Chronicles of Narnia - POLL

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

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

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, May 21, 2015

I need to reread these. Remember really liking The Silver Chair, though, and the descriptions of Charn still stick with me even now. Know it’s basic af, but the ending of TLB really knocked me sideways - it just feels so casually cruel! Millions of people have said about this, but honestly, the thought of being a parent having to explain that...nah

TLB's underlying ethos is a facer ("dying young in a horrible railway accident is good and here's why") but it absolutely has some of the best-realised and and most startling tableaux along the way

Started reading these on a whim with my 8-year-old, in the correct order. So far halfway through TMN and it's just as good as I remember, perhaps even better.

My opinion as a kid was TH&HB > TMN >>>> TSC > TVOTDT > THTW&TW >>>> PC >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> TLB - so will be interested to see if I still agree with myself aged 10.

It’s been too long since I’ve read these.

xp -- re yr placing of TLB: yrself aged 10 was nuts and very wrong

I was a 10-year-old Catholic kid and I genuinely think it may have been one of the first cracks that led to my atheism by the age of 15, just "what kind of sick fuck thinks this is a good thing to publish as a kids' book and do I really want to be in their club?:

That was kinda about my reaction too at 10. (Even if I was more of a relaxed but earnest Anglican.)

I took the Devil and His Works very seriously at that point, remember being equally traumatised by the end of Time Bandits and listening to REM's "Star Me Kitten" on headphones on holiday in France (I had the idea that the cassette had been somehow possessed, really a very good job I lost the religion before I started on the drugs)

what kind of sick fuck thinks this is a good thing to publish as a kids' book and do I really want to be in their club?

The best part.

yrself aged 10 was nuts and very wrong

new borad description

tash! tash! inexorable tash!

I mean in my case it wasn't helped by the fact that my babysitter had apocalyptic Jack Chick tracts around, which I inevitably read. I didn't suddenly renounce theological belief but as the years went by I could pinpoint where the disenchantment derived from. (Certainly there's arresting imagery in The Last Battle, the squeezing out of the sun and so forth, but...)

Respectowiggle.

i don't remember having any inkling about the christianity when i read these as a kid

I was aware of it but loving Aslan was cooler than loving Jesus.

the last battle is good not bad, few know this

― mark s, Thursday, October 3, 2019

otm

the religion in TLTW&TW is so heavy-handed that it would take an idiot child not to spot it, and I was absolutely that idiot child

i do remember loving TLB because i was already a very depressed child

come further up, come further in!

I took this as gospel as a newly gay man.

i never got around to reading the books, just saw the BBC series in 5th grade (well, as far as they got into it).

for years I thought "Cair Paravel" was someone saying "Camp Parallel" with an accent

coincidentally i have also just started (re-)reading these w my 11 yo and yeah MN's is just tremendous. the way he makes the reader a confidante is just irresistible. i think it flags a little in the second half but comes back pretty strong at the end.

as a kid i remember thinking TH&HB was VERY boring so it's wild to see it's your favourite CAL. looking forward to it now!

You “order of composition” rather than “chronological in-universe” fanatics are weird as fuck. TMN is the first book and TLB the final one. How could it be any different?

When I was a kid, TH&HB was the clear dog of the series, although there was so much in it that was great (Aravis; the jackals & the tombs; the phrase “O my father and o the delight of my eyes” which I briefly required my kids to address me with). Later, the heavy-handedness of TL,TW&TW and TLB put them way down the list. Sometimes I wish Aslan would just fuck off. I’ve always had a soft spot for the gloomy Silver Chair (reshpeckobiggle being a joek for the ages) — the true Prince being revealed in a desperate moment of clarity but everything had primed you and the characters and even himself to distrust and dismiss his realness — there’s something deep as hell about that motif.

order of composition is correct. lion witch is the first book and everything else pivots around it

Didn't vote in this, huh! Top 2 are correct because trippy Narnia is the best Narnia.

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.