The chronicles of boredom

December 10, 2005

Guest Post by Morbo

I won’t be in line waiting to see “The Chronicles of Narnia” this weekend.

Because I have kids, I’ve read a lot of kid-lit. Some of it is quite good. Lemony Snicket’s books make me laugh out loud. He loads them up with allusions that he must know only parents will get, which makes reading his books aloud to a kid a lot of fun and educational too boot.

A few years ago, my daughter went through a Narnia phase. We read the whole series. Frankly, I find the books boring, preachy and interminable. It’s not just the Christianity. I could deal with that. The allegory is so clumsily executed that you can easily read the books as just an adventure tale — albeit a dull one.

No, Lewis’ main fault is not that he’s a proselytizer; it’s that he’s dull. The series drags on and on, and by the end you want to take a fire axe to the wardrobe and end your misery once and for all.

The movie is being promoted to both religious and secular audiences — which means it may fail to please both. Disney has hired Christian publicity firms to pitch it to evangelicals. To everyone else, it’s just a fantasy tale with lots of product tie-ins. Aslan is on your box of Cheez-Its, so it must be non-sectarian!

Yet we know Lewis saw the series as a vehicle to spread the Christian faith. He said so many times. Ironically, Lewis had no way of knowing that his beloved home country would become so secular and largely indifferent to religion that his efforts would be for naught.

As London Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee pointed out recently, the allegory only works if people know the bare bones of Christianity’s claims. Many Britons are fuzzy on those details these days.

Most British children will be utterly clueless about any message beyond the age-old mythic battle between good and evil. Most of the fairy story works as well as any Norse saga, pagan legend or modern fantasy, so only the minority who are familiar with Christian iconography will see Jesus in the lion. After all, 43% of people in Britain in a recent poll couldn’t say what Easter celebrated. Among the young – apart from those in faith schools – that number must be considerably higher. Ask art galleries: they now have to write the story of every religious painting on the label as people no longer know what “agony in the garden”, “deposition”, “transfiguration” or “ascension” mean. This may be regrettable cultural ignorance, but it means Aslan will stay just a lion to most movie-goers.

We claim to take our religion much more seriously here in the USA, but often I think we only talk a good game. It’s easy for the average American to sing the Bible’s praises. Actually reading it is quite another matter.

Perhaps the movie, with all of its computer-generated special effects, will find a way to take a ponderous allegory and make it exciting. I really don’t care. There’s only one movie lion I’m interested in seeing. Unlike Aslan, this lion actually teaches us something of worth. You might know him; his name is the Cowardly Lion, and he starred in “The Wizard of Oz.” (I’ve always admired the Cowardly Lion. How can you not love a guy who overcame his fears, battles the flying monkeys and lives to tell the tale?)

So, no Narnia for me. If you feel like me but still want to visit a strange and fantastic land this weekend, skip evangelistic lions and pick up one of L. Frank Baum’s “Oz” sequels. I especially recommend “The Tin Woodman of Oz.” I want to know what Baum was smoking when he wrote that thing. Whatever it was, it produced a much wilder ride than anything that stuffy old prig Lewis has to offer.

I actually quite like both “the silver chair” and “voyage of the dawn treader” when I was younger. They were the ones I read first and when I got to the rest of the series, especially the original, they were indeed a let-down.

Now that I know about the Christian Allegory I don’t think I can read them at all without feeling nauseous. Something always seemed kind of fishy and unconvincing about that Aslan stuff. Now I know CS Lewis has been trying to slip little kids a dose of christ on the side.

Honestly though, shouldn’t a talking magical lion whose life reflects that of Jesus be sacriligious rather than good reading material for young fundies-intraining? After all that fuss about the witchcraft in Harry Potter you’d think the christian right would feel compelled to condemn this for consistency’s sake too. Ha.

  • I reread the Narnia books a few years ago, and found all of them entertaining except for the last — which, I realized, is also the most patently allegorical of the lot. As for the movies, I probably won’t see them, but the marketing of the Narnia films is such a fascinating blend of Christian apologetics and rank consumerism that in 50 years historians will probably make it a case study in early-21st-century American popular culture.

  • “As London Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee pointed out recently, the allegory only works if people know the bare bones of Christianity’s claims.”

    C.S. Lewis failed there as well. My wife and a few other acquaintances and friends all went through Catholic schools but didn’t see the whole Aslan-as-Christ allegory.

  • Well, I made it through one book–“The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.” It really was ponderous and clumsy (though I didn’t pick up on the Christian allegory; either I’m too dull-witted, or Lewis was too oblique in his references), and there are better selections out there for fantasy/adventure reading for adults, but especially for kids. My daughter has read the whole Harry Potter series (she’s not yet 6!), but could care less about the Narnia series. If it wasn’t for my wife reading it to her at bedtime, the books would be gathering dust on her shelf.

    But it folks like it, then hey–have a happy time at the movies! I’m just wasn’t too into it even before finding out that the books were supposed to be preaching at me.

  • It’s been so long since I’ve read Lewis that I can’t remember if I found him boring or not. I do know I never considered him a Christian writer until I studied Lit. I don’t hold it against him even though I’m agnostic. If we reject every writer with a religious point of view, there would be some great masterpieces missing from the bookshelves.

    OT

    Morbo, I want to apologize for messing up your name a few weeks ago. I tried to give you a compliment and then ruined it by calling you Mondo. I think I’m trying to morph your name with Gonzo because I see a little echo of Hunter Thompson in your work. I hope you take that as another compliment and not an insult. Seen any dinosaur people lately?

  • Give me Tolkein or Baum any day. The Hardy Boys. The Hornblower series. Tarzan (though some of the 24 books really are pretty lame). Mary Renault. Critique of Pure Reason for god’s sake (I’m kidding).

  • My favorites in this line recently have been the Phillip Pullman “His Dark Materials” series, starting with The Golden Compass. It turns the whole thing on its head and actually rejects organized religion as evil. And this is in a kids book. Oh, I should mention that it is brilliantly written, wonderfully plotted, and a thumping good read for adults as well. Forget about Lewis. I found him tedious AND tendentious. As Lawrence said, “If you try to nail anything down in a novel you either kill the novel or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.” I think Lewis killed his books.

  • Somehow I never read them. I have read “The Screwtape Letters,” however, and I’d recommend that as a better endeavor on Lewis’s part. The letters are instructions from an old demon (“Old Scratch,” maybe?) to an acolyte, and they’re quite good.

  • I enjoyed 6 of the Narnia books – as a child. My kids enjoyed them, when they were young. Who knows, maybe Lewis really did, in fact write them for children.

    Like them or not, they are at least original and *gasp* each volume is, in fact, a unique work. There is something presumably reassuring in old series like Nancy Drew and the Hardy boys (and new series like “A Series of”), where the stories are all identical with predictable outcomes, and there is no moral ambiguity.

    But I think it takes a bit more skill and creativity to write a work with more moral complexity than an old TV western (where black and white hats helped us keep the good and bad characters seperate) and still have children enjoy it. If the same characters and world can be extended without becoming formula, I think even more respect is in order.

    What I find almost depressing is that Lemony Snicket and “great” children’s literature are mentioned in the same paragraph. Taking the Box Car Children, making them less dimensional, heaping on misery, and regurdiating it over and over may be profitable, but “great”? My oldest daughter made a tracing of a burial marker at the Santa Barbara mission and cried – two years after reading O’Dells ISLE OF THE BLUE DOLPHINS. Somehow I don’t see Morbo’s children looking back, getting misty eyed and, in Jim Carrey’s voice saying, “first I’ll bash in the head of the one that bites, then we’ll screw…”

    Don’t get me wrong, I long appreciated Jay Ward’s ability to satisfy adults and children alike – with everything from cold war humor to the disproportionate role of athletics in higher education (remember how Whatsamota U paid for it’s Bullwinkle led football team). But the sexual innuendo in the “Series of…” books always strikes me as a gimmick to get MTV attention span parents to read the shallow garbage to their kids.

    Back on point, I enjoyed Lord of the Rings as a young reader as well. 30 years later, I find the dialog and characters a lot more stilted and one dimensional than I recalled them. For me, the books (book really) did not hold up well over time, but JR did create a world like none we’d ever seen. I can still respect that. And I think that Jackson did a fine job of keeping the essence of that world when he condensed and modernized the tale for the screen. I suspect that Narnia may be the same.

    -jjf

  • I found it rather ironic that a local Borders Bookstore here in DC had a display of the Narnia books with a sign saying “Holiday Gift Ideas.”

    Oh, that PESKY war on Christmas!

  • … The series drags on and on, and by the end you want to take a fire axe to the wardrobe and end your misery once and for all. …

    ::snarf::

    I don’t agree, but it’s a lovely line.

  • >Morbo, I want to apologize for messing up your name a few weeks ago. I tried to give you a compliment and then ruined it by calling you Mondo. I think I’m trying to morph your name with Gonzo because I see a little echo of Hunter Thompson in your work. I hope you take that as another compliment and not an insult. Seen any dinosaur people lately?

    I don’t deserve high praise like this. I’m not nearly the writer Hunter was — and I’m drug-free. But I thank you for your gracious words. As for messing up my name, just blame it on not being able to type. It always works for me.

  • Meh. I’m the opposite of Carwinrpc. I loved all seven Lewis books and still do. It’s Pullman whom I find I tedious and tendentious, as well as just a bad writer. Pullman’s The Golden Compass started wonderfully, but by the third book the trilogy had become a huge, anticlimatic, infuriating mess.

    I know Lewis’s books have elements in them that are questionable by today’s standards; they skate a little too close into racism with the Calormens to the South (although he’s not completely one-sided), and he tends to reinforce some obnoxious gender stereotypes. So what? They’re just stories, and they were written fifty years ago by a man of his times.

    No book is perfect, and while there are some so backward as to be truly harmful to children, the Narnia books aren’t among them. I can’t think of any classics of children’s literature that don’t have something in them to complain about: the Little House books have touches of anti-immigrant bigotry, the Harry Potter books equate Dudley’s obesity with cruelty and stupidity in general, the Heinlein Juvenile books are full of misogynistic stereotypes, and so on. Instead of rejecting them outright, use them as an opportunity to teach to your children about social progress, point out how far we’ve come since they were written and how far we still have to go. Then loosen up and enjoy the stories, or not.

  • There’s only one movie lion I’m interested in seeing. Unlike Aslan, this lion actually teaches us something of worth.

    Maybe I’m picking at nits here, but I always thought forgiveness, self-sacrifice, and a love of fellow human beings to be fairly worthwhile. In fact, while I am an active atheist, these tenets of Christianity I’ve held onto from my childhood.

    There must be something to the self-sacrifice/resurrection story that is powerful. Otherwise it wouldn’t show up time after time throughout human civilization: Enkidu and Gilgamesh, Jesus, Zoroaster, Gandalf, among plenty of other examples.

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