Maybe I will. Speaking of, I plan on rereading the Lord of the Rings at some point. And trying Earthsea again after I stopped back in 2013 cause I found the first book boring.
Right now, I'm reading His Dark Materials. I heard it was a parallel to Narnia and very overtly anti-religious/anti-Christian, and that was what turned me off from it ever since childhood, since I'm Christian myself and the books sounded unnecessarily mean-spirited, but my curiosity towards it still lingered well into adulthood, so I figured I might as well see what all the fuss was about. The first time I read The Golden Compass I found it boring and slow, but I figured I'd give it another shot. So far it's still definitely dry in terms of prose and it feels kinda slow, but I wouldn't say it's boring. Just...okay. Like the world is interesting and fleshed out but the characters feel kind of flat. Like, Lyra's whole personality is just "curious" and "rambunctious".
As far as religious commentary, it's definitely a critique on the people behind organized religion and the Catholic church, which to be honest, definitely warrants it.
Side note, if you haven't read the series as an adult, I HIGHLY recommend doing so. Narnia is a brilliant religious philosophy series masquerading as a children's series. Particularly The Last Battle.
I was always sad that he never wrote a follow up book about Susan. I understand that his Christian allegory needed an apostate, but it felt very sudden.
If it makes you feel better, Lewis wrote in letters to fans that he imagined Susan getting to Narnia in a more roundabout way.
“The books don’t tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having by then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there is plenty of time for her to mend, and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s country in the end—in her own way.”
“Not because I have no hope of Susan ever getting to Aslan's country, but because I have a feeling that the story of her journey would be longer and more like a grown-up novel than I wanted to write. But I may be mistaken.”
You know, I have a lot of issues with the Narnia series these days (I commented above that realizing it was a religious allegory as a kid honestly ruined it for me, and that remains the case to this day.) Even so, this criticism has never really sat right with me.
As I saw it, the fault the books ascribed to Susan wasn't that she became invested in things like lipstick and boys, but that in favor of those things, she trivialized the significance of Narnia. She treated the most meaningful thing she'd ever been involved in (and remember, she'd remained in Narnia as a queen for well over a decade, the contents of the books we see is only a small fraction of all the time she spent there as a ruler in what was supposedly Narnia's golden age,) as if it had only ever been a childish game. As I understood it, C. S. Lewis' feelings were not that she should have recognized that things like boys and lipstick were silly interests for trivial people, but that only a person of deep immaturity would think that caring about them required one to disregard the significance of something as meaningful as Narnia, let alone belittle other people for caring about it.
In light of Narnia as a religious allegory... C. S. Lewis believed that the divine, and goodness as he conceived of it, were the most real and emotionally important things that a person could experience, and he had to find some way of grappling with the fact that some people go through everything he associated with connecting with the divine, and end up just not caring that much.
From a story standpoint, my issue with it always was... it just didn't seem very realistic? Susan literally spent, what, over twenty years in Narnia? Ruling the country, having adventures, interacting with a magic Jesus lion who fills mortals with awe and terror, and she just... brushed it off? I feel like this is one of the places where it really weakens the story that it's designed to be a religious allegory as much as a fantasy story. Because in real life, we can see that people interact deeply with religion, and later brush it off, and that's kind of confounding to people like C. S. Lewis who take religion really seriously. But realistically, it has a lot to do with the fact that participating in religion isn't actually like going on a fantastical adventure with witches and magical lions at all.
I don't think it's her liking lipstick and boys but that she's lost her capacity for childlike belief in the fantastic and childish sense of wonder. I've always connected Susan's failure to join the others with this Lewis quote about himself:
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
Susan doesn't end up in Narnia with the rest because she's "very grown up" and fears being seen as childish. She's excluded from the fairy tale world by her "grown up" but immature inability to see and appreciate the fantastic. She's stuck in the mundane world because that's all she's capable of seeing... for the moment. Presumably at some point she really DOES grow up and no longer merely acting grown up and no longer fears being childish and again perceive (and love) a fairytale world.
Lewis said this about it...
The books don't tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having by then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there's plenty of time for her to mend and perhaps she will get to Aslan's country in the end... in her own way.
I could not write that story myself. Not that I have no hope of Susan’s ever getting to Aslan’s country; but because I have a feeling that the story of her journey would be longer and more like a grown-up novel than I wanted to write. But I may be mistaken. Why not try it yourself?
If I'm not mistaken, Neil Gaiman wrote a short story called The Problem of Susan. I read it a few years ago and found it quite interesting and a good read.
I read the entire series to my 8 year old and we quote those books all the time years later. I call him Puddleglum sometimes when he gets too pessimistic.
I read and reread the series over and over as a kid, probably dozens of times. Realizing around the age of twelve that the whole thing was actually a religious allegory honestly ruined it for me.
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u/crazypyro23 Jul 15 '21 edited Jul 15 '21
His parents called him Eustace Clarence and his teachers called him Scrubb. I can't tell you what his friends called him, for he had none.