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jtobin 's review for:
The Last Battle
by C.S. Lewis
Rightly maligned as the worst Narnia book, this is interesting for several reasons - unfortunately none of which make it good.
Straight up ending the series with finally assembling and then killing all the characters we have grown to love off screen in a railway accident is a super bold move, one that can only be understood as a happy ending from Lewis’s particular ideological standpoint.
Lewis’s vision of heaven was interesting, and I got a kick out of one of the characters explicitly saying it was directly based on Plato. The absolutely strangeness of the end of the world was also interesting to see, and the author can never be criticized for an unwillingness to make weird stuff.
But the story itself is an absolute slog, with horrible things happening to everyone and every place we have come to hold dear - talking animals being enslaved and massacred without hope is not fun to read. The racial caricature Calormenes are of course the villains and agents if the apocalypse, slaughtering the Narnians and being repeatedly referred to as “darkies”. Our heroes even don literal brownface to sneak into their camp. All around a perfect expression of how nasty and unkind Lewis can be - especially his famous passage about why Susan does not deserve heaven.
One particularly clear example of the author straw maning his religious opponents comes from “Tashlon”, the heretical concept that the (pseudo-Muslim) Calormene devil-god Tash and Aslan are the same being. Even as a small kid I was keenly aware Lewis was talking about the popular notion that we should be tolerant because all religions are basically the same at root. Lewis spends most of this book repeatedly underlying why this is false, his God is the only true God, and all others are just horrific demons who can only work evil.
The whole series as seen Lewis’s immense creativity, sharp writing, and ability to tell a great story balanced against his worst instincts. In this book, his cruelty, callousness, and bigotry finally overwhelm what had made this series so magical - perhaps a fitting thematic end to Narnia.
Straight up ending the series with finally assembling and then killing all the characters we have grown to love off screen in a railway accident is a super bold move, one that can only be understood as a happy ending from Lewis’s particular ideological standpoint.
Lewis’s vision of heaven was interesting, and I got a kick out of one of the characters explicitly saying it was directly based on Plato. The absolutely strangeness of the end of the world was also interesting to see, and the author can never be criticized for an unwillingness to make weird stuff.
But the story itself is an absolute slog, with horrible things happening to everyone and every place we have come to hold dear - talking animals being enslaved and massacred without hope is not fun to read. The racial caricature Calormenes are of course the villains and agents if the apocalypse, slaughtering the Narnians and being repeatedly referred to as “darkies”. Our heroes even don literal brownface to sneak into their camp. All around a perfect expression of how nasty and unkind Lewis can be - especially his famous passage about why Susan does not deserve heaven.
One particularly clear example of the author straw maning his religious opponents comes from “Tashlon”, the heretical concept that the (pseudo-Muslim) Calormene devil-god Tash and Aslan are the same being. Even as a small kid I was keenly aware Lewis was talking about the popular notion that we should be tolerant because all religions are basically the same at root. Lewis spends most of this book repeatedly underlying why this is false, his God is the only true God, and all others are just horrific demons who can only work evil.
The whole series as seen Lewis’s immense creativity, sharp writing, and ability to tell a great story balanced against his worst instincts. In this book, his cruelty, callousness, and bigotry finally overwhelm what had made this series so magical - perhaps a fitting thematic end to Narnia.