Where to start with this...

I am an unabashed CS Lewis fan. I know his problematic aspects, I acknowledge them, but he still wrote good stuff and his Chronicles of Narnia are part of the bedrock of my childhood, my imagination, and even my faith. I know them very, very well; when the reprints were issued in the 1990s, with the changed order, I was able to identify the changed scenes without having my older copies to compare. This is important below.

When The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe came out in 2005, the Walden Media film, I was pleasantly surprised. For the most part, it's an excellent adaptation. There are bits that rang false to me, but on the whole it works, and there are parts that work extremely well - the Stone Table scene is spot-on, for example.

And I approve of the opening scenes, which are not in the book at all. Kids outside of Britain are not likely to know what the Blitz was, or why the Pevensies were shipped off to the countryside. The special effects are spectacular. Aslan is entirely believable and it looks like they hired centaurs for the cast.

So, having seen that in the theater, I was anticipating Prince Caspian a good deal. In fact, I took my mother to see it, which took some doing since she doesn't often go to films (actually, I think that was the last time she went). She'd read the books years before and liked them, and I'd shown her the first film on DVD.

We settle in, the movie begins. About two-thirds of the way through, my mother turns to whisper to me. Where are those characters going?

And I had to reply I have no idea.

That's how bad that film was.

I've tried to block a lot of it out, but from what I can remember, the most egregious thing was that they made Caspian an adult and then tried to pair him with Susan.  It didn't come off, thankfully, but - !! 

Caspian is a child.  This is a plot point in the book!  It is underscored!  There was no reason to make him an adult! 

Then there's the whole thing with the White Witch.  >_< 

I mean, I get that the actor was probably under contract and they didn't want to waste her.  But raising her from the dead is mentioned as a possibility in the book and firmly squashed - they do not go on to raise her, and she certainly does not start sexually harassing Peter!  It was appalling and completely unnecessary.  And gross.  He's a teenager. 

They screwed with the plot so much that, as mentioned, I had no clue what was happening at one point, in a storyline I could have probably recited beat for beat from the book. 

Don't get me started on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  The trailer alone had so much wrong with it - including the Witch again - that I didn't even consider going to see the film.  Not ever going to touch that one, dear heavens. 

Now, the thing about all this is that it has bugged me ever since.  An irritation.  My mind can't just shrug and move on; whenever the topic comes up, I want to rant about it.  And because I'm slow, it finally dawned on me. 

I'm angry.  I'm still angry. 

Not only were the second and third films a distortion of a beloved classic series - distorted for what?? - they were a betrayal of the promise of the first one.  I think that's what bothers me the most.  They did such a good job with TLTWATW, and then burned it all up in an effort to...make it more trendy?  Relatable somehow?  Here, movie for kids, let's make the hero an adult instead, and have him perv on a teenage girl who's actually technically his boss.  Let's bring back the villain from the first film and go all Freudian, again on a teenager.  Let's add World War II to the third book even though it was several years over by then, and have Edmund try to join up underage even though he would never be that stupid, and why on earth are we doing that since 98 percent of the book takes place in the Narnian world?  

It would have been so easy to stick to the story - which is a good one!  Lewis knew what he was doing.  Instead they went to a lot of effort to make it worse. 

It was a betrayal.  I'm still wondering why Douglas Gresham allowed it.  He seemed such a careful caretaker of Lewis' legacy. 

It was a slap in the face to fans, and my cheek still stings.   

Okay, I have had it.  Susan did not get excluded from Narnia because she wore lipstick.  Good grief.  Nor, I submit, because she had become a sexual being.

“My sister Susan,” answered Peter shortly and gravely, “is no longer a friend of Narnia.”

“Yes,” said Eustace, “and whenever you’ve tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says ‘What wonderful memories you have!  Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.’” *

Susan didn’t end up in the true Narnia with her siblings for one reason: she denied the existence of Narnia in any form.

Think about it.  The Pevensie children experienced an extraordinary, magical, vivid adventure--in Peter’s and Susan’s case, twice.  They lived an entire life, or at least a reasonable lifespan, in the world of Narnia--ruling a kingdom, traveling, going to war and forging peace, growing up and into their own power.  And when that was over and done, they got to go back--not for long, but they did get a second run.
It was so important to them, so central, that they formed a group with others who’d been there so that they could speak of it amongst themselves and remember.**

And somewhere along the way, Susan turned her back on it.

We don’t get told why, and I do think it’s hard on the character to be the one left behind.  But for whatever reason, she decided that all of that magic and wonder and delight hadn’t happened.  That she and her siblings had just made it all up as a game.  In the face of what they all knew, that shared experience, and the experiences of Digory and Polly and Eustace and Jill, she denied it.

“Grown-up, indeed,” said the Lady Polly.  “I wish she would grow up. ... Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one’s life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.”* 

Here’s the incriminating statement (it’s Jill who lists lipstick and nylons and invitations).  It comes from the mouth of an elderly woman who has lived a long life and seen a great deal of change, from Victorian times to post-WWII, and probably sees most youth as silly.  It’s a character’s statement, not a narrator’s; the opinion is Polly’s, not necessarily C.S. Lewis’.

The Last Battle is heavily allegorical (see note below).  But I don’t think Lewis was using Susan’s interest in adult female pastimes as a analogy for sexual awareness.  He was far more likely using it as an analogy for worldly things, as opposed to spiritual or heavenly things.  Remember, Lewis was one of the foremost Christian apologists of the twentieth century, and the comparisons are obvious.

“Oh Susan!” said Jill, “she’s interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations.”* The key word here is “nothing”.  Susan gave up Narnia and focused on ephemera, exclusively.  Remember, The Last Battle takes place in the early 1950s at the very latest.  Peter was no doubt beginning to focus on whatever he might have chosen as a career; as a girl, Susan was expected to be interested in preparation for marriage.  But that was all she was doing; she had turned away from everything else.  How could she go back to something she only considered a childish game?

Also, I take issue with the notion that she never did get to the true Narnia.  One can argue that Lewis was using her as an example, just as he did the Dwarfs who wouldn’t come out of the stable.***  But just because Susan isn’t in Narnia at the time of the story doesn’t mean she didn’t get there later.  Mr. and Mrs. Pevensie were there on the other side of the valley,**** and they had presumably never even heard of Narnia.

Note: The Chronicles are often referred to as an allegory, and certainly The Last Battle is an obvious one; as a Christian, I enjoy it a great deal, but that’s a personal thing.  However, Lewis stated that when he began The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe he wasn’t trying to create an allegory; he was just writing a story for a little girl he knew.  He also pointed out that the sacrificed and resurrected god is found in many faiths, not just Christianity.

* The Last Battle, Chapter XII
** The Last Battle, Chapter V
*** The Last Battle, Chapter XIII
**** The Last Battle, Chapter XVI

I figured out what bugs me about the e-reader craze. 

Now, I do think they're a good idea in general.  Having practically unlimited titles at the tips of my fingers, literally in the palm of one hand?  Superb.  Perfect for so many circumstances.  I'm all for it, especially if the e-reader in question can enlarge print and/or read aloud. 

But--aside from the fact that many of my most beloved books are not available as e-files, and won't be for years if ever (They Stand Together, anyone?  Holding Wonder?  The Name on the Glass, with illustrations?)--I get stuck on the format issue.  Not whatever tug-of-war is going on between formats at the moment, that'll probably shake itself out like the video formats, but the evolution of file formats themselves.  

How many upgrades will e-reader software programs go through in the next ten years?  How about the next twenty?  Sure, for a while, a new iteration of a particular application can read the older stuff, but sooner or later the files are just too old.  Maybe the publishers of e-books think that readers aren't going to want to re-read a given title more than a few times, or hang onto it for long, but I still have books I was given as a child and I know there are plenty of others out there who are the same.  

If I'm going to pay more than a few dollars for an e-book, I mean for it to be something I can keep.  Not something that has a shelf (hah) life that can be measured in years rather than decades.  I have books that are older than my great-grandparents, and yet I can open them and read them with no trouble at all.*  I hardly think today's e-book is going to be available to any reader one hundred twenty-five years in the future. 

Now, if purchasing a regular, physical book included an e-file, I'd be enthusiastic.  Heck, for some books I'd be willing to pay a certain premium for such an addition.  That way I could enjoy the title wherever I wanted, and for as long as the paper held together. 

A book isn't meant to be a one-off.  Stories are meant to last, to be retold and handed on.  A good book read only once is hardly read at all; as the reader changes, so does the story.  Dragonflight is a different story to me now than it was when I first read it, or a decade later, or before the death of the fellow fan who said "Here, you'll like these."  Mary Russell changes each time another book in her series is published, and to not go back and re-read the earlier books would be to miss the nuances.  

So don't put a time limit on the stories.  Only the reader should choose when to put the book down. 


* Yes, some of them I must handle carefully, but the argument stands.  

I have now seen the trailer for the upcoming Voyage of the Dawn Treader film.  And they ain't getting my money.  I'm considering writing a plaintive letter to Douglas Gresham to ask him why he's permitted another travesty. 

( Cut for the spoilerphobic. )
Addendum: As a Christian, I have no problem with the allegory inherent in the Chronicles.  I know some people do, and that's fine.  But I would like to note that Lewis did not write the first book as a Christian allegory.  As he said himself, the motif of the sacrificed-and-resurrected god is found in many places, including the Norse mythos that he loved his entire life.  He didn't even intend The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to be an allegory, it just came out that way.  The rest of the series was consciously written as such, but not the first book.  *shrug*