It’s been a long, long time since I’ve read The Last Battle and a while (but not quite so long) since I’ve read The Horse & His Boy.
For me, it’s not so much the good/evil thing as the descriptions of the Calamorines . They’re distasteful (to me (who admittedly lives 50 years later in a society that pays lip service to multiculturalism and has an American imperialistic outlook on the world rather than a British imperialistic outlook). It’s like reading descriptions where all the Indian characters said “How,” did war cries, and mumbled things like “me likee fire water” all the time.
Maybe I’m being wooshed here, but the Calormene God is Tash, not Satan. I don’t even think, as allegory, that Tash would equal Satan; he was a evil deity, but not a fallen angel who was the antagonist of all humanity.
Lewis was a Christian writing with an explicitly Christian worldview. Pullman is a devout atheist opposed to Christianity. Ergo he throws the baby out with the bathwater. He does so, no doubt, while thinking himself broadminded.
He isn‘t, just as you say, but then again, Satan isn‘t a “fallen angel who was the antagonist of all humanity“, either.
At least, according to the Jewish theology I grew up with. As far as I can tell, one evil demon is pretty much any evil demon, as far as children’s literature is concernd.
Yes. it would be good if I could remember, but I can’t, which is why I said I can’t in the post you quoted, remember? :dubious:
Agreed. Maybe the comments are taken out of context?
The article posted in the OP seems to be from a interview with The Observer, the same newspaper thatwrotr the article in the first place, not his blog or something. Thus, if there is more to the story, The Observer ain’t telling.
Anyway, why I agree with the guy re: other anti-religious thing he has said in the past, I don’t agree this time. Perhaps this is a case of "You are a member of a group I disagree with the. Thus, you believe “X”, “Y”, and “Z”, as seen (Or rather, reacted to) here
Actually, it would be more correct to say that Calamorines resemble Arabs who don’t explicitly worship Jesus, but their failure to worship “Jesus” does not preclude them from salvation if their hearts and lives are righteous.
The Hermit who takes in Aravis and the horses? Digory and his mother? Aslan? The Badger and Reepicheep and all the good animals who fed Tirian and Jewel the unicorn and Mr. and Mrs. Beaver and Emeth the Calormene and the Good Wizard in charge of the Dufflepuds? None of these characters display love? Caritas, self-sacrificing love?
Pullman has also dissed Tolkien: in Nov. 2004 he said "'The Lord of the Rings is not a serious book because it does not say
anything interesting, or new, or truthful about the human condition,"he
told Winterson in an interview in the December issue of Harpers & Queen. http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/tv_film/newsid_3224000/3224300.stm
For my money Tolkien is a genius who wrote a masterpiece.
I found Pullman’s over praised and over rated Dark Materials trilogy to be pompous, irritating, and almost unreadable. I never got into the Narnia books (as I did LOTR) but at least they’re readable.
I couldn’t remember at all - like I said, it’s been a while. And those are the two books I’m least likely to re-read because those descriptions bother me.
But I’ll remember next time that you’re the person to copy and paste from.
Well, I can see a little of the mysogyny. Remember in “The Last Battle”, we find out the kids returned to Narnia after a train crash. So basically they’ve died. But Susan, the oldest girl, didn’t return to Narnia because, as Lucy explains, she’s become more interested in boys and nylons and cosmetics and doesn’t want to talk about “childish” things like Narnia anymore.
I always felt that was tremendously unfair and that CS Lewis seems to have empathy for girls (still children) but not for women. I still enjoy the stories but I can see where some of the complaints come from.
Well, that’s certainly decent of Lewis, isn’t it? It’s “Oh, even though you didn’t think you were worshiping [Jesus], you really were, because you’re a nice person, so you get to go to heaven.”
He’s not discussing the Narnia book’s literary merits or lack thereof. What he’s saying, and what he’s been saying, is that the Narnia books are propaganda for Lewis’s version of Christianity and his views of the world…they’re not just harmless entertainment. And therefore, parents need to know that their children will be receiving such messages when they read the books.
I’ve just finished reading them - I had read the first before, but not the other five.
My biggest problem is their lack of humor - excepting The Magician’s Nephew which had a great scene in London - very funny. The Last Battle was a total mess - I think Lewis wanted to show the end, but he lost nerve to present all the horror in the Bible. The group of people who refused to see was a bit offensive. And everyone dies in a train wreck painlessly - give me a break!
But the comment about fear of sexuality was dead on. Remember that by the end of the Lion … the children were quite old. Yet when they returned to Earth, and to childhood, they were as innocent as when they had left. Some of The Horse and His Boy was about protecting Lucy (I think) from the evil man who wanted to marry her. Yes, it was the hoary old plot of attempted rapine by a swarthy Arab, but there is definitely a context of fear of intimacy. The hero and heroine of that book do get married, but it is presented as a marriage of best buds, not a romance. There is no romantic love, or even an approximation of it, anywhere in these books, and all marriages seem to be plotted grudgingly by Lewis to ensure there are descendants later.
May I point out that Lewis wrote an interesting essay for F&SF in the late '50s advocating that prostitutes be shipped to Mars along with the first crew (who would of course be all male) in order to relieve certain tensions?
One more thing I didn’t like - in too many of the books Aslan pops up whenever needed as a literal deus ex machina. In the first book it seemed that Lewis was afraid to draw suspense over more than about five pages for fear that his young readers would die of heart attacks or something. He did a bit better in the later books, though.
I think Pullman is hardly the person to be disparaging a children’s books series for being propagandistic. Not to mention that, as others here have pointed out, his criticism is largely without merit. I haven’t read the books since I was kid (actually, my feminist, pacifist, anti-Catholic parents read them to me) so I don’t remember them well enough to argue specific points, but I certainly don’t remember them they way Pullman portrays them.
As a general rule, I find it’s a good idea to avoid reading the opinions of authors you like. You’re almost always bound to be disappointed and sometimes shocked.
Hmm. I interpreted that as she was just at the wrong age, that a few years earlier peter would have been as bad. But I haven’t read it for a while. There are some gender problems, but I didn’t think more than most books – certainly Lucy, Jill, etc are great.
On the whole, I do have problems with Narnia, but think Pullman’s attack misses the point and is counterproductive…
Exactly. This isn’t mysogyny, it’s (most likely, in any case) decrying what Lewis sees as a childish desire to not be childish.
To quote Lewis himself:
So, Lewis doesn’t feel the tendencies he writes Susan as having as being female - he, himself, admits to possessing them when he was younger - although they are a bad thing. Susan may, or may not, grow out of that stage, but it has nothing to do with her sex.
I think, actually, that this is an example not of the misogyny that Pullman’s siting, but the supposed ‘fear of sexuality’.
Of course, that, again, is a rather bad misinterpretation of Lewis’s ideas - you can grow into an adult (and, thus, a sexual being) without discarding the trappings of childhood, in his opinion. Susan’s failing isn’t ‘growing up’, but rather failing, in Lewis’s eyes, to truly grow up.
I think you can disagree with Lewis’s ideas without misinterpretting them, once you understand them. Unfortunately, I have to admit, Lewis fails somewhat here, as Pullman and violet’s interpretations of the passage are quite valid - if you don’t know what Lewis has written elsewhere. I don’t think he makes it clear in the book why Susan’s behaviour is bad - in my initial reading of it, I got much the same feeling as Pullman apparently did. It wasn’t until I first encountered the quote above that what Lewis most likely intended clicked.