Voyage of the Dawn Treader (I read it over and over again as a child, and the first computer game I ever wrote was based on it.)
The Silver Chair
Magician’s Nephew
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
The Final Battle
Prince Caspian
A Horse and his Boy.
What’s your ranking?
-Ben
The Best:
The Middle:
The Not-So-Best:
I was enthralled by all of them, they were great.
Best: Voyage of the Dawn Treader: lots of adventure, and lots of that talking mouse, who is really a firecracker. When I was a kid, I made a map showing all the islands and what’s on them. Then, I tried to burn the edges to make it look old and mysterious. You can probably guess how that turned out.
#2: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe: such a gem, the enthusiasm CSL had for his idea just shines through in every word.
#3 Prince Caspian: I like the King Arthur-y flavor of this one. Plus, it has the talking mouse.
#4 The Magician’s Nephew: Good creepy, not scary creepy. I also like how it explains all sorts of Narnian landmarks. Although Uncle Andrew’s nervous breakdown gets old.
#5 The Horse and His Boy: A good story, but as a child I was confused about why they weren’t in Narnia, and why it wasn’t about a child from our world. As an adult, the nasty view of Islamic cultures makes me uncomfortable.
#6 The Silver Chair: I was scared of that school they went to, and the journey seemed like all misery and no fun, unlike the other Narnia adventures. Plus, every time they miss a sign, I have an anxiety attack.
Worst: Last Battle: The idea that Susan seemed to be missing out on Narnia because she wore lipstick kept me up nights. Too much preachy symbolism, not enough good story. Oh, and the ape was a freakshow. I’m really not interested in seeing a Narnia where everyone is nasty.
My picks:
The Magician’s Nephew was always my favorite; I loved all the different scenes they went into.
I think in The Last Battle, Susan misses out because she’s grown into that “Adult” thing where fantasy isn’t real any more, even though she had experienced it for herself.
I love C.S. Lewis. He’s my favorite writer.
Count me in for another “C. S. Lewis is my favorite writer” person. I love the Chronicles of Narnia, and his other books are good, too.
Let’s see, my rankings:
#1: Dawn Treader: No doubt the best. All the different adventures, people, etc. Plus the whole deal with Eustice going from being a little shit to a nice guy. Great!
#2: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: The first, and it will always have a place in my heart.
#3 & #4: Magician’s Nephew and Silver Chair. They flip places in my list all the time. I like the Victorian feel of MN, but that whole eerie underground theme of Silver Chair and the scene where they almost get eaten in the Giant’s house always get me. Plus, I love Puddleglum. He’s my favorite. puddleglum if you hadn’t gotten the name already, I would have stolen it!
#5: Horse and His Boy. I’d have to say that if I had to pick an out of place book in the series, this would be it. But once again, I love it.
#6: Last Battle: I always cry at the end, and I like the scene where all the dwarves can’t see they’re in a lovely place.
#7: Prince Caspian: Always seemed like “filler” to me, but once again, I like it.
It’s so hard to rank 'em. They’re ALL good, and I’d gladly read ANY of 'em over and over and over.
Wow, I can’t believe this…I was thinking about starting a thread on Narnia, and here one is! I have just recently read all the books. I never could get into them as a child, but I seem to have more patience for these things these days.
Here’s my ranking:
It looks like I agree with delphica for the most part :).
The Last Battle just pissed me off. First of all, the whole thing with Susan not being a “friend of Narnia” anymore because she likes lipstick and nylons. If this were straight fantasy, you could take it as she’s gotten into too much of an adult, realistic mindset and is no longer open-minded enough to appreciate Narnia. However, this whole series is Christian allegory. The lesson here, as I see it, is that if a woman embraces her own sexuality, she therefore rejects Jesus Christ. :mad:
And, then it turns out, at the end of the book (although I strongly suspected it near the beginning), that he’s killed all the main characters off! (Except Susan, of course…she may be the smartest one of them all!) Isn’t that so lovely? And, conveniently, Mom and Dad are dead, too. I am uncomfortable with the idea of so many children/young adults (exactly how old is everybody? It mentions in this last book that Eustace and Jill are the only ones still in school, but I didn’t think that Edmund and Lucy were that much older, and E&J’s school doesn’t seem like a high school…maybe I’m just clueless on the British school system. Oh, and how old is “too old” for Narnia, in Aslan’s eyes?) dying, even if they get to go to “heaven”.
I also was uncomfortable with the negative portrayal of Arabic/Islamic culture through the Calormen. Light skinned people = good, dark skinned people = bad. :mad:
Does anyone else think that Susan was pretty much a superfluous character, especially in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? I mean, you have Lucy, the star, who starts the whole thing, you have Edmund, the traitor who turns good, and you have Peter, the brave High King. Susan is simply “Susan the Gentle” who keeps the fourth seat warm at Cair Paravel. Later on, she has a terrible experience with a Calormen boyfriend, and then Aslan tells her she’s too old for Narnia, so she goes home and focuses on Earthly things. No wonder she doesn’t dwell on Narnia the way the others did…she didn’t do much there!
Don’t get me wrong…I didn’t hate the series or anything, but some things just bugged me about it.
But I love them all!!
Did anyone else buy the “Companion to Narnia” when It came out a (long) while ago? It’s like a dictionary/encyclopedia for Narnia. I read it straight through, like a regular book. 
And in rebuttal to two specific points that Tamex made (the rest of Tamex’s commentary was great!)
Re Susan: I thought Lewis explicitly said that her problem was “growing up”. It wasn’t that she embraced her sexuality, it was that (parphrased quote, I don’t have the book with me) “…she spent her entire life getting to be the age she is now, and it looks like she’s going to spend the rest of her life trying to stay where she is.” and someone else says something like “Susan thinks Narnia (Christ) is for kids, she’s only interested in things like nylons and lipstick”
Lewis is pretty clear that Susan “grew out of” Narnia.
Also, if you think about it, Susan is always portrayed as not liking Narnia much. In TLtWatW, she wants to leave Aslan and thinks the mice are yuckky at the Resurrection scene and in Prince C, Susan heard Aslan calling, but lied, rather than following because she was scared. There’s some pretty good set-up.
The dark=bad thing, however, I don’t buy at all. False Aslans (aka Islam)=Bad, yes, but he’s writing a Christian series, that’s to be expected though. That’s balanced by Aravis from Prince Caspian and whatshisname from Last Battle, the Calorman who gets into Heaven because he followed Aslan, regardless of the name he prayed to (which pisses some fundimentalists off.). Lewis is clear that he doesn’t like the Islamic beliefs and some of the cultural aspects, but I don’t see any anti-dark-skinned feelings at all.
Fenris
I agree with you there about Jill. I think that’s why I didn’t like The Silver Chair so much.
OK, I see your point there. I forgot about her lying about hearing Aslan. But growing up does mean growing up sexually as well. I figured that’s why they made the “nylons and lipstick” comment. I suppose the point is that Susan’s a bit of a skeptic and a realist, which aren’t qualities that make you succeptable to the Christian faith, generally. She didn’t really like “fairy tales” as a kid, and she probably won’t grow to like them again when she’s older, either…she’ll just spend all that time wishing she was 21 again, I guess. Today, I imagine that Susan is dyeing her hair and going in for facelifts, and grumbling that her whole family of origin is dead because they went in for that “Narnia nonsense”.
He seemed to mention over and over how dark-skinned the Calormen were, and how fair the Narnians, etc. and the English children were in contrast. Aravis and that other Calorman were simply exceptions to the rule, the good Samaritans, so to speak, who rose above their native culture. He doesn’t say that it’s their skin color that makes them bad, but he does make the contrast very sharply between the dark Calormen and the fair Narnians/English.
Oh, and if Tash is the opposite of Aslan, does that mean that Tash = Satan? I’m not sure if I got that.
Tamex, I always took it as Tash being equated with any/every deity other than the Christian God, rather than specifically with Satan.
My ranks:
1)Voyage of the Dawn Treader
2)The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
3)Prince Caspian
4)Horse and His Boy
5)Magician’s Nephew
6)Silver Chair
7)Last Battle
I disagree about the skeptic thing, since a skeptic in Susan’s position would have to accept Aslan. I mean, she’s got visible, demonstrable proof.
On the other hand your description of Susan’s later life is exactly how I saw it too (regarding the facelifts and stuff), but a friend pointed out that in another context, having her entire family and friends die might shake her out of her shallowness and give her a chance to grow again, and Aslan might have been giving her a second chance by not having her on that train too. I like to hope that Susan was changed by the loss of her family and went on to become a better person. Apparently, an English nun wrote two or three books about what happened to Susan afterwards, but Lewis’s estate wouldn’t let 'em be (re?)published.
And while I entirely agree with you that having everyone killed as an “Oh, by the way…” mention is pretty creepy, to a Christian (I’m not one, btw) the knowledge that they’re in Heaven and save in Aslan’s “paws” makes it a happy-ish ending. But it’s a weird point of view for me to try to grasp, and I think that that moment in the series is Lewis’s weakest point.
If you wan to see a great portrayal of the Christian Heaven by Lewis, he wrote a book called “The Great Divorce” that’s 2/3ds wonderful and 1/3 not bad.
Hmmm…I’ll have to go back and read the books again (not a problem there! :D), since, now that you mention it, there was a bunch of fair Narnians, swarthy Calormen comments.
It could just be that he was playing with the English/French vs Islam Crusades type thing and let’s face it: English and French people are lighter skinned than Middle-Eastern types…but…he may have focused on the skin-color more than the cultural differences (outside of A Horse and His Boy).
I’m pretty sure that for Lewis, Tash=Satan or at least Tash=Mohammed (or Allah)=False Prophet=Tool of Satan. I’m not sure where the bird-headed motif comes from.
Fenris
Just a thought about The Last Battle. I’m Catholic, though not what you’d call devout and lately I’m barely practicing; I’ve actually been drifting toward Wicca over the last couple of years though it remains to be seen which path I’ll end up taking.
That said, I do have a problem with Lewis’s depiction of the Calormen folks, but I just love the rest of the imagery. Aslan, the end of Narnia, Father Time blowing his horn and crushing out the sun, the talking Dogs who bound to the Prince’s aid… It’s not the Christian imagery that draws me, it’s the idea of (don’t know if I’m articulating this well enough) Aslan as a force of nature, the wild fantasy of it all (what volume is the stuff about the dancing wood nymphs etc. in?), the loyalty and love mostly as exemplified by the animals. The part in The Last Battle where the dogs are asking how they can help makes me tear up.
I agree about the plot feeling rushed, though. All that beautiful descriptive writing, wrapped up with “Hey, you’re all dead!” is a tiny bit of a let down. And I’ve never quite liked the very end, where Aslan turns into something (or Someone, hint hint) else. I kind of like the whole Lion as God thing.
The whole Calormene=Islam deal is one I did not notice as a child but one which leaps out at me now and is discomfiting to say the least. Lewis has very little good to say about the Calormenes; they’re pretty fair storytellers, he admits, but that’s about it. They’re “unwashed,” they smell of “garlic, onions, and…piles of refuse,” their streets are full of “beggars, ragged children, hens, stray dogs and bare-footed slaves”; their poetry is boring and lifeless, the entire nation is described as “that great and cruel country.” Yes, there are a couple of nice Calormenes, but the thread running through the books is that they’re bad news as a people and as a culture.
Which wouldn’t bother me so much if it weren’t clear that Lewis decided to connect them with Islam. Garlic and onions? Bare-footed slaves? Darker skins? A desert country with dry mountains nearby? The Calormenes carry curved scimitars and they bargain in the marketplace and they have Grand Viziers and they wear turbans and they carry important people on litters and they have Arabic sounding names like Rishda Tarkaan and Rabadash and Azrooh and Arsheesh… and I could go on for quite a good deal longer.
Maybe it flew in 1950s England. Probably it did. I don’t think it flies now. At best, it’s embarrassing. At worst, it’s downright nasty; it certainly has a nasty tone to it. The importance of the Calormenes to books 5 and 7 is much of what makes them rate below the rest, IMHO. Horse and His Boy is a decent story, but the lack of imagination or sensitivity when it came to describing the Calormenes really impacts the book.
My memory of Tash is a little dim, but from what I remember Tash’s appearance sounded a lot like that of Pazuzu, the Babylonian demon which was used in The Exorcist.
-Ben
Wow, how neat! I’m glad I opened this thread, because CS Lewis is one of my favorite authors. I’ll have to read the books again though, because for the life of me I can’t remember Prince Caspian at all. 
Here’s a review of the Narnia books, set up in contrast to L. Frank Baum’s Oz. Articles like this provide the only reason that I still peruse the Salon web site.
I just wanted to highlight one quote from the above article, which may bear some relevance to the views of some others posting here up to now: