Revisiting Narnia, Part the Second

A while back I wrote about my re-read of the Narnia books on the occasion of my seven-year old girl's discovery of them. She's a terrific reader, but I felt that she could not only get more out of the books with some guidance on some ways to think about literature but might also enjoy it more if she has someone with whom to discuss them. As an added bonus, it's been great fun reading them. As I'd said before, these are first and foremost entertaining books which are quite simply a pleasure to read. As a second added bonus, my re-reading of Narnia coincides with my finally having time to finish Lev Grossman's grown-up Narnia tribute series The Magicians. What has the experience been like? Read on!

Reading together, on the train

Revisiting Narnia
I'll confess that  I'd forgotten much of the plot and characters of the Narnia series;  I read them long enough ago to have little more than a vague memory of finding them enjoyable. As an adult, I've learned that CS Lewis was a Christian apologist who wove themes of his faith into the books. What I didn't realize until the current re-read is just how pervasive and how heavy-handedly obvious those themes are. Jesus figures appear from time to time in science fiction and fantasy,  from Michael Valentine Smith (of Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, but if you need me to tell you that your youth has been truly and thoroughly wasted) to Paul Atreides (Herbert's Dune, but you knew that) all the way through Harry Potter. I'm sure someone reading this will correct me, but I don't recall any fictitious messiah figure who takes the Christ story quite so literally as Narnia's Aslan who comes back to life after being ritually killed in atonement for the misdeeds of another. What's neat about this is that it opens a discussion into the myth without the cultural baggage that comes with a modern-day religion followed by millions of real-world humans; Aslan's sacrifice and the way in which people react to it (with some remembering and some doubting or questioning) can be discussed on their own, divorced from the real world.

The straightforward nature of the messages in these books makes them ideal as discussion points for a young reader getting her first taste of real fantasy; in addition to the obvious discussion of plot, Narnia gives very easy answers to the one important question about any fantasy book - or any book at all, for that matter - that of "what is this book about?" It's easy to find answers, including:

• A magical world created by a talking lion
• The value of belief and obediance
• The conflict between tradition and modernity.

Chloe and I had terrific discussions about how these themes were developed. We would talk about which characters were portrayed positively and which negatively, who was rewarded and who was punished, and a bit about which details were a central point of focus. We did not go word-by-word into the language used to describe various characters and settings because this wasn't that kind of reading; in the balance between education and entertainment, I wanted these to be entertaining. Closer readings will come later.

((As an aside, entertainment and attentiveness are not mutually exclusive. My lovely bride asked what I thought of the Harry Potter books, I rattled off a few flaws - most notably an over-reliance on coincidences to move the plot. She asked, with some exasperation, if  could just read something for fun rather than pick it apart. My answer is that, for me, picking things apart IS half the fun. End of aside)).

How to Love Something Problematic
I don't share Lewis's Christian faith, but don't have many real issues with it. What I do have issues with are his sexism and anti-modernity. There are some interesting ways in the Narnia books, some of which we discussed, in which Lewis's ideas of gender roles are presented. One not-so-subtle one (and this is one of the few areas in which Chloe and I did discuss language) is in the way Narnians refer to those from our world as "Sons of Adam" or "Daughters of Eve". What at first seems like a simple nod to the Jewish creation myth can be read to contain something else; by splitting human lineage into male descendants from the first man and female descendants from the first woman one emphasises and exaggerates gender differences, strengthening the expectation of gender roles (ie, Peter is given a sword and shield to fight up close and lead in battle, while his female siblings are given a bow and arrow to offer support from a distance and a magical healing potion). Imagine how different it would feel to have them described as "Sons and Daughters of Adam" or "Sons of Eve and Daughters of Adam".  In later books there are equally troubling messages about modernity, about schooling, and even corporal punishment.

There's a larger meta-lesson here about tolerance and acceptance. One can read a book with some viewpoints which are archaic or even problematic and still appreciate the setting, plot, and other elements. I see it as important to understand them, acknowledge that the messages are there, and make ones own judgements. I see Lewis as wrong about many of these things, but that doesn't take away the enjoyment one feels in reading his books any more than H.P. Lovecraft's racism and anti-semitism diminish the pleasure in reading his Cthulhu mythos stories. Like Lovecraft, Lewis is an important figure in the field with a wide enough influence to make him worth reading for historical purposes if no other.

The Gift of Innocence
All that said, young readers have a remarkable ability to take a piece of fiction at face value. For those who don't remember the last book, The Final Battle, is exactly what it sounds like: the last kind of Narnia along with all of the talking animals, the Centaurs, and everyone else  about whom we've come to care fight an uncomfortably Middle-Eastern seeming invading force and are killed. All of them. Aslan then judges all of the fallen, brings some of them to what is clearly an analogy for heaven. The world-travelling schoolchildren were not killed in the final battle, but learn that they all died in a car crash in the real world and would, therefore, get to stay in the afterlife with everyone else. As an admitted materialist (in the sense of philosophy rather than commerce), I saw "everyone dies, including the children who were killed in a train wreck" to be a bit of a downer. Chloe took the talking lion's assurance that the children had arrived in "the true Narnia of which the other Narnia was a mere shadow) to have many more joyous adventures at face value, and finished the book with a bright smile and look of wonder rather than the stream of tears I'd expected.

Narnia's Shadows
As I mentioned, in between the Narnia books I read Lev Grossman's Magicians novels. These books - dealing with a hidden college of magic - have been described as an adult Harry Potter. There are elements of that, but what they really are is an adult retelling of Narnia. Characters in the book grew up reading series of Narnia-like books about a magical world called Fillory. In the sequences of The Magicians and sequels taking place in Fillory - a part of the book which becomes more prominent as the series moves on - we are treated to a rundown of all the high-points of the Narnia books. This includes not only talking animals and the idea of four humans becoming royalty (and not having to do much in terms of ruling), but such specific plot elements as the sea voyage to the end of the earth and a final, apocalyptic battle at what seems to be the end of the world.

R is for Recommended Reading List (speculative fiction, grrls edition)

With only nine of these leftit appears that we're to make it through the whole alphabet. I wanted to do "recommended reading" today, and chose to focus on women after a conversation I had with Chloe (age 5.5) about the upcoming "Take your children to work day". I'll be taking her to AVI-SPL to see the excciting world of commercial audiovisual integration. She asked about my office (which she's seen once), what my boss looks lile, who my office-mate is. Then:
"Are there any girls, or is it all boys?"
We do have a few women in coordination and administrative positions and one female CAD technician, but that's all. All of the technicians, engineers, salespeople, and programmers are men.
The programming class I just took for Crestron had fifteen students, all men.
The class Biamp gave on their Audio DSP products had about fifteen students, all men.
Extron's AV technologies class had one female student out of about a dozen.
It becomes a self-perpetuationg cycle, that young girls who see certain fields dominated by men never picture themselves there, so the next generation is dominated by men, leaving a lack of role-models for the following generation of girls.  Sometimes speculative fiction literature falls into the same "boy's club" mentality, in which the big names are all men. So, to remind us all that the world can be a more diverse place if we let it, I'll give recommend three female fantasy authors and highlight one work from each.


The Orphan's Tales, by Cathrynne M Valente (In the Night Garden and Cities of Coin and Spice)


Those who know me shouldn't be surprised to see Cat Valente topping this list; I find her to be one of the most compelling and original voices in modern fantasy fiction. She has a poet's ear for language and can weave intricate and complex plots. I could have picked many of her books - her middle-grade novel The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Boat of Her Own Making, her Russian fairy-tale interpretation Deathless, or her in-progress A Dirge for Prestor John trilogy, but The Orphan's Tales were the books that first introduce me to her.  The story is about a young girl with a series of stories tattooed in tiny, tiny writing across her eyelids and in the creases of her eyes. After slowly and laboriously reading them with a magnifying glass and a mirror, she tells them to a young boy. One story leads into the next, like the tales in 1001 Arabian Nights, but they weave in and out of eachother with more complex interconnections. We sometimes see the same story from different perspectives, sometimes realize that what we think we knew was wrong. There's also a feminist subtext to the book, but not in an agressive or didactic manner. It's more that, although there are male protagonists, the stories are very largely women's stories. This is one of those books I cannot recommend strongly enough.


The Edda of Burdens, by Elizabeth Bear
(All the Windwracked Stars, Under Mountain Bound, The Sea Thy Mistress)

Again I was faced with a difficult choice of which of many very strong works by a talented author. I could have chosen her more science-fiction-y Jacobs Ladder or the surprisingly ambitious and  clever Promethean Age novels. The latter contail a veritable laundry list of the most compelling fantasy tropes: wizards, secret histories, fairies, dragons, and some familiar figures from history and myth (from King Arthur to Marlowe). The Edda of Burdens took a little more effort to get into; we get norse mythology, apolcalyptic battles, failures, sacrifice, and romance. The first book, All the Windwracked Stars, opens with the aftermath of a great battle in which Waelcyrge (Valkyries) have been defeated and slain by the forces of darkness - save for the historian and poet Muire who broke ranks and fled from the battle. We follow her to a distant, post-apolcalyptic future in which dying technology shares the stage with the stuff of myth and legend - including the immortal Muire, and suneater Mingan the Grey Wolf. That's right, we get a far-future in which one character has eaten the sun. It doesn't sound as if it should work, but it somehow does.




Shades of Milk and Honey
Glamour in Glass
Without a Summer (forthcoming) by Mary Robinette Kowal
Kowal doesn't have the impressive body of work that either Bear or Valente does (at least not yet - unless there are a whole stack of novels which I missed), but the trilogy beginning with Shades of Milk and Honey is an impressive effort worthy of a place on anyone's reading list. This trilogy starts off as Kowal's take on a Jane Austin-style regency romance. It's full of all the things that make such a book fun; secret agendas, love triangles, mysteries and, of course, literal magic in the form of illusionary "glamours" which can be used as performance, decoration, or misdirection. I discussed the second book, Glamour in Glass, earlier in this blog. The forthcoming Without a Summer will wrap up the tale, and take on the social and political upheaval of the early industrial revolution as well as focusing on the remaining family conflicts. I eagerly look forward to it.



The challenge of this sort of thing is that there are so many great writers I missed. I'll give an honorable mention to Jacqueline Carey's BDSM-tinged Kushiel's Legacy series (taking place in a sort of alternate France in which houses of courtesans worship the angels who walked the earth with the son of Yeshua and the Magdalene), and Kelly Link's brilliant short-fiction. I was also tempted to go back in time to the earlier work of the incomprably brilliant Ursula K Leguin, way back to the short fiction of James Tiptree, Jr or back a whole century to Mary Shelly's Frankenstein - which reads very well today for a hundred year old novel. Check them out. And the next time someone tells you that speculative fiction is a boys' club, club them over the head with a hardback copy of one of these.


See you tomorrow with another book review for 'S'