narnian bible studies: or good beast/bad beast
ok there are dozens of spots in the chronicles of narnia where you think EXCUSE ME just what kind of xtianity does mr clive staples lewis think he is propagandisin FOR plz thkyou, eg in last battle alone the death of the dryad, or the sudden high-speed appearance and extinction of dinosaurs or whatever
but the point that always annoyed and saddened me – it’s in tolk too but less freighted with a DO-YOU-SEE message maybe – are the “species-ist” assumptions about animal goodness and/or badness
i. mice, beavers, badgers, horses ALL GOOD ALL THE TIME
ii. cats and apes and “the people of the toadstools” bad
iii. bears can go either way (corin thunderfist, as a grown-up, anecdotally battles a bear who reverts to beastliness in “horse and his boy”)
iv. cf tolk, where spiders are AGELESS EVIL EMBODIED: but WHY?
i mean i know why: “animals i heart” = GOOD by defn, “animals that creep me out” = BAD by defn, but this is surely very poor theology!! (cf the moment when the taliing beasts who fail to get in through the stabvle door lose the power of speech as they vanish: so narnia-heaven has no real actual ordinary animals (or trees) in it? everything in anrnia-heaven talks and has a soul? csl’s platonism is as bonkers-ass as his faith!! (etc)
corrective addendum to the above: cats are not always bad — aslan disguises himself as one among the tombs in “the horse and his boy”
And what about foxes?
Lions – BORING
I read the entire series seven times as a child and skipped Horse and His Boy six of them.
Horse and His Boy has a handful of terrific scenes — good city slapstick, of running and hiding and the disparity between (tedious and empty) palace life and (perilous and busy) street life, and how the former can suddenly be far more perilous. The wait in the Tombs, shut out of the city at dusk, is excellently spooky: you know something’s going to happen but not what. The evolving relationship of the foursome — two children of different backgrounds, two horses somewhat ditto — is reasonably well managed, even if it’s over-bullied by Aslan; though as usual, the gurls are more interestingly complex than the boys. The climactic comical battle is fun too: distinctly less bad taste in the mouth, like the kids defeating the villains in an old-school St Trinians film, by pranks and the villains’ own bad character, rather than violence etc.
Obviously it’s rendered a bit problematic by its “Here’s what’s wrong with the OTTOMAN EMPIRE” truth-to-power lameness. Actually — as any Arabian Knights type move of the era will amplify — life in Tashbaan looks exotic and exciting, for a thru-wardrobe visit.
The Horse and His Boy was always my favourite Narnia book as a child because it dropped the “strangers in a fantasy world” bit and lived completely within a fairly obscure corner of the world. The island city in particular seemed massively exciting – I pictured it being something like Mont St Michel, which I went to around the same time – and the relationships between the two kids and between the two horses seemed way more genuine than anything else in the rest of the series.