Chronicles of Narnia - POLL

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

ppl who insist you should read that one first are insane

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

she is a librarian lol

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

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

the bolt of Tash falls from above

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

lol yes -- a hammered Puddleglum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

morelike voyage of the yawn treader

voyage of the don't read 'er

The Horse and His Goy

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

SF stiff? But of course. SF stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

aslan voiced by john inman

I read that as "Don Imus."

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

ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOARRRRRR!

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

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

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

hate u miraz

reshpecktabiggle

― mookieproof, Wednesday, August 3, 201

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

regardless we can allow for dialect i feel

THAHB is the best one and was robbed

I reactivated the thread because I reread it

deep dialect from before the dawn of time

agreed that THAHB is the best

the last battle is good not bad, few know this

they're all good i think

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

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

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

i am an original-sequence loyalist.

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

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

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

great piece mark, lol @ this:

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

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

experiment house btw is such a strange satire. from wiki

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

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

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

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

Reshpeckobiggle

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

guess i'll put a bold face on it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— wikishoutouts (@wikishoutouts) September 4, 2019

They don't?

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

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

Come further up, come further in!

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

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

the godly manifestation of corporal punishment

courage, dear heart

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

That…is a take

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

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

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

what's weird about it?

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

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

Mostly a Netflix higher up interview here:

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

But there is this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wild takes from hazel!

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

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

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

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

thats right

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

f.hazel i love you but that is complete nonsense

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

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

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

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

2 who kinda do fit that template

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

I never read the flambards books, maybe they fit too

none of them count

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*married to the architect who designed portmeirion

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

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

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