Title The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Author C. S. Lewis Cover Art --- Publisher Scholastic - 1987 First Printing 1950
	Title Prince Caspian Author C. S. Lewis Cover Art --- Publisher Scholastic - 1987 First Printing 1951
	Title Voyage of the Dawn Treader Author C. S. Lewis Cover Art --- Publisher Scholastic - 1987 First Printing 1952
	Title The Silver Chair Author C. S. Lewis Cover Art --- Publisher Scholastic - 1987 First Printing 1953
	Title The Horse and his Boy Author C. S. Lewis Cover Art --- Publisher Scholastic - 1987 First Printing 1954
	Title The Magician's Nephew Author C. S. Lewis Cover Art --- Publisher Scholastic - 1987 First Printing 1955
	Title The Last Battle Author C. S. Lewis Cover Art --- Publisher Scholastic - 1987 First Printing 1956
	Category Portal Fantasy Warnings None Main Characters Aslan, Lucy, Edmund, Mr. Tumnus, Peter, Susan, Caspian, Eustace, Reepicheep, Jill, Rilian, Shasta, Bree, Tirian, Jewel, Jadis Main Elements Talking animals, witches, giants, dwarves Website ---

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Prince Caspian

Voyage of the Dawn Treader

The Silver Chair

The Horse and his Boy

The Magician's Nephew

The Last Battle

In a year where I read all the great dystopia classics, I felt it needed to be balanced by returning to a childhood classic, Narnia.

I'll start a bit on its connection to Christianity. Yes, Lewis wrote them to reflect the Bible, from Genesis (the creation of Narnia) to Revelations (when Narnia ends). But I'll let you into a little secret, when I read the books as a kid, Aslan was a magic talking lion, not Jesus. It wasn't until I got older and someone pointed out how he sacrificed himself for the sins of others and was resurrected did I see the connection. As I only have passing familiarity with the Biblical tales (with some effort I can match some up with the events in the books) I generally miss the connections.

Otherwise it's a tale of witches and talking animals, magic and dragons, battles and sea voyages, and you can read into it what you want or don't want so if you were afraid it might be too religious heavy, it's not. And if you were looking for something that did reflect your beliefs, then you can have that too. In fact, my sister doesn't like the series because it's too British, with snobby kids being all proper and full of themselves, so there could be plenty of other things that you might not like! And of course there are plenty of things to enjoy, even if it's just the idea that it might be possible to step through a doorway into a world of wonder where you can be king.

Now of course I'd read these books before, but in truth, only The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe really stuck with me, if you read no other that's the one that is the true classic where we are first introduced to Narnia, a world that had been trapped in a century of winter, but never Christmas (a true child's nightmare!)

I still had some general memories of the next three, and gave me a thrill of pleasure when I could predict an upcoming scene, you know how you feel there just has to be a big magician's house with some dwarf-like people that hop around on one leg...seeing as I couldn't possibly have made that up myself I was happy to see it was in the book. And I definitely remembered the Eustace-dragon, not because I learnt the moral of the sins of avarice, but because dragons are cool and I felt it wrong the malign them for their nature.

I love horses, and I even wrote a book report about it in grade 4, but other than the fact Bree could talk, I didn't remember anything at all about The Horse and his Boy. I couldn't quite figure out how Narnia would have this other land to the south, which is apparently populated by Arabs, and there was more than a touch of cringeworthy racism there, these "darkies" were worshipping an evil vulture-headed god named Tash and of course everything about them was as vile as could be, they had slavery, and decadent rich that abused the poor, kind of the exact opposite of utopia Narnia where everyone is supposed to be free, and the Kings/Queens are all gentle and kind and beautiful. This comes back even worse in the last books where one, and only one of these Calormenes was worthy of surviving the apocalypse. I mean every land needs a villain, just unfortunate Lewis didn't make up a race/culture of his own but blasted an existing one. The pro-Christinity didn't jump out at me as much as the anti-Islam (or Hindu? Tash has four arms but there was only a single god...) did. It doesn't mean we should throw these books away, but we need to acknowldge the caricature for what it is and tell ourselves we can be more Christian than even Lewis, to be understanding of other cultures and to love all men, even ones not like ourselves.

The pair of The Magician's Nephew and The Last Battle go well together, where you see Narnia created and then destroyed.

But to me, the most gut-wrenching part of these stories was when the children start to grow up and they are told they are never allowed to come back. It's like when you discover Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny isn't actually real. A little bit of magic goes out of your being and the real world crashes down around you a sucks the wonder out. I mean why can only children appreciate a fantasy world? Must adults always give that up? It's like when Quentin gets kicked out of Fillory in the Magicians, he for whom that world meant more than anything else, meant more to him than it did to the others. I felt the same terrible feeling at the end of The Lord of the Rings, sure our heroes win, but the elves still leave Middle-Earth, taking the magic along with them, allowing the Age of Men to start. They won the war but they could never go back to the way things were. Time moves along, things change, the past is past, and while the future can still be good, something is always lost along the way.

As a kid I loved these books. As an adult re-read, yeah, the kids are annoying and there are some beat-you-over-the-head morals. But I still enjoyed the world, the idea that such a place exists if you could just stumble into it, where you can be greeted by a lion creator god that needs you to save his creation, where you can walk side by side with unicorns and dance with fauns by firelight, and hopefully a place you can still return to even as you grow old, even if only in your imagination. The world needs a little magic after all. And just as Tolkien is the founding father of the Epic Fantasy, Lewis is the founding father of the child portal fantasy, sometimes a classic needs to be read just to see where everything else we have today came from.