I love The Chronicles of Narnia, but the last time I read them I couldn’t get through The Last Battle. Maybe it was just Lewis-fatigue by the seventh book, but I was struck more this last reading by the subjugation of Narnia than I was by the joy of the coming, better world.
Plus I have always, ever since I was a kid, thought Susan got the shaft.
Wow, lots of thought-provoking posts. Thanks for all the responses!
This, I think, was one of the problems I had getting further along in the series. I wanted to read about the Pevensie kids, and I never became much invested in the new characters introduced- Caspian and Eustace, for example. I’ll have to give it a whirl again.
Thanks for the clarification about Susan. (and the mini-debate that broke out was fascinating-very interesting to read the different points of view about it)
I have another question- In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Jadis had ruled over Narnia for some time, keeping it eternally winter. Her reign had gone on for a good century or so IIRC. Why does it take Aslan so long to show up and sort things out? Did he show up because the Pevensies did(thus making it possible to fulfill the prophecy about Adam’s flesh and Adam’s bone sitting on thrones in Cair Paravel?) Was he biding his time until the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve managed to find their way into Narnia?
I’ve always thought it was the appointed time and that all the right things had to come together. After all, he’s not a tame lion. 
One of those chicken and egg things - will he come back when all the necessary things some together, or will all the necessary things come together when it’s time for him to come back?
And I’m not sure (it’s been a long time and I’m working from memory here) but I think the White Queen was a descendent of Jadis. At least that’s the way I understood it when I went through them the first time.
Right. And “Aslan’s place” is the same as “the real world”/Heaven in Lewis’s tract The Great Divorce. Susan is likely to find post mortem that she “has always been in Heaven.”
I pretty much read the lot out of order.* TLWATW* goes into Prince Caspian goes into Voyage of the Dawn Treader–those are the Pevensie children books–but I think those are intelligible out of order. Eustace from …Dawn Treader is in Silver Chair with Jill, & The Last Battle (my least favorite) also features them (with small cameos of some of the others), so I guess read those in order. The Magician’s Nephew is seen through the eyes of Digory Kirke (who would grow up to be Professor Kirke, but you don’t need to know that to appreciate it) & works reasonably on its own (though with references to TLWATW). And The Horse & His Boy (my favorite) involves no travel between England & Narnia & is all world-building–though the Pevensies-as-Kings-&-Queens cameo.
As Tolkien said about Faerie, it also contains our world & everything in it.
But I remember reading The Last Battle as a child & (mistakenly, I hope) getting the impression that England also was ending, which was frustrating. But then I grew up in fundagelical America a generation after Lewis & was getting apocalypticism from other quarters.
No, she *is *Jadis. While Digory was retrieving the apple under orders, Jadis swiped one for herself. It gave her immortality (as in, not subject to dying of old age or illness) but Aslan told Digory that because she stole it she would, as the rhyme by the orchard gate warned, “find her heart’s desire and find despair”. She would come to loathe her own life and abominate the apple she ate, which was why Digory brought one back to be planted in Narnia. Only when that tree died was she able to invade.
The Horse and His Boy just might be my favorite one now, too, but it’s definitely a lot more deep and subtle than the others. About 90% of it went straight over my head as a child; it was only when I re-read the series a few years ago that I came to appreciate it.
Upon further review, I have decided that England HAD ended by the “time” the Pevensies got into Aslan’s Country–from a certain point of view. But that’s not the same as England’s history ending in 1955 or so.
I’m of two minds on which of the Chronicles is best. No, three. Actually, make that four.
In terms of character development, the best written and highest artistic achievement of the seven is The Silver Chair.
The best story, plotwise, is The Horse and His Boy.
The one I turn to for comfort in dark times is actually two: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (because it’s the lightest and most purely enjoyable) and The Magician’s Nephew (because, even though the ending is a cheat, it’s a cheat I understand needing).
Worst date in fiction. 
Maybe, but she’s still a dem fine woman.
Point taken.
It seems The Last Battle isn’t especially well liked. Is it seen as one of the stronger/weaker books of the series? What do you guys think?
Thanks again for all the responses!
Dawn Treader is the one I find most enjoyable in the series, and it has its moments of depth, too (Eustace’s baptism, for instance). I like the theme of adventure and exploration just for its own sake. Horse, though, is much deeper.
It’s certainly a very different style feel than the others, so it’s quite easy to like the others but not Battle. One might say that it’s stronger than Caspian, say, but I don’t think that that equates to better. Part of the problem, I think, is that it’s more constrained than some of the others: Lewis needed a book of eschatology to finish the series, but eschatology can’t really fit into the same style that he used for the theological ramblings in some of the other books. He didn’t have to explore the concept of the Trinity in The Horse and His Boy, for instance: He did so because it fit in cleanly with the story he was telling right there.
I used to enjoy this one, but I’m now extremely uncomfortable with the idea of savage, inhumane people who just so happen to look like and share some cultural characteristics with stereotypical Arabs.
One thing to remeber about Susan. It wasn’t because she had gotten superficial. It was because she flat out denied Aslan. She had met him, adventured with him and even saw his resurection. But in the end she refused to believe and rejected it all, saying it was all made up and games. Which is the big sin in Christianity.
I’m not a Christian, but I am religious and it’s for that reason I find Susan fascinating.
I think, as Dangermon pointed out, that Susan’s trajectory isn’t finished. The apostle Peter denied Jesus, but comes round. Susan has the time to come around. She’s got the same change that Edmund had.
Edmund feels put out and goes astray, but comes back to the fold. Digory flirts with the dark side during his grief as his mother’s illness. But what Susan has to contend with is greater than any of the other characters in the Narnia series. Every one and everything that she knows, aside from her material objects, is wiped away in The Last Battle. And she will either be driven away by her experience of a cruel God / fate or comforted by the fact they are happy.
Susan’s the only one who has a really meaningful crisis of faith - but one that happens outside the book and in the minds of the readers.
Well, they weren’t genetically savage & inhumane, as evidenced by Aravis (and, external to that story, Emeth from the The Last Battle); I also think Bree had some good things to say about his Calormene master. It was more that they had a corrupt government. Somehow I doubt that the Calormenes did anything much worse than, say, Saudi Arabia.
Skald, the only thing Bree had good to say about his master was that he himself was treated well because a warhorse is so expensive. But he flat-out told said Shasta would be better off dead than being a human slave in the Tarkaan’s house.
Second Star, there are two things you have to remember about The Last Battle. One is that it’s the most overtly religious book of the bunch, and a lot of people don’t particularly care for that aspect. The other thing is that it is, for about the first 3/4 of the book, really goddam bleak. It’s a slow, steady progression of everything you love about Narnia being systematically ground into the dirt. As joyous and beautiful as the last part of the book is, it’s still not really a book to just pick up and while away a lazy afternoon with.
Quite true. I recall reading it as a youth and thinking, “Okay. Things look pretty bad for the good guys, but I am sure that Aslan will show up to kick ass, take names, and give courage with a kiss to the forehead any second now. Maybe no in this chapter, but certainly in the next.” Then I’d get to the next chapter and yell, “What the hell! You can’t kill Glenstorm the Centaur! No, you can’t! Stop it!”