Let’s also not forget the description fo the city, either. Lots of people more or less going about their lives happily, and I don’t recall anyone being a jerk just because (except for a Certain Plot-Related Character, but that’s a bit different). And then there’s the king, who was pretty decent by my lights, but unable to really stop A Certain Plot-Related Character from doing Something Naughty. And even said Plot-Related Character did straighten himself up… eventually, and after a lot of hammering by A Certain Religious Allegory.
The dwarfs shoot the horses as they come charging up the hill in order to keep the fight “even” broke my heart as a kid. Heck, I don’t even know if I remember it right. I just hated it.
As a little kid, I liked *Horse and His Boy *least because it offered no fantasy mechanism for getting me from my world to Narnia. As a teen, I started to like the story for itself. As an adult, I still love the story, but I seriously have a problem with the stereotyped Arab thing **jsgoddess **mentioned. It only gets more explicit in *The Last Battle *with Tash. I appreciate the explanation that Calormenes who imagine a loving god are really worshiping the Real God and those who imagine a devil even in Aslan’s name are not (I was raised Unitarian and liked it, so the “whichever path you take to Grace is good” theme delighted me), but it doesn’t change the fact that almost all the Calormenes are devil-worshipers. And by implication, that C.S.L. imagined most Muslims to be evil. It may not be racism, but it is a pretty ugly cultural bias.
That’s my problem with TH&HB. I don’t remember reading it as a child, and when I tried as an adult there was too much of the … how do I say this tactfully … “reflection of the mindset of a mid-20th-Century Englishman that may not fit well with today’s mores and values.”
I may be remembering incorrectly, but weren’t the Calormenes polytheistic? I think they worshiped a pantheon of gods, with Tash being the most powerful. The Calormenes are obviously inspired by real cultures of the Middle East, but if they aren’t monotheists then that would make their religion not directly analogous to Islam.
Has anyone else heard that C.S. Lewis made the Calormenes an Arabic-style (Arabesque?) culture largely because he’d disliked The Arabian Nights as a child? I think I read that years ago, but I can’t remember where so I don’t know if there’s any truth to it.
Heh. I think I appreciate the use of quasi-Turks & really showing a different culture that’s still an Earth-like human culture. Also it introduced Archenland.
But then it’s not so much rejecting the lion as lying about her own past experiences. Maybe that is like denying the holy spirit, somehow. Or it’s something even worse in Lewis’s mindjust to lie to yourself to fit in with others’ ideas of what is real.
Of course, the reign of the Pevensies is a bit awkward, structurally. Lewis never said whether they married or had children. When I was a child, this didn’t bug me so much, but now it sort of does. Susan got to grow to adulthood as a queen, but how did that effect her? It seems that either she did find love & leave a husband and/or children behind in Narnia, or she didn’t & so somehow in hindsight it all seemed a child’s idea of adulthood. Either would be a bit strange to look back on, unless somehow it dropped out of her mind enough that it could be written off as a shared fancy.
So maybe Susan’s not as nuts to deny it as she sounds.
> Has anyone else heard that C.S. Lewis made the Calormenes an Arabic-style
> (Arabesque?) culture largely because he’d disliked The Arabian Nights as a
> child?
That doesn’t fit with anything I’ve read about Lewis. I just did a Google to find anybody else making that claim and the only thing I’ve been able to find are people claiming that Lewis included Calormene because he like The Arabian Nights as a child.
I can wrap my head around this a little more easily now. When I was doing my poking through Wiki most of the references to Susan cited that one quote from the book which says she is interested in “lipstick and nylons and invitations”. That was what made me think “…and?” But I understand now that she acts as if none of it ever happened. Which, wow-as a few have pointed out, she reigned as Queen of Narnia into adulthood before returning back to our world. That’s some hardcore denial right there!
This makes me feel I should read the books in between rather than jumping straight to The Last Battle. It sounds as if it’ll have more impact that way. I’d be ok with the religious aspect, I think. I’m not a Christian myself, but religion interests me in general, and even though the whole thing may not coincide with my personal beliefs, I don’t think it’d bother me unless it was really really preachy.
This thread is definitely interesting reading-thanks, all!
Actually, Susan was being courted by foreign princes. In fact, that’s why they were in Calormen in The Horse and His Boy. But she decided, after seeing him in his native habitat so to speak, that she didn’t want the Calormene prince. That’s what made it a little dicey for them to leave, as it looked as if the prince might just decide to take her by force, regardless.
It seems that the four Pevensie children got whisked out of Narnia just about the time they would have been taking on true adult, dynastic responsibilities, getting married and such. I’ve always wondered how it felt for them to come back to England and be children again after they’d been not just adults but rulers in Narnia. It must have been quite the adjustment.
My interpretation was that Susan was old enough that she could have married, but never got around to choosing from amongst her many suitors (and in fact, may have enjoyed having so many suitors more than she would have enjoyed choosing even the best of them), while Lucy was just about getting to the age where marriage was a real possibility, but not yet old enough that her being single was at all remarkable.
My favorite, by far, is The Magician’s Nephew–Lewis (IMO) never in any of his other writings* captured the…atmosphere…the texture he got in TMN-from the unnatural stillness of The Wood Between The Worlds to the weight and tiredness and fallen grandeur of Charn to the absolutely joyful singing of Narnia into existance (especially the bit where Aslan sings the stars in and they join in the song in harmony) to the very, VERY intense moment where Digory passes the test that Adam failed** TMN is easily my favorite. Plus, Uncle Andrew’s attempt to ‘court’ that Dem Fine Woman Jadis is gut-bustingly funny.
*Maybe The Great Divorce, but only maybe…
**He didn’t take the apple.
I’m torn about Nephew. On the one hand, it has the best moment in all the Chronicles, when Aslan notices* Digory’s fear and worry about his mother’s illness and says “Grief is great. Only you and I in this land know that yet. Let us be good to one another.”
But…I can’t help but think that, even for a kid’s book, having Mabel Kirke magically healed is a cheat. It’s a didactic mistake. What Aslan said to Digory when He broke his rule about explaining what would have happened** is correct: Death is a natural part of human existence, and sometimes it IS better to die. Continued life is not always a mercy.
I know why Lewis did it that way, of course. I just think it was an artistic error and at odds with the aim of his books.
*Well–takes notice of. Being Aslan, he knew all along, of course. That is what “Aslan” means.
**Yeah, that’s right. Aslan broke a rule. He’s wise enough to know that sometimes you have to. That is also what “Aslan” means. “Aslan” means a lot of things.
The recent movie version of Prince Caspian touches on this. I don’t remember exactly what happens in the scene, but at the beginning one of the boys (I think Peter) gets into a fight at the station (maybe defending another child?) shortly before they are all transported back to Narnia. Susan reminds him that they aren’t Kings and Queens anymore and have to act like ordinary children, and whichever of the boys it is says he knows but that it’s difficult.
There’s also a bit of rivalry between Peter and Caspian later in the film, with Peter feeling that he is properly the High King of Narnia.
I see your point but I always read it as “Your mother was sick and that gave you the opportunity to make the right choice. Now that you have made the right choice (in following my will and laws) you can see in a way you’ll understand that it only brings goodness.” not “Ok-you won the prize! Poof! Mommy’s better.”
Digory was…what? 8? at the time? I feel like Aslan was meeting Digory on Digory’s level–saying “Yup, she won’t live forever, but I can make her not be sick any more.”
But even granting (and I’m not sure I do) that it was a mistake, it’s still so much more my favorite than any of the others, I’d forgive a hell of a lot more than just that.
The only other Narnia book that even comes close for me is Wardrobe–and mainly only in the first half–once the thaw starts, (to me) the book loses all that weird, otherworldly atmosphere and becomes a fantasy novel. Nephew never loses the otherworldliness.
This puzzles me… Isn’t the otherworldliness precisely what makes a fantasy novel? Or, at least, a good one? You’re enough of a connoisseur of the genre that I’m certain you have some subtle, nuanced distinction you’re making here, but darned if I can tell what it is.
A passage at the end of The Last Battle, with the Pevensies seeing their parents waving at them from a bit of a distance away left me feeling that Mum and Dad Pevensie died at the same time as their kids (although not on the train). In any event, there they were in the “real” England as opposed to the “Shadow Lands” England where Susan had been left behind.
But I had never thought of them as being deceased at the time of the train trip.
Am I the only one who thought that Susan had lost, not only her brothers, sister, and cousin, but also her parents, in one fell swoop?
I can’t say whether it was an artistic error or not, I just want to point out that Aslan is supposed to be Christ. And Jesus Christ is most famous for…healing people who ask him to.
Peter says they were on the train: “[His parents] were on their way to Bristol. I’d only heard they were going that morning. But Edmund said they’d bound to be going by that train.”
There, that should cover spoilers.