heatherlynnhla2 's review for:

The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis

3.0

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Writing a Christian allegory that spans 7 books is an impressive feat; however, The Chronicles of Narnia series doesn't wrap up in all the ways I necessarily expected. This book is more violent than the others in the series, which maybe I should've expected given the title.

Spoilers ahead:

Spoiler

I think the allegory somewhat breaks down in two places. One, Lewis does Susan dirty. She grows up and gives up on the dream-like idea of Narnia, which is coded as faltering in faith, but she doesn't get to go to paradise with her siblings just because she learns to adjust to her real world? Second, there's a weird scene at the end with a Calorman named Emeth who served Tash (heavily implied to be the devil), where Aslan says that all the good deeds he did for Tash were really done for Aslan, even if Emeth didn't know it. This sounds a lot to me like universalism, which is fine, but doesn't really fit the rest of the theology of the books? I don't know. But I'm happy to discuss with anyone who has read the series.