Why I Secretly Hate The Chronicles of Narnia
A Love-Hate Letter to Jack
Like many in the “Inklingsphere”, I seem unable to discuss any subject without quoting C. S. Lewis. More than half of my essays mention him or his work in one way or the other. Because Lewis is just that damn good.
His prose is one of the best, a style that makes even otherwise dense texts pleasant to read. Yet this pleasantness does not sacrifice power. Lewis’s greatest strength as a writer — whether in fiction or non-fiction — is his ability to explain non-trivial concepts in a way that makes them seem not only accessible, but obvious. When reading Chesterton, one gets the impression of seeing a paradox unraveling itself to reveal a beautiful, but still exotic, flower. When reading Lewis, one gets the impression of common sense taken to its logical conclusion. Of course the world is that way, we think, even if the thought had never crossed our minds before.
Lewis takes the preposterous thesis that all men in all times agree on good and evil, and not only leads the reader to agree with him, but to believe they themselves had held the thesis before the discussion began. He puts mundane pieces of hell in the letters of a demon, and we are compelled to confess we have done all those evil things. He talks of lands in which time passes differently, hubs of the multiverse, and worlds inside worlds, each more perfect and more real than the last, in a way even a child understands.
And so it is with shame that I have to say, about Lewis’s most famous work, The Chronicles of Narnia… I… kind of… do not like it.
To say that I hate them is, I admit, quite clickbait-ty of me. Some of these books I have read and re-read, and they kept me company for many a calm summer afternoon. However, some is the key word here.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Silver Chair, and The Magician’s Nephew are the good ones. Prince Caspian and The Horse and His Boy have bad endings. Voyage of the Dawn Treader bored my childhood self to death. And The Last Battle… oh, The Last Battle.
I knew from the first sentence I was in for a treat: “In the last days of Narnia, far up to the west beyond Lantern Waste and close beside the great waterfall, there lived an Ape.”
An Ape.
The climax of the series, and we are going with an Ape and a Donkey as the bringers of doom.
That’s just lame.
But if the opening is bad, the ending is so, so much worse. For as much as the Narnia-in-Narnia concept blew my mind in a good way, everything else blew my mind in a bad way. All our heroes die in a train accident. All of them. Digory, Polly, the Pevensies (minus Susan, who is a jerk now), Eustace, Jill. All dead from Chapter Five onwards. It’s like bad fan-theory: what if character X died and the whole movie is him in the afterlife?
The experience left a sour taste, and in many ways ruined the series for me. Getting older and understanding better the Christian themes did nothing to help it. Not only was the series imperfect, it was trying to lecture me!1
My official position thereafter was that I disliked The Chronicles of Narnia — even though I re-read the three good ones from time to time. And even though, even as a child, I recognized that Lewis was something special. There was just something that set him apart from others I was reading at the time (say, Riordan’s Percy Jackson).
I still have the book on my shelf: an old black tome with a golden lion on the cover, containing all seven Narnia stories. I suppose it belonged to a library once, since the first page instructs you to handle it with clean hands and not eat or drink while reading. In my memory it is a massive book, a thick block of paper one would take months to read through. As with many things, it seems to have shrunken down as I grew older.
Despite my mock-hate of Narnia, I have a lot of affection for that book. It changed my life, not because of the Chronicles, but because of what came after them.
My copy included, after The Last Battle, a print of On three ways of writing for children. It was, if memory serves me, the first non-fiction text I read willingly (apart from children’s science books about the Universe, dinosaurs, and whatnot). The first text “for adults” that I read.
There was something very persuasive about both his argument and his style, and I wanted more of it. Some time later, in my teens, I got myself a copy of The Abolition of Man. For good or evil, Abolition is one of the foundations of my intellectual life (if I may call it that). There is Good, and we know it. Above all assertions of knowledge and faith, in this I believe.
So many years later, I look upon my shelf and see it dominated by Lewis: The Screwtape Letters; An Experiment in Criticism; a big white volume containing Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Four Loves; Lenten Lands, a beautiful book written by his stepson. Tolkien is my favorite author, far and wide, but in sheer volume of reading, there is no competition. Lewis is a big part of what I read and how I think nowadays. And it all began with:
I think there are three ways in which those who write for children may approach their work; two good ways and one that is generally a bad way.
“On three ways of writing for children”, C. S. Lewis
In my imaginary and progressively more absurd feud with Narnia, I propose a truce. Some of the books I have read more than once; some I haven’t touched after the first reading, and the impressions they left are more clear to my memory than the books themselves. But I have never read the entire series, front to end.
I am all for intellectual honesty, and casting praise on books based on what they are, instead of what we think they are. Therefore, I will finally begin something I have been wanting to do for a long time:
I will FINALLY re-read The Chronicles of Narnia. All of them, from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to The Last Battle2. And I’ll share this experience with you.
Let’s see if eight-year-old me was a good literary critic.
This is, of course, not a despise for Christian thought itself. I will gladly read Lewis apologetic works, because then I know what I am getting myself into. As I have said in The Problem with Fanservice, Clichés, and Politics, the truth of the worldview being espoused is less important than the fact it is being espoused in detriment to the narrative.
Which, as we all know, is the one right way to read them.
I will simply say that the fact you included the Silver Chair as a good one above Prince Caspian and the Dawn Treader is unforgivable. Or possible just the result of different tastes lol.
I hope you enjoy your reread through.
Curious to know your take on the Space Trilogy!