literature, a genre nuance that didn't exist in Lewis's day. But, given the marketing and general library and bookstore classifications of both series, it's clear that both are working within the same broad literary milieu, and within that scene, Pullman is clearly trying to set himself apart in terms of what children should read [2]. This is, after all, a series in which the good guys are part of a concerted effort to overthrow the Judeo-Christian god. Pullman's not fooling around.

I didn't have a good place to mention it in the post, but
the trilogy is actually sort of a retelling of Milton's Paradise Lost.

The funny thing is that while all these specifics set up The Golden Compass pretty easily as an anti-Narnia, this generally cavalier sentiment toward genre conventions shares quite a bit with Lewis's conception of Narnia. Diligent readers of the blog may remember that in my entry on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe from the Narnia project, I mentioned that at the time Lewis was writing the first Narnia book, fantasy literature was highly unfashionable, especially for children, for whom the day's literary gatekeepers considered fantasy to be frivolous and even harmful [3]. Of course by 1995, fantasy was nowhere near as on-the-outs, especially for younger readers, for whom Narnia and a whole slew of subsequent fantasy novels that include the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, Lloyd Alexander, and Ursula K. Le Guin had practically formed the entire modern canon of children's lit. But even so, Pullman's specific approach to fantasy—resolutely grounded in a violent, uncompromising world with gigantic philosophical and theological underpinnings—lands him on the vanguard of boundary-pushing children's lit luminaries alongside other banned-book-list homies like Robert Cormier, Judy Blume, and, of course, that old Oxford scholar himself, C. S. Lewis. With these authors, and especially Lewis, Pullman shares a firm belief that children, under no circumstances, should be talked down to, particularly on life's most important truths. For Lewis, this means an unguarded discussion of the importance of imagination and myth and devotion in imbuing life with meaning. For Pullman... well, this is going to take some explaining.

Because I haven't even really talked about The Golden Compass at all yet, and hey, isn't that what this post is supposed to be about in the first place?

Put shortly—and I'll have to be short, because The Golden Compass is rich in plot and incident—the book is about a girl, the aforementioned Lyra, living in a world much like our own was 100-125 years ago, with a couple key differences: the most obvious being that every human being on the planet has what is called a dæmon, an animal companion that is basically the embodiment of that person's soul. Lyra's dæmon is named Pantalaimon, or Pan for short (thank goodness for nicknames). A second important difference from our world is that in Lyra's, the Protestant Reformation seems never to have happened, and so the Catholic Church, called the Magisterium [4], remains the sort of pan-European political and intellectual ruling body that it was in the Middle Ages and along with this, its tendency to suppress subversive information or scientific discoveries considered heretical. They also control the major universities, including Jordan College at Oxford, where Lyra grows up parentless, raised in a piecemeal fashion by the university scholars, many of whom practice "experimental theology" (basically, science but often more specifically particle physics).

Depending on your view of the Catholic Church, I suppose, the world of the novel that I just described may have come across as a dystopia, but that's not how Pullman presents it, especially not in the book's opening chapters, which are as filled with wonder as any of Lewis's fairy-tale gawking. This is, in fact, yet another way in which Pullman and Lewis seem in-step. In praising the series, many go right to the plotting and theme, which I will get to eventually (I promise); however, it's not recognized nearly enough just how rich Pullman's writing is nor how much of a joy it is to be immersed in the world he creates in this novel. In an interview in which he talks about the values he thinks are important, he first lists that "life is immensely valuable and this world is an extraordinarily beautiful place," and in The Golden Compass, that's no more apparent than in the Jordan College chapters, where Lyra spends her time exploring all the strange and wonderful corners of the world presented before her with a curiosity and no-nonsense bravery that, given Jill Pole and Aravis and the older iterations of Lucy, it seems like C. S. Lewis would have found admirable in a protagonist as well. And even beyond the novel's opening, that sense of wonder never truly goes away; large portions of the book, while driven by a meticulousness in world-building that feels very Tolkien, contain a love of just sitting back and watching cool fantasy creations that feels very much in-step with what Lewis is doing with a lot of Narnia.

So then what's up with all this talk of His Dark Materials being the anti-Narnia?

Well, the novel doesn't stop there. And that's crucial. Remember that attempted murder? Buckle up, because it gets a little hectic.

Lord Asriel, whom Lyra knows as her uncle (but will eventually find out is her father, who left her for adventure), is one of these "experimental theologians," and what he's researching is Dust, a new elementary particle that the Church—and thus mainstream scholarship—views with intense suspicion, given that (as we find out at the end of the book [5]) it seems Dust is the physical evidence of Original Sin. His work gets him labeled as a heretic, hence the attempted murder (which he survives thanks to Lyra's warning), and eventually, he travels to the far reaches of the North to continue his research. Not too long afterward in novel time, one of Lyra's dear friends, Roger, disappears, the latest in a long string of missing children whom have been taken by the General Oblation Board ("Gobblers," for short), an organization formed by the Magisterium to further research the effects of Dust on children. So under the care of Ms. Coulter (a woman Lyra finds out later to be her mother and whose demon also happens to be the scary monkey I warned all y'all about), Lyra heads north to find both Lord Asriel and Roger. I specify these plot points not just because they're the major narrative of the novel but also because they are key to understanding what Pullman is doing with his novel. Because no sooner have we experienced the wonder of the world's fantasy are we told that it is fundamentally corrupt. This is a world in which information is not just suppressed but its bearers are murdered; this is a world in which the primary governing body of the land kidnaps children and subjects them to involuntary experiments; this is a world in which parents abandon their children and only reveal their true identity under duress. This world is not cozy, and its awe mixes quickly with horror.

In a sense, this is similar to the Narnia that Lucy and Edmund first find in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which is, you'll remember, ruled by a wicked queen who has fundamentally corrupted this world that Lucy initially finds so wondrous; this queen also manipulates children. The same is also true in Prince Caspian and, to some extent, The Last Battle, all of which present corrupted iterations of Narnia. However, The Golden Compass handles this device to entirely different effect. In the Narnia stories, the protagonists are informed promptly of the evil in charge of the land and of the pure Narnia to be revealed once that evil is deposed: after a brief attempt at kidnapping, Tumnus spills the beans about a land where it is "always winter and never Christmas" [6]; shortly after meeting the returning Pevensies, Trumpkin tells the former Narnian royalty all about the treasonous Telmarines; and in The Last Battle, the narrator himself shows us Shift's corruption of Aslan as we see his whole plan unfold before our eyes. In short, the characters always know something is wrong with the world. In Lyra's case, though, knowing the full extent of everything that is wrong with the world is the destination, not the starting point. That changes everything.

The Golden Compass begins with the first hint of the world's darkness, the attempted murder of Asriel, which suggests that the institution she has relied most on growing up—the scholars at the college and, by extension, the Church itself—is not nearly so benevolent as she had been led to believe. And that's only the start of it. The rest of the book is, among other things, a sequence of attempts by Lyra to recontextualize her world within the new and damning information she finds about her former safe places, only to have to readjust again as new information knocks that new context askew. After leaving the college, Lyra aligns herself with her mother, Ms. Coulter, who at first seems to offer Lyra a new life outside the authority of the college until Lyra learns that she is one of the chief authorities at the Oblation Board. Again, a trusted figure having turned out nefarious, Lyra runs, this time assuming that it is her father, Asriel, with whom she must align herself. But even this turns to ash when at the book's end, Lyra finally finds her father, whom she has assumed to be the virtuous opposition to the Church's horrors, and, in one of the most horrifying passages of all time in children's literature [7], watches him murder Roger in one of his experiments. For a final time, Lyra learns that something she trusted to be good in this world is, in fact, a lie.

Imagine Lyra like this, only without a beard.

That's what Lyra does the entire book: learn. On a traditional dramatic metric, she's actually rather unengaging as a protagonist; her stiff-upper-lipness that makes her such an easy vessel for an adventure narrative also imbues her with a blankness that makes her seem distant and confoundingly accepting of new environments, often with a cheerful shrug that betrays an empty emotional landscape [8]. But despite the emotionally distressing situations she's put through, it's not emotional dramatics that form her most dramatic journey throughout the book; no, this is a book about the process of learning about the world, about acquiring information piece by piece until the binders every child grows up with are pushed away and the universe can be viewed in wider and wider panorama. Early in the book, Lyra is given (by a college scholar, no less) an alethiometer [9], a fantastic device of which the scholar simply says, "It tells you the truth." What this turns out to be is something of a fortune-telling tool, wherein Lyra eventually learns to ask it questions and then received cryptic answers. It is, in short, a tool for harvesting information, for learning. And this is the great narrative of the novel: of one girl's quest to find the truth: the truth of her parents' identities as ambassadors of the Church (her mother) and uninhibited Science (her father), the truth that the Church (and by extension her mother) is a cruel mechanism that tortures children in the name of virtue, the truth that Science (and by extension her father) exploits human life as a mere means to a higher end, the truth that those in charge of the world are capricious, selfish, and cruel. It is the truth of the cavernous gap between "should" and "is"—"Fathers are supposed to love their daughters, en't they? You don't love me," Lyra tells Asriel near the novel's end, and his heartbreaking reply is of the same brutal pragmatism that leads him to kill Roger: "If you're going to be sentimental, I shan't waste time talking to you." There are the ideals we tell children, and then there are the realities by which powerful adults act.

The Golden Compass is the story of a girl whose light, awe-struck worldview is slowly and brutally pounded out of her by cruelty and betrayal that undermines her beliefs again and again, until at last she must come to grips with the fact that every single institution she has known in her pre-adventure life is fundamentally rotten. This is the true anti-Narnian sensibility of this first book in His Dark Materials. C. S. Lewis, for all his swipes at tyrants and progressive educators and religious frauds, is ultimately affirming of the institutions controlling the world provided they are the right institutions, insisting that those right ones always exist, even if temporarily buried beneath evil. And so his protagonists' jobs are almost to find that existing righteousness that undergirds the mechanisms of the universe.

The Chronicles of Narnia is a collection of stories about the basking in the imaginative beauty of the various ways in which that righteousness manifests itself and overcomes darkness. These are stories that affirm the basic wisdom in the awestruck perspective of a child toward the world. They are, basically, myths—and I don't mean that in the sense that they are false or lies but in the way that Lewis would have meant it: stories that are about an ineffable beauty and deep, ancient order that supports reality. But The Golden Compass, despite its pileup of religious and mythological allusions, is not myth. By grounding its story in Lyra's gradual accumulation of knowledge as she navigates the adult world, the book becomes a coming-of-age tale, wherein its protagonist must grow out of childhood's naivety in order to come to grips with a previously unknown adult world. There are happy or even wistful coming-of-age narratives, but The Golden Compass is not one of them. It is deeply cynical about the world and the people who run it, and ultimately, that is what Pullman's narrative here is about.

As distressing as that is, I'm not here to tell you that Pullman is wrong. Neither is Lewis, I don't think—at least in how he characterizes the fundamental fabric of the universe, Lewis is right; there is a mystic spirituality present in the world's beauty that I can only attribute to a divine mover. But when it comes to actually describing the day-to-day experiences of humanity in total, Pullman is spot-on about the institutions built atop that metaphysical framework. I defy anyone to name me a large national or religious governing body that has not been responsible for unquantifiable reservoirs of human suffering, one that does not exploit human life for its own gain. We don't even need to get into secular government here [10], since that doesn't seem to be of much concern to Pullman's narrative. We can just look at religious organizations, the big villain in this installment, and not even have to go that far. We don't even have to look back to the pre-Reformation Catholic Church that The Golden Compass evokes. Right there on eye level is the decades-long—perhaps centuries-long—Catholic conspiracy to protect priests who raped children. That's not a Pullman-invented villain; that's real life. And lest we Protestants get feeling too high-and-mighty about that, let's remember that the Southern Baptist Convention—the closest America has to a religious government—exists only because a large enough body of Christians believed that the enslavement of an entire race was a God-given mandate, to mention nothing of how the trauma of decades of LGBT youths at gay conversion camps rests on our hands like Lady Macbeth's spot.

And while we're at it, let's talk about the specific experiment that the Oblation Board performed on the children in the book. What the Magisterium has found is that Dust (Original Sin, remember) only begins to accumulate on humans once they hit puberty, and in this world, puberty happens when a child's dæmon, which is able to change shapes throughout childhood, settles on a permanent form. So what the Oblation Board does, in order to prevent the accumulation of Dust, is use a special scalpel to cut the link between child and dæmon, an operation that, when it doesn't kill children outright, leaves them sick and essentially lobotomized, but without Dust (hurray?). So afraid is the Church of sin that it mutilates children in the hopes of eradicating it [11]. They have basically castrated children en masse, and before you think that's an extreme extrapolation for me to make, it's an extrapolation that the book itself makes, because apparently like the real-life Catholic Church way back when, the Magisterium in this world has also castrated children to serve as eunuchs in the choir. And again, Protestants, we're not off-the-hook either: genital mutilation as a way of preventing "sin" has happened on our side of the Reformation, too, even as recently as the 20th century.

Philip Pullman, an ardent atheist, has said in interviews that he believes that Christianity is irredeemable, and while I don't share that view (I am with C. S. Lewis in believing in redemption as part of that fundamental fabric of the universe), it's impossible for me to shake off the critique of large religious institutions presented in the book [12]. The horrifying coming-of-age that Lyra experiences is not based in some fantasy hypothetical; it's something that real children in real life must come to grips with.

So, bringing this back to the question I posed forever ago: this is children's literature? And I say why not. Every child must, one day, come of age, and the realization that the adult world is more complicated and painful than previously assumed is as universal a coming-of-age experience as acne. Maybe not four- and five-year-olds, for whom I doubt this book would make sense anyway, but people Lyra's age? Older? Why not? Because it's bad to learn about these things? Innocence is not something you choose to keep except with great privilege, and after a certain point in one's life, even that becomes a liability. There is room in the world for both the myth-makers and the comings-of-age, the Lewises and the Pullmans. Both are vitally important.

I worry that I've made The Golden Compass out to be some sort of horrid, unpleasant read, but if you have not read it and somehow made it to the end of this blog post, I both commend you and beg you to give the book a read. It's exciting, elegant, and riveting, and Pullman is one of the best prose stylists that children's lit has ever seen. And that sense of wonder and awe I talked about up the post never really goes away, even when the novel is at its darkest. As antithetical as it may seem to the overall bleak sentiments of the themes, Pullman's belief that the "world is an extraordinarily beautiful place" comes through loud and clear, both in his lyrical writing and in the way the characters constantly find joy despite the horrors. I've framed the story's themes very negatively here to prove a point, but a more positive way to say it is that it's a story about how love and beauty are found not in the traditional institutions of social order but in unexpected corners, at the fringes of society among the outcasts and the poor, in the small, unobtrusive moments between the furtive lunges for power that motivate society. In a very un-Lewis-like way, it is still a story about beauty, and how it becomes even so much more achingly beautiful within a world that does not regard it as worthwhile.

But more on that next time, in The Subtle Knife. See you then!

EDIT: Read the next entry, on The Subtle Knife, here.


1] Well, technically her father—see plot synopsis.

2] It's also worth noting that the broadening of the scope of children's lit has been a bit of a passion of Pullman's in his personal life as well, as demonstrated by his 2008 campaign against labeling children's books with suggested ages and by his 2014 campaign to remove labels suggesting specific genders for books. He's said, "I'm against anything, from age-ranging to pinking and blueing, whose effect is to shut the door in the face of children who might enjoy coming in."

3] Interestingly, Philip Pullman insists on calling His Dark Materials "stark realism," which, for a series that includes prophecies, talking animals, and flying witches, is definitely metaphor. But it shows you where his sympathies lie—and for what it's worth, most of Pullman's other work is a bit more realistic. It at least doesn't involve magic (although Ruby in the Smoke, the first book in his other popular series [a sequence of Victorian-era mysteries], the protagonist does solve the mystery by smoking opium, so...).

4] Wikipedia: "The magisterium of the Catholic Church is the church's authority or office to establish its own authentic teachings." This is the kind of series that rewards extensive Wikipedia-ing.

5] In a scene that is absolutely thrilling, by the way. People often roll their eyes at info-dump scenes in speculative lit (think the Architect scene in The Matrix Reloaded), but this scene, which is basically just a long lecture given by Asriel, lights the pages on fire. It helps that the particular info given—a mix of philosophy, theology, quantum physics, and actual Bible verses modified to work within Lyra's world—is as thrilling an intellectual voyage as it is the resolution to several ongoing mysteries in the novel.

6] Still one of the most chilling phrases in the English language.

7] I'm really not kidding—the final two chapters of this book are harrowing and brutal in ways that literature, children's or otherwise, very rarely is.

8] The most troubling of which is in the sequence in which Lyra herself is captured by the Gobblers and put into their childcare facility, which the book tells us Lyra "soon found herself enjoying."

9] Which, due to its appearance in the book's marketing, many have mistakenly assumed to be the "golden compass" of the book's title. The title is actually an allusion to the mythological object God supposedly used to draw the spheres of the universe—not a compass that tells you cardinal directions, of course, but one of those hinged geometric tools with the point at one end and the pencil at the other.

10] Though goodness, we could spend days listing off the atrocities committed on behalf of those institutions alone.

11] Instead of, I don't know, relying on the grace of Christ to deal with sin, like it says in the Bible. Interestingly (I'll almost definitely return to this point in a later blog post), Jesus is not mentioned once in the entire His Dark Materials trilogy.

12] And, to be frank, is one of the main reasons I have not become Catholic or Anglican, instead remaining with small, nondenominational church bodies.

Mini-Reviews for June 5 - 11, 2017

Hurray for reviews!

Movies

XX (2017)

It's hard to figure out if it's to the movie's benefit or detriment that it organizes its four short films in order of descending quality: the first two are, respectively, unnerving and uneasily hilarious, while the second two are, again respectively, slight and go-nowhere. Maybe the bigger problem is that the film's shorts only have a 50 percent success rate (though the stop-motion interludes are gloriously creepy and Jan-Švankmajer-esque). At least the one directed by Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent, aka the reason I watched this to begin with) is one of the good ones. Grade: B-

The Handmaiden (아가씨) (2016)

For a nearly pornographic movie about porn, it's classier than you'd think. The cinematic craft displayed here is impeccable, as is the acting—both of which do the film the fantastic favor of treating the story (a wild, twisty ride adapted from a novel but transformed significantly, I'm led to believe) in the heightened, almost comedic meter of high pulp. Park Chan-Wook (Oldboy, Stoker) is, of course, a natural fit here, his gonzo, energetic directing style played back just slightly enough that it doesn't feel anachronistic within its pre-WWII Korea setting. There are only two missteps, neither of them minor but neither movie-ruining, either. The first concerns the ending, which foregoes the delightful POV manipulation of the first 2/3 of the film and instead barrels toward its finish rather inelegantly; the second is the sex scenes. One (or two, depending on how we're framing this discussion--if you've seen the movie, you know what I mean) is a rather brilliant evocation of POV and conflicting emotional registers while at the same time being a kind of skeevy staging of lesbian characters within a hetero-male director's fantasy—they're literally re-enacting porn, which is an interesting point about the psycho-sexual effects of porn, but they're still re-enacting porn directed by a straight male); the other is just as skeevy and lacks that fascinating perspective angle. So the movie isn't perfect; but that doesn't keep it from being enrapturing otherwise. Grade: A-

Shadowlands (1993)

A warm dramatization of the relationship between C.S. Lewis and his wife, Joy Davidman, whose death led to Lewis's writing of A Grief Observed, as piercing and timeless a wail of grief as has ever been put to the page. Knowing films of this ilk—that being the inspirational weepy—I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and for there to be some hackneyed epilogue that would bring artificial uplift to this story, but astoundingly, none such moment exists. The film ends with Lewis, wracked by the thought of God as a sadist, weeping as both he and his step-son cry that they miss Joy terribly. It is, for once, a movie about death that's as respectful of grief as it is of the later healing. Grade: B+

Misery (1990)

Back when both Rob Reiner movies and Stephen King adaptations were still good (and often the same thing), something like Misery might have been more of an expected treat than the delight that it is to see it now in 2017. It streamlines one of Stephen King's best (look down the post, yo!) down to its core pieces, losing a tad bit of the richness of the novel but not losing an ounce of its vicious terror or pulp glory. And how about Kathy Bates? It's the only performance for which she's won an Oscar for, and that's absolutely right. There are some actors who only have one great performance in them, that one it seems that they were born to play, and as much as I like pieces of the rest of her career, especially her role in Shadows and Fog, which she played immediately following her role here, this is it, my friends. There's a reason why it's Bates and not an uncharacteristically forgettable James Caan or even the expectedly jovial Richard Farnsworth who gets plastered all over this film's marketing and iconography. It's her movie. Grade: A-

Au revoir les enfants (1987)

You don't set an easy-going boarding-school dramedy in occupied France during WWII just for kicks and giggles, so it's no surprise when the other shoe drops and Au revoir les enfants becomes a WWII drama. But lord, the specific way in which this movie tumbles into the broader horrors of its era is a knife to the gut, twisted mercilessly in its final minutes by the way it interrogates the culpability of small actions and the ramifications of even the most minor ways one can be complicit in evil. The narrator (director Louis Malle, whose childhood memories form the basis for the film) says he will never forget what happens here; neither will you. Grade: A



Television

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Season 3 (2017)
It's Kimmy's weakest season yet—the moment-to-moment dialogue is still a riot, but a lot of the recurring jokes (the weird robot stuff, Titus's cruise) don't land consistently. The plotting, too, is haphazard, already treading on that late-period 30 Rock crutch of making up for the lack of forward momentum with doubled-down absurdity. It's not so much that nothing happens, or that characters don't grow; the show has subtly moved Kimmy into being the wisest and most-competent of the main ensemble, and while considering that ensemble, that's might sound backhanded, it's a nice, subtle touch of growth for her. No, the problem is more that the show doesn't seem to know what to do with the ways the characters are changing: not just Kimmy but also Titus looking for new boyfriends, Jacqueline's quest to change the Redskins' name, Lillian's new love interest—these are all plots that bear fruit, but frequently, they also stagnate and meander. This is just most apparent with Kimmy, where it's becoming clear that the show increasingly doesn't know how to deal with the gravity of her traumatic background within the context of its increasingly silly universe. That's not to say the series isn't still enjoyable, though. As I've already said, the dialogue is still great, and there are a couple episodes (notably, a late-season heist parody) that rank among the show's finest. It's only natural for shows, even good ones, to meander after a while, I guess. Grade: B

Books

Misery by Stephen King (1987)
It's not a coincidence that one of King's best is handily under 400 pages. There is exactly the right amount of novel here, and the result is a book that capitalizes on King's strengths while being virtually free of every weakness—it even lands the ending, by golly! Misery is the sort of grimy, psychologically twisty thriller King specializes in when he's not in world-conquering mode, executed to near perfection. What's even more impressive is the rich metaphoric depth here: Annie Wilkes and Paul Sheldon are as compelling of characters as King has ever written, made even more potent by their archetypal and symbolic significance. On Writing is famously King's great book about writing, but Misery might be the better one. Grade: A


Music

Patti Smith - Horses (1975)
Like some mad-scientist fusion of a punk rocker with a beat poet, Patti Smith exploded onto the mid-'70s New York CBGB-adjacent scene, taking no prisoners and leaving no earth unscorched. Horses is a masterpiece that captures the spirit of NYC punk in all it's multifaceted, sonically adventurous glory. From the rock-'n-rolling "Gloria" (one of the all-time great rock covers) to the dissonant rapture of "Birdland" to "Land"'s epic rock-and-soul medley, this is the sound of rock artifacts being repurposed into harsh and exciting architecture. Grade: A

Revisiting Narna: The Last Battle

Hi, everybody! This summer, I'm rereading C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and blogging about each book. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

You can read the post on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe here.

You can read the post on Prince Caspian here.

You can read the post on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader here.

You can read the post on The Silver Chair here. 

You can read the post on The Horse and His Boy here. 

You can read the post on The Magician's Nephew here.

How in the world do you end a long-running fantasy series? If you're J. K. Rowling, you rely on epic confrontations and grand-unification theories; if you're J. R. R. Tolkien[1], you rely on epic confrontations and an extended denouement; if you're Lloyd Alexander, you basically do the Tolkien thing with about 5% of the denouement; if you're George R. R. Martin, you just wait for the sweet sleep of death to free you of the burden of even finishing your series. And if you're C. S. Lewis, you just bring on the end the friggin' world.

Let's be fair here. At the time C. S. Lewis was writing The Last Battle, the seventh and final entry in his Chronicles of Narnia series, there were very few precedents for such a thing, given that fantasy novels of the kind Lewis was writing (youthful heroes, British values, more-or-less cohesive world-building) were not nearly so common then as they are now, and those books that did exist tended to be either standalone novels or never-ending serials, neither of which have to deal with the hassles of multi-book conclusions. We have to remember that in 1956, when The Last Battle hit bookshelves, J. K. Rowling was still eight years away from even being conceived, and the final volume of The Lord of the Rings had only just been released a year earlier (and to only modest success at that), meaning that the world was still about a decade away from the modern conception of a "fantasy series" as heralded by the explosion of fantasy literature influenced by LotR's mid-to-late-'60s boom in popularity. Lewis was pretty much flying blind.

But all that's just history. What about now, in 2015? Is The Last Battle a fitting conclusion for The Chronicles of Narnia? Well, despite the book's initially positive reception (it won the Carnegie Medal, after all), the popular consensus among modern readers is that no, it is not. This book has had a precipitous fall from grace, thanks not only to high-profile voices like Philip Pullman and Neil Gaiman criticizing it but also a generation of readers more attuned to modern fantasy conventions and less to Lewis's never-more-blatant parallels to Christian theology. As for myself, my answer is a bit more complicated than a simple yes/no, though I will say upfront that I do not think Lewis ended on the series's strongest note. In fact, for reasons I'll hopefully explain in more detail as this post continues, I'd call The Last Battle the second-weakest Narnia book, ahead of only Prince Caspian. But even beyond issues of good and bad, one thing I know for sure after reading The Last Battle again for the first time in over a decade is that this book is a weird, weird end for the Narnia books.

Here's the plot in a nutshell: Hundreds of years after the events of The Silver Chair (in Narnian years, at least), an ape named Shift and a donkey named Puzzle find a lion skin out in the Western Waste of Narnia. Shift hatches a plan to dress up Puzzle in the lion's skin and convince other Narnians that he's Aslan, and Puzzle, being kind of a pushover and easily confused, reluctantly goes along with the scheme. Soon, Shift has succeeded in convincing quite a few Narnians that he is Aslan's first in command, and with this newfound power (under what is ostensibly Aslan's orders), he allies himself with the Calormenes and allows Calormene mercenaries into Narnia to chop down the land's trees, enslave the land's animals, and do all sorts of dreadful things. This attracts the attention of Narnia's king, Tirian (who is something like Caspian's great-great-great-great-great grandson), and, enraged, he kills several Calormenes, which gets him captured. Tirian sees that the ape has bullied many of the Narnians into submission to "Aslan's" orders—the Narnians long to see Aslan (who has been long-absent from the land), but they are confused by the brutality of his apparent orders. Tirian is powerless to aide these creatures, and in despair, he calls out to Aslan and the strange children who he has heard have helped Narnia in the past. His cry is answered a moment later when Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole appear out of nowhere and free him of his bonds. With the help of Scrubb and Pole, Tirian plans to retake Narnia from the Calormenes and Shift; however, things start to look pretty bleak when Shift and the Calormenes start trying to tell the Narnians that Aslan and the demonic Calormene god Tash are, in fact, one and the same god, a declaration which causes Tash himself to appear and take up residence in the stable. Shift begins throwing rebels into the stable for Tash to devour, and this continues until Tirian, Scrubb, and Pole arrive and unite the Narnians against the Calormenes. A huge battle ensues in front of the stable, during which Shift and several others are eaten by Tash. Eventually, though, the Narnians are overwhelmed by Calormene reinforcements and forced into the stable themselves. However, once inside, they find themselves not in a stable but in a sunny field along with the Pevensie children (sans Susan[2]) from the earlier Narnia books and Digory and Polly (now quite elderly) from The Magician's Nephew. Then Aslan appears and, looking out at the nighttime outside the stable, makes all the stars fall out of the sky and puts the sun out and basically ends the world. As it turns out, the field that our heroes find themselves in is heaven (the English characters apparently died in a train crash in their own world), and once they run around for a while, they find pretty much every good character from the other books just chilling in a garden. And that's the end of The Chronicles of Narnia.

That's great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes and airplanes...

I'm in no place to evaluate how shocking the end of this book is, given that I read it first when I was around six years old and had read so few books that I had little conception of what was standard and nonstandard in stories (thus surprises didn't phase me much), but I imagine that any adult reading that plot synopsis might have to do a double take on those last three sentences. Yes, The Chronicles of Narnia end with Narnia itself being plunged into an eternal, cold nothingness, and all of Aslan's friends dead and living happily ever after in heaven. I suppose it's a reasonable assumption that Lewis would follow his Christian parallels in Narnia to their logical conclusion by having the characters eventually make it to the afterlife, but did anyone actually think Lewis would go full-on Revelation with this last book? I don't know for sure, but in hindsight, it seems like a mighty strange, mighty bold move to make.

But "strange" does not necessarily equal "bad"; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a very strange book, and it's nowhere close to being a bad one. I'm not even saying that "strange" equals "bad" in this particular instance. So my head-shaking at that ending doesn't get us any closer to answering my original question of whether this book works or not as an ending. What my head-shaking is, though, is an admission that this book is devilishly hard to talk about in any cohesive way, and a big part of that has to do with how Lewis seems to kind of punt in the book's last sixty pages. So maybe it would be easier to begin by answering the much smaller question of whether or not this book is any good on its own, regardless of how it works as a series finale. To break that question into even smaller chunks, I'm going to divide that evaluation into a few sub-topics that have cropped up a lot in the posts for the other books and deal with each of those one at a time. So hang with me; like The Last Battle itself, this post is going to be a strange, disjointed ride.

Plot
Alright, so here's the first sub-topic: plot. Does The Last Battle work on a purely story level? The short answer: yes, until it doesn't. I've made no secret of the fact that I think the plots are often the least compelling, least functional part of the Narnia books. Of all seven books, the only ones I would say contain good plots are The Magician's Nephew and The Silver Chair (and maybe, if you press me, The Horse and His Boy); the rest of the books tend to favor image and anecdote over consistent storytelling. Actually, for a while, The Last Battle does a much better job of plot than most of its brothers, and that's partially to do with the fact that it jettisons most of Lewis's trademark meandering wonder in favor of a relatively mean, lean, propulsive story. The threat of Shift and the Calormenes taking over Narnia by means of a false Aslan is far and away the most dramatically urgent story the entire series tells, and for a good chunk of its pages, The Last Battle is a page-turner like no other Narnia book can claim to be, filled with action and intrigue, suspense and disguises. It's genuinely tense when Tirian is captured, and it's genuinely exciting when Tirian and Pole and Scrubb sneak around Narnia forming their retaliation against the Calormenes. The Last Battle gets closer to being a thriller than any other book in the series.

It helps that The Last Battle also tells the darkest story of all the Narnia books; we've see Narnia under siege before, but it's never been under attack from both within (Shift) and without (Calormen), and that's not even mentioning the violence—seriously, there is so much killing in The Last Battle, both by the enemies (the death of a Dryad early on in the book is particularly chilling) and our heroes (so many dead Calormenes...). I tend to think that this violence is a necessary device for the kind of bleak story Lewis is telling, but it's startling nonetheless—all the more so becuase Lewis is savvy enough to know that whimsy or humor[3] would disrupt the thick dread and elegiac tone that hangs over the novel. With a few exceptions like Digory's mother, the Narnia books tend to be fleet-of-foot in tone and storytelling, but Lewis shows here that he knows how to get heavy when the story calls for it. The first few words, "In the last days of Narnia," open the book with a haunting note of finality and apprehension; the same goes for Tirian, whom the book introduces simply as "the last of the kings of Narnia." This is the end.

And yet, as much as those words seem to be an attempt to prepare us for the novel's apocalyptic climax, they just don't. On a storytelling level, Aslan has always been a problematic device, too often lending himself as a tidy machine to save the day or motivate characters in otherwise unnatural ways, and his appearance at the end of The Last Battle is far and away the most egregious of these instances. Look, I know that a large part of the plot (and the righteous-anger-fueled momentum) hinges on their being a false Aslan, so it makes sense that the real Aslan is going to have to show up in the flesh sooner or later. But the way he shows up makes absolutely no sense on a plot level. Once he appears, he does nothing to directly confront the false Aslan or the battle with the Calormenes or Narnia's political trouble or any of the other issues that have fueled the book's plot engine up to that point; he simply calls for the end of the world, and that's the end of that. It's dramatically unsatisfying because it doesn't resolve the ongoing conflicts; it merely changes the rules. In a sense, it doesn't matter that the world ends, because the prospect of the world ending was not a dramatic question we were invested in for the first three quarters of the novel. As a result, the book's final sixty-ish pages are actually kind of boring. I don't care that our characters can swim up waterfalls or run without stopping in heaven; I wanted a conclusion that somehow connected to the plot of the novel's first one hundred and sixty pages.

Characters
Alright, next topic. Historically, Narnia books have fared a little better with characters than with plot, and there are gleaming examples throughout the series of wonderful gems of characters—Eustace, Uncle Andrew, Edmund, Lucy, Jill, Aravis, etc. But even then, most of the books have struggled to keep interesting character development at the forefront; Edmund's arc in LWW ends well before the book's conclusion, to name one example. I'm afraid that The Last Battle doesn't do much better with characters than the rest of the series, although there are the usual exceptions throughout. On the whole, the problem is that the characters here—at least, the ones we spend the most time with—are just kind of boring. Not really boring (the Peter and Susan still hold the record there), but just boring enough that you never really care for them all that much. Eustace and Jill are back at the center of this novel, which would be a good sign except that they have become, like most people who are on their second trip to Narnia, a little bit too agreeable. The great thing about their relationship in The Silver Chair is the thorniness that surrounds their friendly affection for one another; unfortunately, in The Last Battle, most of their bickering has gone the way of Edmund's petulance: barely there.

King Tirian, looking elegiac as ever

King Tirian, the book's de-facto protagonist (we spend more time with him than anyone else), is slightly better, although he's his own kind of blandness—a sort of mashup of nobility, honor, and self-seriousness that isn't all that interesting either. What makes him better, though, is that there are moments of much more complex character work: by and large, he's the emotional core of all the "This is the end" doom and gloom, and his laments about the downfall of Narnia under his rule have a deep, almost classical-tragedy pathos to them. He also has some moments (though these are few and far between) where he tries to wrestle with some rough theological questions as a result of the false Aslan. The "he's not a tame lion" line from LWW becomes a kind of mantra in this book, and at times, Tirian comes to grips with the terror of that phrase: Aslan is capable of anything, so what if he decides to be cruel and turn his back on Narnia? However, these moments largely fade away once Jill and Eustace show up, and in the end, they don't have much long-term weight.

That's a big problem, actually; you'd think that in a plot that involves a doppelganger for someone as central to Narnian identity as Aslan, you'd have tons of interesting, unique dramatic conflicts between characters pop up as a result of their own feelings toward the lion (and as I said, such moments exist in the novel), but by the end, all the characters fall into two basic camps: those who are for Narnia and those who are against it, and that takes away a lot of the dramatic possibility and interesting character development that could have come out of an idea as volatile as a false Aslan. That's a big part of why our protagonists are so boring: instead of having interesting, personal desires, they are all animated by the same "let's save Narnia" motive, which doesn't provide many dramatic fireworks.

But even with the kind of boring duality that the book eventually settles into, we still get a few interesting character moments. I've already named a few involving Tirian, but I also want to call attention to the story's villain, Shift, who ranks among the best of the Narnian villains. With this ape, Lewis seems to have split the difference between the insecure bullies of previous books (think Edmund, Eustace, Uncle Andrew) and the cruel sadism of the White Witch, and the result is one diabolical, pathetic dude. He's the kind of guy you just love to hate; whenever he opens his mouth, he's guaranteed to say something interesting. In general, though, The Last Battle struggles with the same inconsistencies of character that the rest of the books do.

Fantasy
This is probably the biggest disappointment in The Last Battle. Throughout the Narnia books, one thing you can reliably count on to brighten up the novel is C. S. Lewis's vivid imagination for fantasy. More than anything else (including, arguably, his passion for Christian theology), Lewis seems to have envisioned the Narnia books as joyous excursions into the imagination. It doesn't matter that the books don't always have internal consistency or even compelling characters, provided that they indulge the pure aesthetics of fairy-tale storytelling—just look at my own favorite, Dawn Treader, which, except for Eustace's arc, has almost no meaningful character work or plot but is bursting at the seams with fantasy ideas.

However, The Last Battle is a Narnia book that seems to run a little dry on fantasy ideas. Some of this seems to be by design; with the focus on Shift's political machinations and on the heroes' undercover stealth, magic and vibrant fantasy imagery would have been a distraction. Also, with Aslan's long absence, a lack of magic seems appropriate; it's a lot easier to believe in fake magic (i.e. Puzzle in a lion skin) when the real magic is only a distant memory. "That sort of thing doesn't happen now," Tirian says at one point, and it's poignant and even compelling how right he seems to be. That's good. Still, the presence of more awe-inspiring things in the story is something I missed a lot when reading the book.

This is Tash. Oh yeah.

"But wait!" you might be thinking. "What about Tash? And the end of the world? Isn't that all pretty fantastic?" And yes, on one level, it is. Tash is a pretty cool, even scary creation (made even better by Pauline Baynes's amazing illustrations), and the end of the world lends itself to a few amazing fantasy images: the shower of stars, for example, or my favorite, when Father Time takes the sun and squeezes it out "as you would squeeze an orange." That's all neat. But on the other hand—well, this will be easier to explain in the next section. So without further ado...

Themes
Oh boy, does The Last Battle have some themes. And unlike most of the other books in the series, Lewis doesn't come at his themes obliquely here. Nope, there's a message, and he's going to make sure you get it. Narnia's connections to Lewis's Christianity have never been all that subtle—e.g. Aslan appears as a lamb at the end of Dawn Treader—but nowhere else in the series is Lewis's Christianity so strongly and unambiguously presented as in The Last Battle. A sample line: "In our world too, a stable once had something inside that was bigger than our whole world." Yeah, we're barely in the realm of allegory anymore. This is a book about C. S. Lewis's unabashed conservatism and the solution to everything he, through that conservatism, sees as wrong with the world.

Now, by conservatism, I don't mean to evoke any kind of specifically political or religious meaning. I'm not necessarily saying that Lewis would have voted Republican (or I guess the Conservative Party—isn't that the UK equivalent? Help me, readers; I'm so ignorant) or that he was a biblical literalist or anything like that. I'm talking about the general definition of the word, where "conservatism" means that you are more of a traditionalist who tends to view change with suspicion. And Lewis was most definitely that kind of conservative. That's not necessarily a bad thing to reflect in a book. All of the Narnia books (in fact, most traditional, happy-ending stories) are this kind of conservative: a status quo is disrupted by event or person that takes away an older (better) way of life, and it is the goal of the hero to defeat that changing element and return the land to that older, happier time. The White Witch must be killed so Narnians can live like they used to; the Telmarines must be overthrown so that Old Narnia can return to power; the seven Telmarine lords must return to their old posts in Narnia; Digory's mother must recover from her illness so their family can return to their old life in the country.

That conservative spirit is all over The Last Battle. In Lewis's world, that conservative fear that the world will get worse as time goes by has become a reality: Calormen takes over Narnia, fake Aslans confuse the animals, forests are destroyed. This progress toward oblivion is something that takes a toll on King Tirian. He is constantly longing for how things used to be in Narnia, lamenting his position as the last king, thinking of the "old days" when Caspian or Rilian reigned. And as I said earlier, that's a pretty compelling character dilemma, and it makes for some good, poignant moments. Tirian's character is a graceful integration of that theme, the fear that the world is falling apart.

However, elsewhere in the novel, the theme is not so gracefully integrated. With ideas like the stable and "Tashlan" (the pluralistic amalgam of Tash and Aslan that Shift eventually starts preaching to the Narnians) and the faithless dwarfs[4], it becomes all too obvious that there is a one-to-one correlation between the things we see in Narnia and the things Lewis sees in his own world outside his window, and that's where the novel starts to run aground on its themes. Lewis always had a purpose in mind when writing Narnia, so I won't pretend like the other Narnia books are models of literary ambiguity or anything. Nevertheless, The Last Battle goes way beyond what the other books do, to the point where it sometimes seems to become more rhetoric than artistry. The craft of the novel begins to serve the message instead of that message flowing organically from the art. This is my issue with the fantasy that does appear in the book; it becomes just another way of reinforcing Lewis's ideas about the world, in a way that sucks a lot of the wonder from what has the potential to tap into the fairy tale aesthetics in the other books. Tash, a cool creation on his own, becomes a stand-in for paganism and later, religious pluralism, and that drains some of the vibrancy from his creation. This is the only Narnia book where all the magic feels more like a tool than something wild out of a child's vibrant mind. This is, to paraphrase that famous Aslan line, tame magic.

That's an even bigger problem with the novel's apocalyptic/afterlife ending, which causes the components of the novel's drama to break apart completely. When Aslan ends the world, he brings the novel to a screeching halt artistically. Up until the heroes enter the stable, a certain trajectory for the plot had been playing itself out, with the land of Narnia spinning into darker and darker chaos, sometimes to heavy-handed effect but also sometimes to compelling effect. But with the arrival of Aslan and the end of the world, the constituting parts of that plot are replaced by entirely new dramatic elements (i.e. the afterlife) in a way that neither complements the original artistic motions of the novel nor provides a compelling case for its own existence other than to serve as a theological punctuation to the rest of the story. This is conservative storytelling divorced from craft and continuity—a "return the the status quo" (the afterlife is basically a purer form of the old Narnia) from outside the story logic or even emotional logic, all for the sake of the thematic point that it will take divine intervention to rescue the "good" people from the doomed world on its rapid downward slope.

In the interest of honesty, I should probably note that in general, I am a fan of C. S. Lewis's theology; some of his ideas, including ones raised in this book, I take issue with[5], but on the whole, I tend to like what he has to say. At the very least, I am a Christian, which means that I share some of the same foundations as Lewis, if nothing else. So I am probably a much more receptive to Lewis's raw theology at the end of this book than others might be. I don't hate this ending; I just think it's clumsily placed. But that's the thing: I don't think a work of literature should live and die by how much you agree with the thematic aims of the author. For sure, you can disagree and even hate a work for what the author is trying to say; just ask me about Fight Club. But even within that agreement or disagreement or even hate there should be room for the appreciation of form, of language, of beauty, or else the work is vapid as a piece of art. I'm afraid that as The Last Battle enters its apocalypse, it verges on that vapidity.

I say "verges" because I don't think it quite gets there, and that's largely due to two things. First and foremost, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Lewis's prose and tone in the book's final chapters. He describes the new, afterlife Narnia with such joy and passion that I can't help but share in a little of the emotions. "Further up and further in" is a wonderfully evocative phrase, and it exemplifies well the ecstasy of those final pages and the burst of, if not creative energy[6], emotional energy at least. I may feel that the ending is disingenuous to the rest of the novel, but C. S. Lewis very sincerely does not, and he does about as good a job as can be expected (given the circumstances) of making that sincerity infectious.

Second, there's this phrase. It's a small one, and it's one that probably doesn't carry a lot of weight in the grand scheme of things. But after blogging through all seven of these books and writing so much about Lewis's ideas about fairy tales and storytelling, I couldn't help but find it meaningful—not cheap, coercive meaning like the apocalypse but actual meaning that seems to tie the entire series up beautifully. That phrase is this: in describing the new Narnia in relation to the old one, Lewis's narrator says that it's "deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story: in a story you have never heard but very much want to know."

Aside from being another great example of the lovely prose often found in this afterlife section, this phrase does something much more interesting, thematically, than any of Lewis's blunt theological parallels in the rest of the book. With this phrase, Lewis makes a connection between stories and this afterlife land. A tension between life in fairy tales (i.e. Narnia) and life in the real world has run throughout the entire series. At the end of each book, the children must return home; the story must end. The real world is separate from the land of stories. Sometimes this separation is stark (as in Prince Caspian, where Peter and Susan learn that they will never return to Narnia) and sometimes it is porous (as in The Magician's Nephew, where Digory and Polly hop from story to story at will), but it is always poignantly true that real life and stories do not exist in the same spaces. What that phrase does is resolve that tension, dissolving the lines that divide life from stories. In the afterlife live not just people from Narnia but people from all different worlds, including the "real" world of England—off in the distance, Peter, Edmund, and Lucy can see their parents waving at them. For the first and only time in the series, the world of stories and the world of life are one and the same place. The two are reconciled. And that's actually pretty beautiful.

***

So there still remains that original question: is The Last Battle a good conclusion to The Chronicles of Narnia? The answer to that question is much too messy to be even a qualified yes; there are, without a doubt, some true missteps here, especially when you consider the connection to the series as a whole, and any Narnia book so short on fairy-tale wonder is bound to be a frustration for me on some level. But then again, there are parts that work well enough that make me hesitant to give a straight no either; it seems perversely appropriate for a series that focuses so much on Aslan to spend so much in its final entry with a villain who interrogates the very concept of Aslan, and for all my misgivings about the ending, that story connection is so lovely that it makes me want to forgive all the heavy-handedness. So my answer to that question lies somewhere in between. As I said before, this is an astonishingly weird book, and like many of Narnia's novels, its unconventional shape defies regular standards for evaluating literature.

Whatever the case, though, I have thoroughly enjoyed my return journey to Narnia over these past several weeks, and I hope you've enjoyed it, too. Thanks so very much to all of you who stuck out the whole ride; I've had way more reader involvement and feedback than I normally get from this blog, and that's been super fun and super encouraging. You guys are the best! I'd love to hear back from y'all one last time, too. I know The Last Battle tends to be a divisive book, and I've barely scratched the surface of some of the issues it raises. So feel free to comment, talk to me, etc.

Otherwise, until next time (when I'll tackle something completely different, I promise)!

1] Well, first of all, if you're Tolkien, you don't have a long-running series anyway, but your publisher makes you break up your monster-sized work into still pretty monster chunks.

2] Controversy Corner: Susan's fate is the second of the two controversies I named in my post on The Horse and His Boy (the first being the arguably racist depiction of the Calormenes, something that is even more a problem in this book than in Horse[7]). The argument is that Lewis is being sexist for keeping Susan out of Narnia/heaven, since the reason given for her absence is that she became "interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations," interests that have caused her to reject her belief in Narnia. This issue hinges on the words "nylons and lipstick," which some critics have taken to be Lewis's way of representing femininity or possibly sexuality in general, the idea being that Lewis is saying that interest in femininity and/or sex has made Susan an atheist and therefore not fit for heaven. I don't quite agree with that reading, though I certainly see where people are coming from. It seems inordinately harsh to give Susan such a bleak ending when pretty much every other non-villainous character in the books gets into heaven at the end of The Last Battle. I mean, geez, Jack. However, I do think that this controversy misunderstands the nature of Susan's transgression. It's true that Lewis uses a couple of traditionally feminine objects (nylons and lipstick) as shorthand for Susan's problem in that specific passage, and the associations are unfortunate (especially since Susan is the only major character who is interested in traditionally feminine objects). But I'd argue that that associate is largely accidental and that Lewis actually thinks Susan's sin is fixating on frivolous things like appearance and social standing at the expense of more important things like faith, wonder, and family. The distinction isn't, I think, between faith and femininity or faith and sex, but rather between the childlike capacity for curiosity/awe/honor and what Lewis would call the "silliness" of adulthood—i.e. a lifestyle defined by superficiality and faux maturity. In that same passage in The Last Battle, Polly says of Susan that "her whole idea is to race to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can," which, to me, harkens way back to Lewis's dedication in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where he talks about being temporarily too old for fairy tales. It seems that Lewis believes that at a certain age, there is a temptation to consider adult thoughts and childlike thoughts mutually exclusive, and that Lewis finds this idea particularly troublesome, especially when your version of "adulthood" is one that prioritizes how you look and how many parties you get invited to. This is a belief of Lewis's that crops up throughout the Narnia series, and it's not always gender coded like it is with Susan. Besides Lewis's dedication to Lucy Barfield, the other most prominent character who personifies it is Uncle Andrew, who, in a particularly telling passage, dresses up in front of a mirror preparing for an afternoon out on the town with Jadis. Lewis writes that "children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind. At this moment, Uncle Andrew was beginning to be silly in a very grown-up way." Lewis isn't saying that it's silly or wrong for Uncle Andrew to have romantic or social desires, just that his application of those desires in this particular circumstance (she's a freakin' witch!) and prioritization of them over the more pressing matters at hand is not great. It seems to me that it's much the same thing with Susan—you don't want to get too hung up on word studies in Narnia (Lewis's style never seems considered enough to justify that sort of close reading), but the use of the word "silly" in both cases seems like a pretty strong link. Of course, it helps that Uncle Andrew is a fantastic character with a rich, conflicted inner life; Susan, on the other hand, has always, always been a bore, even among the generally boring Pevensies. That, in my estimation, is the real "problem of Susan": she's just a crappy character throughout the series, and that makes her eventual absence from heaven seem kind of careless and lazy. It's not sexist; it's just bad writing.

3] This is probably the only Narnia book without a single wry aside or funny line, although I did get a chuckle out of Shift's incredulous response when Puzzle says that he thinks everything's alright in Narnia at the book's beginning: "Everything right?—when there are no oranges or bananas?"

4] I won't list them all out, but the most central one I disagree with in The Last Battle is the idea that the world will get worse and worse until the only solution is for God—erm, Aslan—to end it. If you're interested in talking theology, you can email me or we can chat in person; otherwise, I'm not going to bog this post down in eschatology.

5] Who, when it comes to Lewis's theology, are a pretty interesting case. Just in case you've forgotten, the dwarfs in Narnia decide to stop believing in pretty much all things supernatural ("the dwarfs are for the dwarfs") once they find out that Shift's Aslan is a hoax. I find two things really fascinating about this. First, that it's misappropriated religion that turns them into modern secularists, not any of the old Christian bogeymen like science, reason, or secular education. Second, that these unbelieving dwarfs still make it into heaven. Lewis seems to posit that lost belief is only foolish, not damning.

6] I think the afterlife "superpowers" are pretty lame. Swimming up waterfalls, running without stopping—those would be pretty cool to do, but they don't exactly capture the freedom and beautiful otherworldliness that I imagine Lewis is going for with these actions.

7] For example, we get the only real racial epithet in the series, with the dwarfs calling the Calormenes "darkies" a couple times. Granted, the dwarfs aren't exactly good guys in the book, so it's possible that Lewis meant the word to characterize just how nasty the dwarfs really are. Still, it's a little surprising when it happens. That said, The Last Battle also contains several redeeming factors for Lewis's depiction of the Calormenes. The most prominent grace note is the character of Emeth, a Calormene who makes it into heaven because Aslan basically counts his righteous worship of Tash as worship of Aslan himself. For certain brands of Christians, this is very troubling theologically (enough so that it maybe counts as a third controversy, although it's so localized to these Christian groups that I don't know if it's worthy of its own category), but on the level of basic representation, it's nice to see Lewis extend the afterlife to this otherwise marginalized group, even if it's only one pretty minor character. A second note to consider is a small one, but important: when everyone is in the afterlife Narnia, the narrator describes the landscape of the country and mentions that way off in the distance lies Tashbaan, the Calormene capital. This is significant because it means that Calormen still exists in the afterlife—this nation was not totally irredeemable. Again, it's a minor detail in a series otherwise scornful of Calormen, but it's still good to see Lewis end the series on a note of grace rather than condemnation.

Revisiting Narnia: The Magician's Nephew (or, Adventures in Grief)

Hi, everybody! This summer, I'm rereading C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and blogging about each book. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

You can read the post on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe here.

You can read the post on Prince Caspian here.

You can read the post on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader here.

You can read the post on The Silver Chair here. 

You can read the post on The Horse and His Boy here.

Let's not beat around the bush here: The Magician's Nephew, the sixth book published in The Chronicles of Narnia, is almost without a doubt, the most perfectly realized book of the entire series. Now, whether or not "most perfect" means "greatest" is a matter I have not quite sorted out yet[1], but what I do know is that it is the only Narnia book that comes within spitting distance of my perennial favorite, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Furthermore, unless I'm grossly misremembering The Last Battle, Magician also makes up the last entry of what we might call a sort of "hot streak" or even "trilogy of greatness" in The Chronicles, with the first two books being the aforementioned Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair. C. S. Lewis was on fire when he wrote these three books back-to-back[2], and as far as I'm concerned, this unofficial trilogy is the primary justification for Narnia's continued legacy in the pantheon of children's lit greats.

So just to clear up any confusion, The Magician's Nephew is definitely great. But I also called it "perfectly realized," and what I mean by that is this: while most of this re-reading project has led me to discover just how bizarre and flawed (albeit powerful) most of the Narnia books are, The Magician's Nephew is a novel that manages to distill the greatness from the series without accumulating the lopsided structure, incomplete character arcs, or any of the rest of chaff that I've mentioned in my reviews thus far. I called The Silver Chair a great novel, and it is, but I think even more than that book, The Magician's Nephew takes the fantasy of Narnia and works it into what most of us would recognize as a finely calibrated story.

And the key to that calibration is our protagonist, Digory Kirk.

Let's summarize for a moment. The Magician's Nephew takes place in London in the early 20th century[3]. A girl named Polly Plummer lives in a row of townhouses, and one day, she's out in her garden when she meets her neighbor, a boy named Digory Kirk who used to live in the country but now resides in London with his aunt, his crazy Uncle Andrew, and his deathly ill mother. The two strike up a friendship centered around the mutual discovery of a crawl space that runs along the entire row of houses where they can have secret meetings. They decide to use the crawl space to break into an abandoned house in the row, but they miscalculate the distance and end up in Uncle Andrew's study instead. It turns out that Uncle Andrew imagines himself a magician and has come into possession of some magic rings. The unpleasant man tricks the children in to touching the rings, which he says will transport them to another world. They find themselves in a wood filled with pools of water. The children realize that these pools represent different universes that they can enter using the rings, and they decide to try out one of the other pools before returning to their own puddle. They find themselves in a ruined civilization called Charn. Digory accidentally awakens an evil queen named Jadis, and against their will, she returns with them to Uncle Andrew's study. The queen promptly wreaks havoc in the London streets, and in a panic, Digory and Polly use their rings to take her (and, without meaning to, Uncle Andrew, a cab driver, and his horse) back to the wood and into the first world they can get to. This world is dark and formless until a lion (Aslan, of course) appears, creates life and landscape before their very eyes, and christens it "Narnia." At the sight of the lion, Jadis runs away into the countryside, and Aslan tells Digory that since he has brought this evil into the new world, he must also protect it by going on a journey to a garden to get the seed of a magic tree that will ward off evil. When Digory finds this garden with the help of Polly, Jadis is already there. She tells him that the fruit of the tree is a life-giving fruit that will cure his mother's illness, but Digory, though terribly conflicted, follows Aslan's instructions and returns the fruit to him. Aslan plants the tree, and when it has grown (which, in the magical new soil of Narnia takes a matter of minutes), he gives Digory fruit from the new tree. When Digory and Polly and Uncle Andrew return to their own world, Digory gives his mother the fruit, and she undergoes a miraculous recovery. The end.

Digory and Polly

So yes, The Magician's Nephew is a prequel to the entire series (even more so than I've described—for example, Digory grows up to be Professor Kirk from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), but besides that, hopefully something you picked up on from that plot summary is that at the book's beginning, Digory has a tremendously sad life: he has lost his childhood home, his former life, and his friends, and most importantly, he's on the brink of losing his mother, too. In most books, this would not be particularly notable; think Huckleberry Finn, Oliver Twist, or even relatively lightweight fare like The Boxcar Children: literature thrives on the sadness of its protagonists. In most conventional storytelling paradigms, plot and character development stem from conflict, and almost always, that conflict grows out of a tragedy of some sort.

But for an entry in The Chronicles of Narnia, beginning with that kind of tragedy is a big deal, because up to this point, sadness and grief have not been central to the Narnia ethos. In fact, The Magician's Nephew is an anomaly in how desperate and broken it makes Digory's life in the outset. Think about the rest of the books: there's a hint of tragedy in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in the tossed-off reference to the Pevensies' flight from the bombings[4]; a twinge of sadness as the Pevensies await adulthood at the train station in Prince Caspian; some bullying woes for Pole at the beginning of The Silver Chair. But these are all minor occurrences, both in the books' treatment of them (these troubles are usually swept aside for more interesting, magical things in a page or two) and in their weight to the characters (none of them seem deeply distraught, and besides, none of their problems even approach the horror of the death of a parent). The only protagonist who even approaches beings able to lay claim to the same depths of grief as Digory is Shasta from The Horse and His Boy, but even then, Shasta's prospects improve drastically a few pages into the book, once he encounters the magic of Bree, the talking horse. Anyway, even if Shasta regards Arsheesh's cruel treatment with the same level of grief as Digory does his mother's illness, he doesn't show it.

By contrast, the first thing we see of Digory is his tear-stained face after he's been crying alone in his family's yard, and only a page and a half later, he's choking back tears again. What's more, the cause of this sadness isn't something that fades away after the introductory pages; Digory's mother is ill until the very last chapter, and we see tears come to his eyes at the thought of his mother several times on the way there. Digory's sorrow is deep and sustained in a way unlike anything any other character encounters in the series. Lewis's protagonists, when they aren't glorious little snots in the mold of Eustace or early Edmund, tend to be of the stiff-upper-lip variety, the kind of folks that call things a "bother" and face troubles with a clever, problem-solving resoluteness that protects them from any heartache too profound. They tend to be capable of joy but not grief—even Susan and Lucy, weeping at Aslan's corpse in Wardrobe, seem to be doing so innocently, almost like Pole crying about the bullies, the way people cry at momentary cruelties or a scrape on the knee. Digory is in for the long haul, and he realizes it. His story is sad and affecting, all the more so because the book gives weight to the fact that Digory knows that once death takes your mother, you never get her back. He's a boy that Lewis renders with tenderness and compassion, and as a result, Digory becomes the series's most bleedingly human character.

I include this picture here for the sole reason

that I think it's one of the series's best.

This accomplishes two things. First, on a purely technical level, it gives the book a dramatic drive that even the more propulsive books in the series can't match. I mean, with Digory's grief, The Magician's Nephew has a sustained dramatic conflict affecting a character for the entirety of the book; that's astonishingly rare in The Chronicles of Narnia. But even the books with a similar single conflict don't quite match Magician's heights. The Silver Chair may be a tightly plotted novel with an exciting hook—who doesn't love a missing person plot?—but for all its twists, even I have to admit that it's central premise is a little dry on the emotional front (unless we identify with the largely absent King Caspian, something the book does not encourage us to do). The Magician's Nephew, on the other hand, outdoes it by girding its exciting, world-jumping plot with emotional stakes unparalleled in even that masterful novel: Digory is grieving his mother's imminent passing. Plots with exciting twists are one thing, but plots with exciting twists and emotional stakes are even better. This novel is the series's most effective page turner because it's the book most engineered to make us care about what's happening. Take, for example, the book's climax, where Digory must choose between saving his mother's life by stealing the magic apple for himself or following Aslan's commands by returning it to the lion to protect Narnia. Throughout the Narnia books, we see characters face similar conundrums, where they must either act selfishly or obey Aslan, and honestly, it's never all that interesting because it's always obvious which choice is the right one: of course they should follow Aslan and not side with the White Witch, etc. And honestly, the right decision is pretty obvious here, too—Digory knows he should obey Aslan. However, the cost of obeying Aslan is never as steep as it appears here, and because of that, Digory's choice is one of the most compelling moral actions in the series. Unlike the rest of the "do the right thing" scenarios, there is real weight to the ostensibly wrong choice. And that's all couched in Lewis's depiction of Digory as a character whose world is profoundly broken.

Second, the grieving, compassionate humanity with which Lewis renders Digory forms the thematic core of everything this book does. The Magician's Nephew is a novel about dealing with grief—specificially, Digory's. And I do mean dealing with grief. I don't think it's any accident that Lewis waits until more than half the novel has passed before introducing even a sliver of hope for Mrs. Kirk's recovery[5]. By not giving us the narrative logic necessary to see Digory's mom's recovery as a possibility, Lewis makes us focus not on how Digory saves his mother but on how Digory lives with the fact that he can't do anything for his mother—to put it another, broader way, how Digory manages to cope with a world full of evil and tragedy; how Digory finds beauty in a world he calls "a beastly hole." And that focus leads to some rather profound insights into the series's pet motifs of storytelling and fairy tales (you knew that was going to come up sooner or later, didn't you?).

It might help to look at the novel's opening chapter just a little more in-depthly. I've already mentioned that the novel opens with Polly finding Digory crying, which is, of course, heartbreaking. Besides introducing Digory, though, what's interesting about that scene is what ultimately diverts the story away from just focusing on Digory's grief. Lewis's narrator writes that "to turn Digory's mind to cheerful subjects," Polly asks him if his Uncle Andrew "is really mad." Which, at first blush, seems like one of the absolute worst questions you could ask someone who was already feeling bad about their family problems—"I'm awfully sorry to hear about your dying mother; now why don't you tell me about your insane uncle?" But that question makes a lot more sense once you see where it leads. Once Polly and Digory begin to talk about Uncle Andrew, it becomes clear that they aren't talking about him because he's a crazy uncle; they're talking about him because with him lies the promise of discovering a fantastic story. Uncle Andrew is a mystery, not one of those ugly, unpleasant, real-life mysteries like "When will Digory's mother die?", but a romantic, storybook mystery—he might be a coiner or have a crazy wife shut up in his room, to name two possibilities the children name. "Or," Digory adds eventually, making the storybook connection even clearer, "he might have been a pirate, like the man at the beginning of Treasure Island." This is how Digory finds beauty in life and how he deals with grief: through stories. More specifically, through fantasy[6] stories.

That attraction to storytelling as a means of dealing with grief is there from the book's outset, and it only becomes more apparent as the book progresses and fantasy becomes more and more a part of not just the children's imaginations but the novel's reality. With Uncle Andrew's magic rings and the trip to the Wood Between the Worlds, all the storytelling possibilities Digory and Polly have thrown around become actualities. They can jump from world to world, story to story. They literally immerse themselves in fantasy by jumping into the pools in the wood, and they can bring back into their own world the things they have learned and acquired. Of all the Narnia books, The Magician's Nephew is the one that spends the most time in our world, and it's the only one besides Wardrobe where major plot points happen on Earth, outside of Narnia. This is important. Most of the Narnia books are interested in fairy tales and storytelling in one way or another, but The Magician's Nephew is unique in that it's interested in how fantasy interacts with reality. Nowhere else in the series is the division between "fantasy/Narnia" and "real life/England" more permeable. Let's not forget that the first page of the book also tells us that "in those days Mr. Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street." This is a book in which the fantasies we read about in literature—be they the wicked Queen Jadis[7] or Atlantis or magic rings or cure-all apples—have a life in an other, fantasy realm and in "real-life" London. In The Magician's Nephew, C. S. Lewis argues that these fantasies are vital sources of beauty and hope for us as we live through our own world.

I don't think this is any sort of prosaic statement on Lewis's part. A lot of this "beauty" and "hope" takes the form of less savory things like witches and ruined civilizations, and even the initial storybook mysteries that Digory and Polly suggest at the book's beginning aren't exactly pleasant ones: counterfeiters, pirates, insanity. It's not that Lewis thinks that we should disappear into fantasy in order to buffer ourselves from the pains of the real world. Digory could stay in Narnia or Charn or the Wood Between the Worlds and forget about his mother, but he always returns to his home in London. What I do think Lewis is trying to show is that stories are how we are taught to see truth, and by knowing the truth (be it God Himself, whom Lewis found through his own studies of literature, or just a deeper understanding of the complexities of life[8]), we can better interact with our own world and deal with pain and hurt and brokenness in a more mature way.

Of course, it's true that The Magician's Nephew does end up kind of rectifying every one of Digory's woes through magic, and I suppose this could be considered Lewis's argument for (or maybe even fallacy of) escapism. I'll admit that Lewis lays on the happy ending a little thick, even for the Narnia books: not only does Digory's mother get better but also some random relative dies and bequeaths Digory's family his immense fortune, which allows his father to retire from his job in India and the family to move together to a beautiful country estate. However, I have two things to say about that. Firstly, any ending that allows for the scene in which Digory feeds his mother the apple is a-okay in my book, as that scene is one of the most poignant, tender passages Lewis ever wrote. Secondly, I'd also say that Lewis is totally aware of the escapism of that ending, which is why he drives the prequelness of the book so hard in the end. The final pages of the novel are chock full of allusions to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—Digory builds the wardrobe, the country estate is the same one the Pevensies live at during the war, the lamp-post in Narnia turns into Lantern Waste—and at least one of the effects of all of these allusions (in addition to the satisfying feeling of watching everything click into place from the other books) is that it calls attention to the fact that The Magician's Nephew is a book itself and not real life and that although Digory got to live his fantasies thanks to the rings, our interactions with the stories in books must be more metaphorical. No, there are no magic silver apples that we can bring from other universes to heal our mothers[9]. But that doesn't mean that there isn't value in talking about a fantasy world in which there are.

This book, y'all.

And... gaaaahh, there's so, so much that I still haven't said about this book! The Magician's Nephew is so rich that I've spent this entire post babbling on about Digory and spent next to no time talking about Uncle Andrew (who ranks with Eustace as one of the great heels of Lewis's creation) or Jadis or the knowledge/power thematic connections or the urban/rural divide or Polly (who isn't as interesting as Digory or Pole but still does alright as a pricklier version of Lucy) or even just the wonderful, wonderful imagination and imagery on display in this novel—seriously, Charn is one of the most haunting, evocative things Lewis put on the page, and the same goes for its eventual fate as a small hollow in the Wood once its puddle has dried. But a post has to end somewhere, and I guess I have to end it here.

But that doesn't mean you readers have to stop! I know I've focused rather narrowly in this post, so let me know what I missed about the novel. I could talk for pages and pages about it, and I'm sure at least a few of you out there share my enthusiasm. Feel free to share in the comments or let me know otherwise about your own thoughts, feelings, likes, dislikes, etc.[10]

Until next time (and the conclusion of the series!)!


1] Dawn Treader, a book much too messy to ever be called "perfect," has an odd, powerful greatness that makes the shagginess of its form a non-issue.

2] The Horse and His Boy, though published between The Silver Chair and The Magician's Nephew, was actually written earlier (hence the references to it in The Silver Chair).

3] To be completely accurate, the narrator says that the story happens "when your grandfather was a child." My grandfather was a child in the 1940s, but if you imagine the "your" being some idealized young reader picking up this book in 1955 (when this book was published and my grandfather wasn't even twenty), we can imagine that it's supposed to be about fifty years prior.

4] Something the 2005 film ran with, to great success (the added emotional weight was definitely one of the film's strengths).

5] And even then, it's the very slimmest of slivers, hinging on a figure of speech about his mother being cured by fruit from "the land of youth."

6] I mean, really. What else would you call Treasure Island? I know there's no magic, but as far as the snooty world of literary studies goes, this level of genre fiction basically resides all in one big clump. Lewis, an academic himself (though far from a snooty one) is aware of that, I'm sure.

7] Whom Wikipedia tells me is basically an Edith Nesbit character come to life in Lewis's world from her novel The Story of the Amulet.

8] As, I think, Uncle Andrew learns from his encounter with that "dem fine woman" Jadis.

9] At least, I don't think there are. If you have evidence to the contrary, let me know pronto.

10] One final note that I didn't quite know where to put in the post: it's almost certain that The Magician's Nephew is the most autobiographical of the Narnia books. Not only is it set during Lewis's own childhood (and colored by quite a bit of nostalgia, as in the opening where he says "the meals were nicer" back then), but Lewis's own mother was also taken ill when Lewis was about Digory's age. Sadly, just a few months before his tenth birthday, C. S. Lewis's mother died, which adds an extra layer of poignancy to Digory's situation and the novel's ending. This is the ending Lewis never got.