Tag: Narnia

Riding Towards Narnia

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fantasy, Juvenile, Reviews2 Comments

After listening to The Magician’s Nephew on audiobook, I continued my adventures through Narnia with The Horse and His Boy.  It’s the third book, chronologically, but I reread The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe relatively recently, so I jumped on ahead.

The Horse and His Boy is set during The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe–or during the reign of High King Peter, in in-universe timeline.  This book centers on new characters, with the characters from the previous book only in supporting roles.  This is the story of Shasta and talking horse Bree, who flee the oppressive empire of Calormen, trying to reach the free kingdom of Narnia.  They join forces with Aravis, a Calormene aristocrat fleeing an arranged marriage, and her talking horse, Hwin.  Their mission takes on new urgency when they overhear Calormene plans to conquer Narnia and neighboring Archenland.

This one started a little slow for me, though I’m not sure why.  It may have just been me, but it took me a while to get involved with the characters.  I found it picked up right around the same time the Narnians first arrived in the story.  I don’t know if that was because of them, or because the threats from Calormen became more pronounced then, or if I’d just been listening long enough to get engaged.  After that, the book has more momentum as it becomes a desperate race to warn Archenland and Narnia before invading forces arrive.

As in The Magician’s Nephew, I found the supporting characters highly engaging.  The talking horses were particularly good, as Narnian exiles both eager and anxious about going home again.  Bree is decidedly arrogant, while Hwin is sweet and altogether too self-effacing.  I also liked the glimpses of Lucy, Edmund and Susan as adults…although it adds hugely to the tragedy of the previous book, when they’re pulled out of Narnia and sent home to be children again!!  They had amazing lives in Narnia–how do you go home after that?  But that’s classic children’s fantasy for you…

I liked Shasta and Aravis well enough too, if not extraordinarily.  Perhaps a little context on that comment, though…  When I reread The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, it was because I had just read The Magicians by Lev Grossman, which made me desperately want to run back to Narnia.  So now any time I feel at all disengaged from characters in Narnia, all I have to do is remind myself–I could be reading about Quentin and his friends from The Magicians–and then I’m very happy to be with Lewis’ characters instead!  So take “disengaged” as a relative term…

Although I enjoyed the Narnians so much, it was also fun to see a different country in this world.  Calormen has Middle Eastern elements, and was very richly described.  Archenland was less developed, but I really liked the bits in the Epilogue about Archenland’s history.  Seeing multiple countries, with their own governments and cultures, gave a much more grounded feel to the magical country.

All in all, this isn’t my favorite installment of Narnia (so far Magician’s Nephew is still holding title) but it was a good ride!

Author’s Site: https://www.cslewis.com/us

Other reviews:
The Bookworm Chronicles
The Daydreaming, Candy-Eating, Redheaded Bookworm
Here There Be Books
Anyone else?

Buy it here: The Horse and His Boy

The Magician’s Nephew

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fantasy, Juvenile, Reviews6 Comments

I have been meaning for ages to reread C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series…in part because Jessica keeps reviewing them!  I have such a stack of other books, though, that I kept not getting to them, until I finally hit on the idea of audiobooks–which should have been obvious to me, considering my first Narnia experience was when my dad read them to me as a kid.  So I just listened to The Magician’s Nephew, read by Kenneth Branagh, and am very happy to say that the story was even more delightful than I remembered.

Set chronologically before The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, this installment gives the origin story for certain elements of the later novels, and provides a Narnia creation story.  That said, it’s largely stand-alone, apart from a few references at the end along the lines of “and so this led to that and much resulted, but that’s quite another story…”  This story is about Digory, his friend Polly, and his Uncle Andrew, a rather nasty man who has been dabbling in magic.  Uncle Andrew has devised magic rings which he believes will send people to another world, and tricks Polly and Digory into taking the trip.  They reach the magical Wood Between the Worlds, and venture first into dying Charn, where they meet the evil Empress Jadis, and then into Narnia, on the day of creation.

Digory and Polly fit in amongst Lewis’ collection of child heroes, imperfect but basically good, generally courageous and honorable though apt to falter at times in a very human and believable way.  They provide a solid center to the story, while the surrounding characters are in some ways more complex.

Uncle Andrew is wonderfully painted in his egotism and cowardice, so sure of his own inherent greatness but so obviously a petty, narcissistic man.  Jadis shares some of Uncle Andrew’s narcissistic tendencies, but is clearly in a class all her own for sheer cruelty and coldness.  Once Jadis arrives on the scene, Uncle Andrew shrinks dramatically as a villain, so obviously upstaged by the real villain.  Lewis does something rather brilliant in that, as soon as Uncle Andrew loses power as a villain, he’s turned into a comedic figure instead, equally effective in that role.

I madly loved the setting of this book–all the settings, actually.  I don’t know how Lewis resisted doing an entire extended series just centered around the Wood Between the Worlds.  I mean, it’s an endless forest full of pools of water, and each pool goes to another world.  And we only went through three pools, counting the one to our world.  The untapped possibilities!

And then Charn was just fascinating.  Lewis has never before reminded me of Tolkien (though I hadn’t read Tolkien before either…) but Charn with its enormous marble edifices, apparently ancient history, and epic battles, reminded me of Middle Earth (less trees, though).  It had a similar quality of existing on an unimaginably epic scale.

I loved the creation of Narnia too.  How lovely to have a world spring into being through a song!

Just when everything was getting very solemn and epic and sweeping, when it might have become a little too much–it didn’t, because there’s a wonderfully funny episode of Narnia’s newly-created animals trying to decide what ought to be done with the raving Uncle Andrew.  They aren’t quite sure if he’s an animal or a tree…

If you’re thinking about starting Narnia, you could begin here (and if you’re thinking about the audio, Branagh was excellent).  It’s listed as #1 in a lot of editions, since it is first chronologically.  However, I think you’d be better off starting with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, for the sake of all those “and then it led to other adventures” references.  But once you’ve read Lion, I don’t see any need to go through the next several books, in their original publishing order, before reading the very delightful Magician’s Nephew.

Other reviews:
The Bookworm Chronicles
Sonya’s Cannonball Read
Stray Thoughts
Here There Be Books
Kristina Yarn
Anyone else?

Buy it here: The Magician’s Nephew

Through the Wardrobe

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fantasy, Juvenile, Reviews8 Comments

Narnia has been coming up a lot for me lately.  I went to see The Voyage of the Dawn Treader…my book club book pick was inspired by Narnia…the series was referenced on a blog I follow…  I decided the universe was telling me something (and that book club book especially made me want to go back to the original) and I decided to re-read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis.

I say “re-read” because I know I read it before, but I honestly couldn’t tell you how long ago it was.  Years and years, although the story is so familiar that in some ways it doesn’t feel that long.  For those who somehow don’t know the story (side-note–I once overheard a woman tell a librarian she’d never heard of the series, so it’s possible), it’s the story of four children who go through a wardrobe and find themselves in the magical country of Narnia.  There they meet the great lion Aslan and fight an epic battle against the White Witch.

It’s a wonderful story on many levels.  It’s a lovely children’s fantasy with dashing heroes, not too much blood, magical creatures like Mr. Tumnus and Mr. and Mrs Badger, and several stern admonitions that it’s very foolish to shut oneself inside of a wardrobe (I honestly think Lewis was worried about this, he repeats it so many times).  On a more symbolic level, there’s a clear Christ story enacted.  But it works on both levels, for however you want to take it.  I’ve always thought that was the mark of the best kind of book–a good story and a good message where neither one gets in the way of the other.

I enjoyed Lewis’ style very much.  Things happen so quickly.  Lucy, the first child into Narnia, gets there by page six.  As the adventures continue, they go on at a tumblingly-quick rate.  There’s even a point where Lewis writes, of an unpleasant night journey by sledge, “This lasted longer than I could describe even if I wrote pages and pages about it.”  Thankfully, he doesn’t bother, concluding, “But I will skip on to the time when the snow had stopped and the morning had come and they were racing along in the daylight.”

C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were in the same writing group.  I’ve heard that Tolkien spent years and years on The Lord of the Rings, and Lewis wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in a matter of weeks (something that I’ve also heard annoyed Tolkien no end).  I have to say, it shows for both of them.  Different viewpoints on writing could consider that a plus or a minus to either one, but my preference would have to be with Lewis.

Lewis begins the book with a lovely dedication to his goddaughter, the real-life Lucy.  In somewhat contradiction to the story that he wrote the book in a few weeks, he says that he wrote it for her but she grew up faster than it did and she’s now too old for it, “but some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”  Lewis clearly understood about the cross-age appeal of the best children’s stories.  We may go through an age where we think we’re too grown-up for “kids books,” but eventually we get old enough to realize we can come back to them.

St. Paul wrote, “When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me” (1 Corinthians 13:11).  C. S. Lewis added, “Including the fear of being thought childish.”  We don’t have to “think like a child or reason like a child” (paraphrasing Corinthians) to appreciate a story written for children.  We can enjoy it with new eyes, new understanding, and hopefully some of the old magic too.