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cocoonofbooks 's review for:
The Last Battle
by C.S. Lewis
Well, that was weird and racist!
For most of these books, Lewis seemed to be writing a children's fantasy adventure story and mixing in Christian elements, or at least that's what he said he did with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and so I read the rest of the series through that lens. In this case, though, it seemed like he was trying to make so many theological-esque points that the plot was strung together just to hold them up. It also featured the trope of bringing together every character from the first six books as a kind of heavy-handed attempt at closure and a farewell to Narnia.
The first half of the book was actually quite promising. As someone uses an imitation Aslan to coerce Aslan's followers into doing terrible things, we see the danger in people speaking for Jesus, doing bad things in the name of Jesus, or trying to argue that other people don't love Jesus if they don't [fill in the blank]. Then when the imitation Aslan is exposed to a handful of characters, they decide that there must not be a real Aslan at all — a clever reflection of how people see atrocities committed in God's name and decide that proves there isn't a God. This is Lewis doing what he does best: demonstrating the foibles of human psychology, intertwined with spirituality.
The second half of the book, however, is mostly about the Calormenes, who readers of The Horse and His Boy will remember as offensively stereotypical stand-ins for Middle Eastern Muslims, who are all smelly and uncivilized and bloodthirsty.
Lewis tries to push back on the argument that Allah and God are one and the same (specifically that the God of the Muslims is the same as the God of the Christians, since "Allah" is literally the Arabic word for God used even by Arabic-speaking Christians). Those trying to deceive the crowds argue that the Calormenes' god, Tash, is the same as Aslan, and start referring to this entity as "Tashlan," though we soon learn that Tash is a separate god that is foul-smelling and bloodthirsty. This raises all sorts of theological issues, including the issue of there being actual multiple gods in the world of Narnia (as I noted in my review of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) and the fact that Aslan is supposed to be a stand-in for Jesus while the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea is the stand-in for God, Jesus' father. This all gets further complicated by a character who has devoted his life to Tash but is rewarded by Aslan, who says that all of this character's devotion to Tash was really for him, not because they're the same but, apparently, because this character is a good person or something (unlike basically every other Calormene). It's convoluted and doesn't really clarify things for anyone who may be looking to Lewis to explain the actual differences between Christianity and Islam.
If you thought The Horse and His Boy had ugly stereotypes of Middle Eastern Muslims, this book manages to be so much more racist. There's the part where the main characters put on brownface to try to pass themselves off as Calormene. Then there are the multiple parts where the Calormenes are referred to as "darkies." It's clear throughout the book that Calormenes are not just bad people from another country, but that their dark skin represents their badness, while the good guys can be identified by their fair skin. It was pretty painful to listen to.
I'm not even going to go into the whole "for now we see in a mirror dimly" part because it was weird and complicated and kind of unnecessary, honestly. Unlike some passages in the Narnia books where I've felt that Lewis captured what a certain part of faith feels like, this seemed intended much more to present a literal depiction of what heaven might be like, but coming after the utter oblivion of Narnia, and with the combination of living and dead characters and it being essentially an exact parallel universe to all of the worlds we'd previously experienced, it just felt like kind of a convoluted mess.
Overall, I'm sticking with what I said for the previous book: If you want to read some Narnia books, read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Magician's Nephew, and then you can go read some of Lewis' other work because you don't need any of this other nonsense.
For most of these books, Lewis seemed to be writing a children's fantasy adventure story and mixing in Christian elements, or at least that's what he said he did with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and so I read the rest of the series through that lens. In this case, though, it seemed like he was trying to make so many theological-esque points that the plot was strung together just to hold them up. It also featured the trope of bringing together every character from the first six books as a kind of heavy-handed attempt at closure and a farewell to Narnia.
The first half of the book was actually quite promising. As someone uses an imitation Aslan to coerce Aslan's followers into doing terrible things, we see the danger in people speaking for Jesus, doing bad things in the name of Jesus, or trying to argue that other people don't love Jesus if they don't [fill in the blank]. Then when the imitation Aslan is exposed to a handful of characters, they decide that there must not be a real Aslan at all — a clever reflection of how people see atrocities committed in God's name and decide that proves there isn't a God. This is Lewis doing what he does best: demonstrating the foibles of human psychology, intertwined with spirituality.
The second half of the book, however, is mostly about the Calormenes, who readers of The Horse and His Boy will remember as offensively stereotypical stand-ins for Middle Eastern Muslims, who are all smelly and uncivilized and bloodthirsty.
Lewis tries to push back on the argument that Allah and God are one and the same (specifically that the God of the Muslims is the same as the God of the Christians, since "Allah" is literally the Arabic word for God used even by Arabic-speaking Christians). Those trying to deceive the crowds argue that the Calormenes' god, Tash, is the same as Aslan, and start referring to this entity as "Tashlan," though we soon learn that Tash is a separate god that is foul-smelling and bloodthirsty. This raises all sorts of theological issues, including the issue of there being actual multiple gods in the world of Narnia (as I noted in my review of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) and the fact that Aslan is supposed to be a stand-in for Jesus while the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea is the stand-in for God, Jesus' father. This all gets further complicated by a character who has devoted his life to Tash but is rewarded by Aslan, who says that all of this character's devotion to Tash was really for him, not because they're the same but, apparently, because this character is a good person or something (unlike basically every other Calormene). It's convoluted and doesn't really clarify things for anyone who may be looking to Lewis to explain the actual differences between Christianity and Islam.
If you thought The Horse and His Boy had ugly stereotypes of Middle Eastern Muslims, this book manages to be so much more racist. There's the part where the main characters put on brownface to try to pass themselves off as Calormene. Then there are the multiple parts where the Calormenes are referred to as "darkies." It's clear throughout the book that Calormenes are not just bad people from another country, but that their dark skin represents their badness, while the good guys can be identified by their fair skin. It was pretty painful to listen to.
I'm not even going to go into the whole "for now we see in a mirror dimly" part because it was weird and complicated and kind of unnecessary, honestly. Unlike some passages in the Narnia books where I've felt that Lewis captured what a certain part of faith feels like, this seemed intended much more to present a literal depiction of what heaven might be like, but coming after the utter oblivion of Narnia, and with the combination of living and dead characters and it being essentially an exact parallel universe to all of the worlds we'd previously experienced, it just felt like kind of a convoluted mess.
Overall, I'm sticking with what I said for the previous book: If you want to read some Narnia books, read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Magician's Nephew, and then you can go read some of Lewis' other work because you don't need any of this other nonsense.