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biscuitcrux 's review for:
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
by C.S. Lewis
I've decided to reread the Narnia books this year since I spied them on the shelf at the school I'm teaching at in South Korea. So far, I read [b:The Magician's Nephew|65605|The Magician's Nephew (Chronicles of Narnia, #1)|C.S. Lewis|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1308814770s/65605.jpg|1031537] (for the first time) and [b:The Horse and His Boy|84119|The Horse and His Boy (Chronicles of Narnia, #3)|C.S. Lewis|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1209165084s/84119.jpg|3294501] (for the zillionth time; it was my favorite of the series as a kid). Today I finished The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which was my second favorite.
You know what all these books have in common? They get really boring whenever Aslan is around. I didn't notice this as a kid. My parents didn't expose me to religion much as a child (although they did give me all these Narnia books, so I don't think it was part of an agenda), so the Christian allegories zoomed over my head.
However, I do recall being confused on one point about this book when I was younger. When Aslan strikes the bargain with the White Witch to sacrifice his own life in exchange for Edmund's, the witch and her monsters tie him to the stone table and have their way with him. But he's only "dead" for a few hours. Younger me read that and thought "Aslan didn't keep up his end of the bargain. He didn't sacrifice his life. He lied to her. Why was he so sad? He knew he wasn't going to die for real."
Lewis throws out a couple of lines about Deep Magic and Deeper magic, but on the whole, it makes about as much sense to me as the most important teachings of the Bible. How does an omnipotent being's son being dead for a few hours constitute a huge sacrifice? Aren't we all God's children? If God created everything, what makes Jesus any more the son of God than the rest of us? Why is Jesus so much more special to God than the trillions of other people who have ever lived? I don't pretend to understand the answers to these questions, not even when people who do try to explain them to me. Overall, I think that writing the death of a major character into a book (including the Bible), only to have them be resurrected by unexplained magic a few pages later, feels cheap and manipulative, and ruins any resonance death might have in the work as a whole.
C.S. Lewis is a superb storyteller with a great imagination and wonderful ways of describing things. Unfortunately, his fixation on preaching about Jesus makes parts of these books plod along to a non-religious adult. Would I recommend or gift these books to the young kids in my life? Yeah. Would I read them again in my lifetime if a kid wasn't listening? Probably not.
You know what all these books have in common? They get really boring whenever Aslan is around. I didn't notice this as a kid. My parents didn't expose me to religion much as a child (although they did give me all these Narnia books, so I don't think it was part of an agenda), so the Christian allegories zoomed over my head.
However, I do recall being confused on one point about this book when I was younger. When Aslan strikes the bargain with the White Witch to sacrifice his own life in exchange for Edmund's, the witch and her monsters tie him to the stone table and have their way with him. But he's only "dead" for a few hours. Younger me read that and thought "Aslan didn't keep up his end of the bargain. He didn't sacrifice his life. He lied to her. Why was he so sad? He knew he wasn't going to die for real."
Lewis throws out a couple of lines about Deep Magic and Deeper magic, but on the whole, it makes about as much sense to me as the most important teachings of the Bible. How does an omnipotent being's son being dead for a few hours constitute a huge sacrifice? Aren't we all God's children? If God created everything, what makes Jesus any more the son of God than the rest of us? Why is Jesus so much more special to God than the trillions of other people who have ever lived? I don't pretend to understand the answers to these questions, not even when people who do try to explain them to me. Overall, I think that writing the death of a major character into a book (including the Bible), only to have them be resurrected by unexplained magic a few pages later, feels cheap and manipulative, and ruins any resonance death might have in the work as a whole.
C.S. Lewis is a superb storyteller with a great imagination and wonderful ways of describing things. Unfortunately, his fixation on preaching about Jesus makes parts of these books plod along to a non-religious adult. Would I recommend or gift these books to the young kids in my life? Yeah. Would I read them again in my lifetime if a kid wasn't listening? Probably not.