Why did I choose to read this series to the girls?
Mostly it's because I enjoy fantasy and science fiction stories. I like the direct, exciting adventures in them, and I like that the well-written ones are usually also morality stories examining the human condition. They are a great way to get us thinking about who we are and our place in the world.
The Narnia series is a fantasy adventure written for younger children, in simpler language. The books are also famous classics, and recommended reading for children. I'd read them as a young teen, and my recollection was that they are fun and exciting.
So, I'd been looking forward to the girls being old enough to listen to me read aloud these books, and I started out very positive about them. But sadly, on re-reading them, I discovered a few imperfections. Such is life.
With the books being so well known, I don't need to give too much explanation of them here. Mostly, my aim in this post is to briefly put in writing my thoughts on re-reading the books, and the girls' reactions to the books (as usual with my blogging book reviews, I haven't done any research on what others have thought of the books -- this is just our opinions). Nonetheless, a few initial words of explanation may help.
Published in the early to mid 1950s, the books are, in order of story chronology (Lewis wrote the books in a different order):
- The Magician's Nephew
- The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
- The Horse and His Boy
- Prince Caspian
- The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
- The Silver Chair
- The Last Battle
(The only book in the series that does not centre on any of the English children is The Horse and His Boy. This book also does not centre on Narnia, which we learn is a small kingdom in a much wider world, but instead on another neighbouring land.)
The first book, The Magician's Nephew, is set a couple of generations (England time) before all the other books, in late Victorian times. In it, we learn that there are uncountably many worlds in existence, of which our seemingly-recognisable world of England is one such world. Magic is used to travel between worlds, and in this first book the nephew (Digory) and his friend (Polly) use magic rings that the magician had developed to travel to Narnia just at its creation.
All the other books are set (England time) around the time that Lewis was writing the books -- that is, they are set over a period of a few years during and immediately after the Second World War.
Each time the English children (there are eight English children who visit Narnia, though not all at the same time) enter Narnia, they are faced with some current event or crisis that they must participate in and help with. Mostly, but not always, this involves bad leaders who must be overthown. As with many sword and sorcery books, there is plenty of travelling and exploring. The majority of the series is direct storytelling, detailing the adventurers moving from place to place and their encounters in each new location.
Any explanation of the Narnia books must also include the fact that Lewis was a Christian who wrote theological works (both literary and argumentative essays), and the series includes many Christian and spiritual elements. But it is also a children's book series (in The Silver Chair he explicitly writes under the title that it is for children), and as such any interpretation needs to balance the theological references with the child-directed storytelling.
Firstly, then, the immediate good stuff about the books. Simply put, they are a great read. The girls were always happy to hear me read more, and the stories are exciting adventures. In this sense alone, they are well worth reading and I highly recommend them. Sometimes, the books were a little too exciting for the girls' ages (especially for Miya), and they preferred me to read them earlier in the day rather than in the evening before bed.
Now to the more negative stuff.
1. Mysteriousness
Some fantasy writers choose to develop their stories in ways that show that their worlds are systematically believable, understandable and law-like (even if the laws are very different from those of our world). Lewis is not this type of writer. In the Narnian universe, while things are on the surface similar to our own world, they are clearly quite different underneath. But we never really get to know, in a systematic way, how, where and why they are different. For example, we know that time runs differently between different worlds in the Narnian universe, such that minutes may pass in one world but many years in another, but time passes inconsistently and no one seems to try to work out any underlying rules. We also learn in Dawn Treader that the Narnian world is flat, not spherical, and the stars are people, not suns, but there is no explanation of how it could all possibly work; it is just left as a blunt fact.
As I see it, this lack of systematic explanation is part of Lewis' storytelling style. I think he is wanting to create a theological mysteriousness -- that in the Narnian universe the powers and gods are beyond understanding and are inherently mysterious. There is either an arbitrariness about the universe, or things happen at a level of explanation that is impossible for people to properly understand. Thus, in the Narnian world it is absurd to try to understand things beyond a fairly simple (Medieval, animal, child-like) level, and those who try to do so (eg Eustace initially in Dawn Treader) miss the point and miss out.
I have two thoughts about this:
Firstly, I think that, as a storytelling technique, sometimes this works for Lewis and sometimes it doesn't. I think that sometimes Lewis' writing comes across as too artificially mystery-mongering and a little bit clumsy. That is, even if one is wanting to show that one's story-world is inherently mysterious, as a writer one still needs to keep the storytelling clear, and not resort to convenient plot devices or just-so explanations that struggle for coherence.
Secondly, I have a touch of concern about too much mystery-mongering, and how it might influence our perception of our own world. Our actual world that we live in (not the Narnian story-universe) can be a complicated place, but whether it is complicated because it is inherently mysterious, or because it just takes a bit of effort to understand, is an open question. I think it is a mistake for us, in our real world, to give up too soon and assume it is mysterious, without first having a go at trying to figure it out.
So, I think there is a danger that the Narnian books can induce in people more of an inclination to just accept as mysterious things that are puzzling, without having a go at struggling to understand as well. The Narnian books can trick people into assuming that our world is just like the Narnian world, when we really don't know that it is. It can make people think that it is uncool and silly to be a bit like Eustace was initially, in trying to make rational sense of the world.
To put this directly, I think the Narnian series has the potential to influence people in a bad way, regarding how much effort we should put into questioning and seeking explanations of things. It is a little bit anti-intellectual, and may promote anti-intellectualism.
2. Casual violence
We all know the saying, that when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. I think the characters in the Narnian world often make this mistake.
The Narnian world is basically Medieval in its level of society and technology. There are castles and kings, swords and shields. The male nobility go about in their everyday life wearing mail armour and carrying swords (at the end of The Last Battle, when they find themselves dressed in their ideal, most comfortable clothes, they are all still wearing mail and carrying swords).
And this attitude of carrying around a deadly weapon while dressed in heavy, defensive clothing dominates their interactions with other people. If they disagree with someone, they are just as likely to draw their swords and go charging in to strike at them (eg, in Prince Caspian, where Caspian, Peter, Edmund and Trumpkin kill Nikabrik, etc, when they had a disagreement during council over how to proceed). And if they meet a stranger, they have a habit of thinking the worst and preparing for battle.
The Narnian world does not promote discussion, compromise and understanding of other perspectives. It promotes battles, fights and killing when faced with disagreements and differences.
Moreover, after they have killed someone there is almost no sadness at the pain and suffering they have caused, nor any deep soul-searching over the tragedy that led to it. None of the characters seem to feel, in any deep way, any of the pain that a healthy human being should feel in such a moment. They are far too casual and cold-hearted.
Mulan and Miya picked up on this, both disliking this aspect of the main characters throughout the series. As we read about the last battle, in The Last Battle, we asked each other which side of the battle we would have been on, as it started. We identified four sides:
- The Narnian king Tirian, with the English Eustace and Jill
- The Calormenes
- The dwarfs
- The animals who left the battle and didn't fight
Again, to summarise, the Narnian series has the potential to influence people in a bad way. It trivialises and normalises the carrying of a weapon in everyday life, as well as using it far too readily when one has a disagreement. And it normalises a cold-hearted, casual attitude to violent death, where one just carries on afterwards, largely unaffected by it all.
3. Casual sexism
There are very strong gender roles in the Narnian series, with the males as the leaders and fighters and the females as the nurturers and healers.
Time and again, when they suited up for battle, the boys were given swords and hurried to the front to fight, while the girls were at best given bows and told to get in behind and be safe.
Mulan and Miya quickly picked up on this, pointing out how silly it all was every time we read about a battle.
Even the portrayals of the baddies was sexist. The main female baddies (eg the White Witch, The green Witch in Silver Chair, the hag in Prince Caspian) all seemed to get their power through magic and deviousness, while the male baddies were more directly physical and up front. This buys into all sorts of gender stereotypes, which most of us are now familiar with.
Could this sort of casual sexism be influential in this day and age? I don't know and I hope not. My children just found it laughably ridiculous. But even if it isn't influential, it is clearly completely inappropriate.
4. Casual horror
Similar to the casual violence, the girls and I felt that the occasional casualness of human tragedy was quite off-putting.
The most graphic example of this was in Dawn Treader, when the main characters came across the gold statue in the pool on the island. It turned out, in some unexplained way, that the water in the pool turned everything to gold (I'm not sure how this might be possible, as surely the water would also seep into the ground, turning the surrounding land to gold). Someone, at some time in the past, had dived into the pool and they had turned into gold, sinking to the bottom. One minute a living, breathing human being, feeling hot after walking up the hill to the lake, the next minute they are dead and gone, a gold statue.
Mulan was quite horrified at the thought of that, and for the first time that I'm aware of she had a bad dream about something that we/she had read (and that is saying something; I've read Greek myths to Mulan).
I really don't think there was any need for Lewis to include those sorts of graphic ideas in a children's book. It was highly inappropriate and insensitive to children's feelings.
And once again, this shows a cold-hearted callousness towards living beings that is plain wrong. I admire Mulan for being disturbed by the imagery, and I hope she never loses her automatic reaction to first feel for others.
5. Casual racism and English cultural superiority
Broadly speaking, throughout the Narnian books, on the one hand there is a lot of positive associations for English cultural traditions, while on the other hand there is a lot of negative associations for non-Western cultural traditions. Some of this is innocuous, while other bits are disturbingly racist and show up as an arrogant sense of English cultural and racial superiority.
Firstly, it is clear that Narnia is very traditionally English in almost every conceivable way -- the landscape, weather, clothing, food/drink, recreational activities, buildings and social class structures. Narnia is a re-creation of an old, imagined and idealised English aristocracy. The main characters, as part of the nobility, have a grand time with parties, court life, hunts and sailing. They drink wine (even the children) and go hunting on horseback. The decent, normal, non-noble folk are happy to live in cleanly simple conditions, going about their everyday lives and being ruled by the nobility.
But scratch the surface, and already some disturbing class-based assumptions are there. The nobility are humans -- elegant, smooth, tall, light-skinned and refined. As the true rulers, they have the right to rule through their heritage, as descendants of the English folk who were appointed rulers by Aslan (God). Those who they rule are variously simple, clumsy, innocent, slow, lumpy, bumpy, cute and generally well-meaning in their more limited way. Each is apparently born into their place, and the light-skinned humans rule the hairier, smaller, darker others in a paternal, if sometimes somewhat bemused, way.
Just like England was, Narnia is an empire, with its dependencies and colonies. But Narnia's empire is sanitised, and its subjects are grateful for Narnia's rule. Narnia is an idealised England, without the inconvenient atrocities. The Lone Islanders are grateful to the Narnians for driving away the baddie who was terrorising them, so they let Narnia rule them forever. The island of the Monopods, in Dawn Treader, has a smart, sophisticated English-like ruler, benevolently ruling over the simple-minded, ungainly, amusing little natives who are incapable of looking after themselves properly and so need to be told what to do. The main characters recognise the necessity of this rule, as they watch the natives in amusement from the grand residence above.
Clearly, anyone who reads this, and has a passing familiarity with England's history, is going to read into it an attempted, rose-coloured-glasses, defence of England's dodgy colonial past.
Turning to the other cultures in the Narnian world, the most obvious is the Calormenes. Their southern lands are hotter and drier than Narnia/England, and with deserts. The people wear turbans and robes, and carry curved scimitars instead of straight swords. They are called "darkies", and are described as dirty. They are mostly rough, ruthless and conniving, making treacherous plans to increase their own power. Their god is ugly, spiky and revengeful. I don't know how else we can see this but as a thinly-veiled attempted parallel of Islam and the Middle East.
The dwarfs, who live in the Narnian lands, also raise red flags. They are lumpy, bumpy, and small, with big noses. Mostly, the Narnians see the dwarfs as troublemakers, and frequently the dwarfs side with the Narnian enemies. A few dwarfs are friends with the Narnians, though often in a slightly amusing way. They may be advisors, but there is never any suggestion that they could be rulers -- it is only the tall, straight humans who could really rule. In The Last Battle, the dwarfs sat in the stable, not seeing Aslan's world around them. Does this sound like the dwarfs are the Jewish people of the Narnian world? And does their depiction sound a bit like anti-Semitism? I think so.
Read altogether, in my opinion the Narnian books promote a form of racism that sees the English as racially superior, and that this justifies English rule, in a paternalistic way, over the intellectually-inferior and funny-looking lower races.
6. Aslan as a moral role model
No discussion of Narnia would be complete without mentioning Aslan.
Aslan is the lion, of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. He is the creator of Narnia in the first book, and shows up in each book to help the main characters and sometimes kill the baddies. He is clearly extremely powerful, but just how powerful he is remains unclear throughout. Nonetheless, frequently he is able to magically make things happen in ways that go far beyond everyone else. The Narnian characters worship Aslan, treating him as their god. Aslan dies and comes back to life in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and occasionally he refers to his father, the Emperor-over-Sea, suggesting that he is intended as the Jesus character of the series.
Aslan's help in each book is unclear and mysterious. Sometimes he intervenes directly and solves the key problems. Sometimes his intervention is indirect and is more like a nudge to direct the main characters to do things for themselves. And sometimes he does not intervene at all, even when the main characters seem in big trouble and are suffering badly.
Given that Aslan is trusted by the main characters, and they tend to follow him unquestioningly, we may see him as the moral role model -- the being who does what is good and right, and who we should follow if we also want to do what is good and right. Certainly, at the very least, he seems to do a lot of good, helping to get rid of the baddie leaders who want to oppress and hurt the people.
But does he always do the right thing? Is he really perfectly good, to be followed unquestioningly? Is he really worthy of worship? Or is he just mostly good, and it's possible to show that he sometimes gets things wrong? And if he sometimes gets things wrong, or even if it is a live question that he might sometimes get things wrong, is it wrong for the main characters to follow him so unquestioningly?
Part of the difficulty of answering these questions is that Lewis has intentionally made Aslan's reasons and motives unclear. We see some of his actions, but we often don't get to see the details of how the world really is, to be able to clearly evaluate whether Aslan's actions were truly appropriate to the situation. That is, we are often not given enough information to understand why Aslan intervened in this situation but not in that situation, or why he directly killed the baddie here, but not there.
Nonetheless, over the course of seven books we have got some information to work with.
Mulan, Miya and I first started to really question Aslan's goodness in The Horse and His Boy. This was especially when Shasta, Aravis and the horses were being chased by the lion, and the lion badly scratched Aravis' back. Later in the book, we learnt that the lion was Aslan, and we were told that his motive had been to force the group to move faster, so that they would get to King Lune in time to warn them of the Calormene invasion.
The girls and I all thought this explanation was completely implausible. There could have been any number of other ways to encourage them to go faster, without the need to hurt someone so badly. Or Aslan could have intervened in some more direct way to stop the invasion. Why all the trickery? Why did he create all that extra unnecessary suffering? We all concluded that surely Aslan hurt Aravis for no good reason.
From that point on, other events also seemed questionable. We all started to doubt that Aslan really had to do things in the way that he had. Too often, there seemed extra, unnecessary trouble that could have been resolved more simply and with less suffering.
All this meant that none of us are especially pro-Aslan. Yep, he is powerful, and yep, he is pretty good. But nope, none of us think he deserves all that worship and unquestioned devotion. He is probably not ideally good, and he is not a clear moral role model who we should follow.
7. Spirituality
It has been suggested to me that I am reading all of this too directly, and that the books should be read more spiritually. That is, I think, it should be read a bit more like Pilgrim's Progress, in that the characters are not supposed to be seen as real people, but more as representations of abstract ideas or character traits. Battling a character in the books is not really to be seen as battling a person, but instead as battling a bad idea or bad character trait.
If this is the case, then my treating this as representative of real interactions between real people is missing the point.
While I can see this as a possible interpretation, and one that adults may get a lot of value out of, I remain unconvinced of this for the purposes of a children's book. Children are going to read the books more directly, and they are going to take notice of the interactions at a more personal level. The issues that I have raised above are still going to influence children in these bad ways, regardless of whether Lewis or other adults are getting more abstract spiritual values out of it.
More pointedly, if Lewis was really trying to write merely at a spiritual level, why were the characters depicted so similar to real, earthly people? Was he really so blinded by his own social and racial prejudices that he didn't notice that he was describing earthly politics and society?
Conclusions
As I said at the beginning, I initially started out very positive about the Narnia book series, and I still think they are fun and exciting stories. They are a pleasure to read.
But sadly, the more I read the more I became opposed to the political, moral and social values expressed by Lewis. Hopefully, these days Lewis' views are merely a historic relic, and not too many people would take them seriously. Nonetheless, books like these may work subtly to somewhat normalise these wrong attitudes in children.
This means that I think it is important for these points to be explicitly raised with children as they are reading the books. Pointing out and discussing how and why they are wrong can help to nullify any influence they might have.
Used as teaching resources, and pausing to discuss ideas as they are raised, can still make these books extremely worthwhile. It is in this sense, and with these qualifications, that I recommend the Narnia series of books.
Postscript
Mulan read this post, and fact-corrected a minor point about the story. She often has a better memory for the details of stories than I do. She said that she agreed with what I had written.
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