I hereby assert that the seven fantasy novels written by C. S. Lewis known as The Chronicles of Narnia are a bunch of crap. I will justify this claim. First let me state my premises.
C. S. Lewis wrote these books as children’s books, obviously. I do not believe that there can be a good book which is exclusively a children’s book. Certain books are entertaining for children but entirely worthless from an adult’s perspective. Other books, though commonly thought of as children’s literature, are highly entertaining for adults. I read the Narnia books when I was young, roughly eight years old. I even read some of them twice. But as best I can recall, back then my little brain didn’t really evaluate books. Anything that wasn’t a total bore got put in the good category, and was even considered worthy of a reread if I had some spare time. Somewhere between there and adulthood, my standards advanced. I will now say what I think about the Narnia books from my adult stance.
First of all, each book is an allegory for some aspect of Lewis’ take on Christianity. There’s nothing wrong with that. What’s wrong is that the allegories Lewis wants to tell don’t fit the structure he chooses. I see three big problems:
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Each Narnia book is over 200 pages. This often requires Lewis to pad the tale with filler material. In three of the books, the probelm is particularly severe: Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Horse and his Boy and The Magician’s Nephew.
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Useless static characters. Frequently the big characters have no purpose. Peter and Susan are blanks in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Eustace is worthless in The Silver Chair. Lewis typically makes the point he wants to make with only one character, and the others are milling around trying to find some way to be interesting.
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Endings are forced. Prince Caspian, in particular, stands out for the “Aslan showed up and everything was suddenly okay” ending. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Magician’s Nephew have no drama in their conclusions whatsoever.
These are the big problems. However, they all tie together in one really big problem: Lewis didn’t have a central plan for any of the stories. His idea in each book was to write an allegory. Once he had the allegory going, he simply stuck on whatever bits and pieces he could come up with at random locations. Consider, just as an example, the listings of creatures in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Any creature from any fairy tale tradition or mythological base shows up. Any at all. There’s no organization, no logic to it. He just needs to make the paragraphs long enough. So the witch has half of Greek mythology on her side, and Aslan has other half? Doesn’t that somewhat spoil the “ye olde England” feel that Lewis was making a feeble attempt at building? Essentailly Lewis needed to make those paragraphs long enough, so he just stuck in whatever he could think of without worrying about whether it added up to a coherent whole.
(We could look at any number of other authors for comparison’s sake. I would suggest Tolkien in The Hobbit; he understood that the story becomes stronger when there’s at least a little attention paid to plausibility of what the protagonist is seeing.)
The Narnia books have one more weakness: writing. The Lion , the Witch and the Wardrobe has acceptable writing. Wehn Lucy and Susan ride on Aslan’s back it almost approaches good. The other books are atrocious. Here’s the start of The Silver Chair
You will not think for yourself while reading my books. I will tell you what to think, and you will obey.
