Chronicles of Narnia - POLL

Very difficult for me. The Silver Chair is the least of them for me because the Emerald Witch is a pale (green?) reprise of The White Witch, but boasts Puddleglum the Marsh-Wiggle and the scene in the giants' castle.

I always wished Lewis wrote more novels about the High King Peter's reign during the so-called Golden Age.

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

isn't there some hint that the witch in 'silver chair' is the same person as the white witch?

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

I agree re The Magician's Nephew. It's a beautiful little book: the Wood Between the Worlds, the desolation of barren Charn, the scary resonance that the Deplorable Word has for children reading it -- I can't ask for a better creation myth.

isn't there some hint that the witch in 'silver chair' is the same person as the white witch?

She's not! A Dwarf at the end of the novel speculates that they're of the same breed or something.

Magician's Nephew is definitely the most interesting from the perspective of narrative construction, and Horse and His Boy kind of prefigures a lot of kid-and-his-spirit-animal '70s novels. THe Last Battle is dire, dire, dire, and Dawn Treader is episodic to the point of idiocy. Dawn Treader is not uninteresting though, just kind if undramatic (except for Eustace's transformation from asshole to semi-decent guy). Prince Caspian and Silver Chair are kind of 'ehh' and I guess the whole series wouldn't exist w/o Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe. I guess this means

1. Magician's Nephew
2. Lion, Witch and Wardrobe
2. Voyage of the Dawn Treader
4. Horse and His boy
5. Silver Chair
6. Last Battle

I disagree about Voyage of the Dawn Treader: each one of the lords they find boasts an interesting back story and adventure. I'd rank them:

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Magician's Nephew
The Horse and His Boy
The Lion...
The Last Battle
The Silver Chair
Prince Caspian

huh maybe I should reread these because I have long felt that The Silver Chair was far and away the best of the series

My opinion of Dawn Treader has fallen off since I taught it to my fifth graders this past fall, and it was such a mega slog. The language is a little inflated (comically) for an adult, but it was very difficult for my students, and the irony of Eustace's speech and affectations were totally lost and distancing for them. The kids also marked the Aslan-as-deus-ex-machina schtick pretty early, and it became kind of laughable when he showed up in the ship medallion, on the Dufflepuds' island, to skin Eustace from his dragonness, at Drinkwater, etc., etc., But Reepicheep, man, what a character – he's entirely why I've got it tied for number two.

I only minded it when he appeared as Coleridge's albatross guiding them past Dark Island.

I only read the first three when a young teenager and hated them but that is because I had just before read the Lord of the Rings and was looking for more the same. Everyone knows that talking lions only exist in Oz.

haha, oddly enough tolkien was annoyed by exactly the same thing when lewis started reading them out loud at the pub -- talking lions, fauns, father christmas all co-existing in the same universe.

I'm not sure The Last Battle is actually dire, as such. I think it's possibly successful in its own terms, but crucially those terms are not predominant in the previous novels, at least not predominant in most readers' minds, and are in a form, allegory, that isn't really v popular these days, with reason imo.

I think it's just a case of the allegory cracking the narrative basically. It's also kinda absurd, as allegory often is.

Did the BBC adaptations of these not use the same actress for the witches in TLW&W and TSC?

Yes, but wikipedia says they used a lot of actors in more than one part for budget reasons. (lol BBC)

I loved The Horse and His Boy because it has Aravis and she's fleeing an arranged child-marriage on horseback, and she's stroppy. That was my kinda girl. Little bit afraid to re-read it now; Anne Faddiman did that for me, luckily, in the Re-Readings book of essays, so that's okay.

Reepicheep is ALL-TIME.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

i liked the silver chair the least because i thought it was horribly sad that when our heroes showed up, eustace didn't recognize caspian in his dotage and couldn't say hi before he died.

i love them all, but the last battle does get awfully judgmental. not least with the susan thing.

reepicheep <3

need to re-read these.

Marshwiggle ftw

surprised by the love for magician's newphew, thats probably my pick as well, it just has a grander sense of space and time than the others.

reshpecktabiggle

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

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

Prince Caspian is better than the Silver Chair, which is irritating and not very good

― the absence of bikes (f. hazel), T

respectowiggle

i really like silver chair: puddleglum is a good character to have in a kid's book i think

anything would be a letdown after Dawn Treader though

dawn treader has too much aslan in it

courage, dear heart

the Emerald Witch plucking at her koto surrounded by clouds of incense = so metal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh55SzhLkmc

hoping there’s a metal band called bism

also mudfilth

I love fantasy books where people walk for ages (and maybe get lost). The best bits of Lord of the Rings are them walking.

Prince Caspian is better than the Silver Chair, which is irritating and not very good

― the absence of bikes (f. hazel), T

respectowiggle

This is 90% of why Fellowship is the best. It’s basically a travelogue of a long walk without a ton of other plot going on.

― The land of dreams and endless remorse (hardcore dilettante),

*cough* The Silver Chair: the trek through Ettinsmoor, etc.

in the silver chair it bothered me all out of proportion that scrubb didn't get to say hi to the elderly caspian

also: repectabiggle

amidst all the bad takes in this revive, and they're not few, the idea that fotr lacks plot is a real doozy

we have a good thread where we do in fairness surmise that it is a book about walking in the main so points for that

mark otm about why not listen to lucy, the portrayal of the character in the british tv tltwatw in the nineties was shockingly annoying and very accurate

we just finished the horse and his boy. Aslan saved the boy so the Aslantians would win the war years later. Main kid(s) always become rich at the end, in one world or another.

the bolt of Tash falls from above

― mookieproof, Wednesday, August 3, 2011 9:56 PM (twelve years ago)

the bolt of tash falls from above

― mookieproof, Wednesday, February 1, 2023 3:56 AM (eight months ago)

sorry for duplication, but i just wanted to point out that i was otm

amidst all the bad takes in this revive, and they're not few, the idea that fotr lacks plot is a real doozy

"Lack" implies it's the worse for it, though.

Silver Chair and Dawntreader are my absolute favourites. It makes me a little sad that KIDS TODAY don't read these books. I loved them so much. I still do. I don't care if CS Lewis was trying to indoctrinate me into Christianity by stealth. It's not like he did a very good job of it.

. It makes me a little sad that KIDS TODAY don't read these books.

They don't?

Cobbles and kettledrums!

i really like silver chair: puddleglum is a good character to have in a kid's book i think

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.