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.
