Review: The Last Battle

I’ll start with a confession, which seems fitting given the content of The Last Battle. It hasn’t been until this most recent re-read that I realized – I don’t really like this book. It’s sad. It’s grim. It’s weird. It’s a story about how all our main characters die and the fantasy world we’ve adored is utterly destroyed. And no, all that talk about how it was just the Shadowlands; a dim reflection of the true glory of heaven doesn’t cut it – because that’s not where I spent the last six books.

But more than that – I don’t think it’s particularly well written. I’m certain that opinion is considered a specific kind of blasphemy in some circles, but I honestly don’t think The Last Battle works well as a story. A very clear conflict is set up between King Tirian and an ever-shifting set of antagonists (from Shift to Tarkaan Rishda to Tash – none of which are around long enough to make an impression) only for the good guys to lose and none of it to matter anyway. During this re-read I was actually feeling impatient during the pre-stable door chapters, knowing that none of it was all that important in the long run. This review says it best:

And the end of the book, for me, does not redeem the horror and pain and misery of the first half. I know it ought to, but it just doesn't. It feels like cheating. The good characters don't win; the game is declared over and they are pronounced victors by fiat. It's like when you're playing SimCity (not that I'd know anything about that *cough*), and you've mucked the city up so horribly that there's no way to salvage the situation, so you delete the city and start a new one. That's fine for a game, but it doesn't work in real life, and it doesn't work in novels. (At least, it doesn't for me.)

Basically, we spend the first three-quarters of the book invested in a desperate struggle that’s rendered futile – not only because they lose, but because it never really mattered in the first place. All the important characters died and went to heaven. In the book’s own words: “all their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnian had only been the cover and the title page.”

(As an aside, this is why I never recommend exploring the afterlife in fiction. Unless your story is specifically about the afterlife – like a ghost story or something – then confirmation of life after death tends to seep away the significance of the here and now).

Look: I’m not saying that this worldview isn’t viable, or that it doesn’t fit in perfectly with Narnia’s Christian analogies. I can easily visualize Lewis finishing up The Magician’s Nephew and deciding that because he’d just depicted Narnia’s Creation, he’d have to go the whole hog and portray its End-with-a-capital-E to finish off the series. What I’m saying is that as a story, this transition from drastic crisis to happy heaven feels supremely unsatisfying.

As well as that, I honestly think The Last Battle could have used an extra draft or two. Some bits feel arbitrary or incomplete, and knowing that all seven Narnia books were written over a very short period of time (The Lion was first published in 1950; The Last Battle in 1956) I can’t help but feel that Lewis rushed through this one. Take the Lamb for example, who appears outside the stable near the beginning of the book, described as: “so young that everyone was surprised he dared speak at all.” Several chapters after Jewel is rescued an oddly specific observation is made: “[Jewel] didn’t know what had happened to the Lamb.”

Huh? Does Lewis mean that the Lamb who spoke out against Shift was also going to be executed along with Jewel? Or is the Lamb’s disappearance meant to be significant in some other way? We’ve seen Aslan appear in the form of a Lamb in The Voyage, and it’s not a huge stretch to suppose that perhaps this mysteriously-disappearing-yet-important-enough-to-be-mentioned-again Lamb was Aslan in disguise – except that this is never confirmed nor denied by the actual text. The whole thread just vanishes.

And then there’s Tash. Hoo boy. There are plenty of enigmas strewn throughout the Narnia books, but most of them are little asides, glimpses of world-building, nuggets that enrich the world and leave tantalizing unspoken stories in their wake. But Tash... I have no idea what to make of Tash.

I said in my review for The Lion that referring to The Chronicles of Narnia as Christian allegories is a big mistake. They’re not allegories, as not every single element of them correlates directly to an event or figure in the Bible. Aslan isn’t an allegory or a symbol of Christ, he IS Christ – albeit in another form in another world. On the other hand, Jadis is not the devil; she’s a witch originally described as being descended from Lilith who occasionally does things that are reminiscent of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Likewise, Peter is not Saint Peter, though here he’s given the task of shutting the door on Narnia in a similar manner to Peter guarding the gates of heaven.

Nothing relates directly to the Biblical text, but everything is soaked in Christian imagery.
So what do we make of Tash? What’s he meant to represent? Where’d he even come from?

He’s first mentioned in The Horse and His Boy, as the god of the Calormenes, though there’s no indication that he’s actually real. In The Magician’s Nephew there’s certainly no “birth of Tash” along with all the other nature gods. And yet in The Last Battle he manifests as a very real creature that kills Shift and makes off with Tarkaan Rishda under his arm. He’s banished when Peter says: “Begone, Monster, and take your lawful prey to your own place.”

What place? Hell? Does that mean he’s meant to be Satan in the same way Aslan is Christ? Later Tash is described by Aslan as his “opposite.” Perhaps he’s meant to be the Antichrist, though technically Shift fits into that role much more elegantly.

Is he then simply a demon or some other evil spirit? But within the Christian worldview that forms the theological backdrop of these books, this would make him a fallen angel – which he clearly isn’t. His vulture’s head, four arms and collection of turban-wearing, scimitar-wielding worshippers clearly makes him Eastern in origin. Is he then meant to symbolize Lewis’s idea of a pagan deity? And if so, that still doesn’t answer where he came from.

And what about the other Calormene gods, Azaroth and Zardeenah, mentioned in The Horse and His Boy? Are they real?

In short, I don’t understand Tash. At a guess I’d say he’s simply supposed to be part of Lewis’s message that atheists (in this case, Tarkaan Rishda and Ginger) get more than they bargain for when they call up deities that turn out to be very real despite their disbelief. Unfortunately, that treatise means introducing a bizarre element into his story that feels completely arbitrary in terms of the established world-building.

Then there are the unfortunate implications prevalent in the Calormenes, who have always been a little controversial in previous books, but whose portrayal here is flat-out offensive, from the description of them as “smelling of garlic and onions, their white eyes flashing dreadfully in their dark faces”, to the brownface that Tirian applies in order to move around the countryside easily, to the fact that (with one notable exception) all of them are essentially the villains of the book, worshipping a malevolent creature described as Aslan’s opposite.

Yes, Lewis was a man of his time, and yes, Emeth is an important exemption, but it’s impossible to read any of this and not feel deeply uncomfortable.

And of course, if you get past all of that, you’re left with what is perhaps Lewis’s most infamous creative decision: Susan.

As it turns out, Susan does not feature in this book. When Tirian questions her absence, we’re told that she has grown up in the worst possible sense, that she’s only interested in lipstick and nylons and invitations, that she’s dismissed all of her experiences in Narnia as make-believe. She is, as a matter of fact, rather like the Dwarfs Who Would Not Be Taken In, presumably doomed to spend eternity believing that they’re squatting in a darkened stable because they refuse to believe the truth of their surroundings.

My first experience of The Last Battle was actually an audiobook, one that was heavily abridged. This meant that although I learn that Susan was “no longer a friend of Narnia”, I was left with no idea why. It was horrifying. What on earth could Susan have done to be excluded in this way? Had she murdered someone? Had there been some terrible falling-out between her and her siblings? Eventually I got my hands on the full text and learnt the answer. To say the discovery was bitterly anti-climactic is an understatement, and I clearly remember my ten-to-twelve year old self feeling numb with disappointment.

When I grew even older, the horrific implications of Susan’s fate hit me more fully. She was not on the train that took the lives of her siblings, parents and cousin. Her entire family (not counting the awful Uncle Harold and Aunt Alberta) are dead. She is alone in the world. As I said earlier, I have to believe that Lewis rushed through The Last Battle without thinking certain elements through, as to deliberately kill off an entire family and leaving a young girl to grieve on her own just to make a point about frivolity is too cruel for words.

So why did he do this? Perhaps he wanted the Friends of Narnia to be significantly seven in number. Perhaps he wanted to demonstrate that no matter a person’s experiences, there’s always the chance that they might fall off the wagon, so to speak. Mostly though, I think he wanted to demonstrate his disdain for superficiality.

If I divorce myself from my feminist leanings, it’s made reasonably clear by the text that Susan’s fate is more about worldliness than femininity. In plugs in very deeply with Lewis’s belief that:

To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

Heck, this concept is captured in his dedication to his god-daughter found at the start of The Lion: “I wrote this story for you but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

It’s the fear of childhood and the embracement of adulthood’s trappings that Lewis is attacking when it comes to his exclusion of Susan, not strictly femininity. I know I’ve read a passage elsewhere in which Lewis states that he finds the masculine obsession with cars and sports just as tedious as a woman’s with lipstick and nylons – but unfortunately, he still chooses to make his point about adulthood and triviality by framing the dismissal of Susan in distinctively feminine terms.

And I find it interesting that the three characters who are most caustic toward Susan are Eustace, Jill and Polly. Her siblings stay silent (perhaps out of lingering loyalty?) and so it is the two youngest and the two women who are the mouthpieces of why Susan is no longer a friend of Narnia, which cannot be a coincidence. Polly’s line in particular is pertinent:

“Grown up, indeed. I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she’ll waste the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one’s life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.”

It’s a loaded passage, one which simultaneously differentiates between two types of “grown up”, criticizes the feminine desire to look and act a certain way, and explicitly links that to the wrong way of growing up. The “age” that Lewis is referring to no doubt signifies adolescence/very early adulthood, continuing in the grand tradition of denigrating and ridiculing teenage girls, but in doing so it completely undermines all the potential that Susan had – and still has – as a character.

By absorbing what Lewis wrote about Susan’s life regardless of his intentions and/or lack of interest in the subject, it’s easy to figure out why Susan turned her back on Narnia. She was a High Queen, powerful, adored and beautiful. Then, in a matter of seconds, she’s a child again. Can you imagine being flung back into your preadolescent body? To endure puberty all over again?  To go from the powerful ruler of a kingdom to a helpless girl in wartime? And then, when you finally managed to return to the world in which you reigned as queen, it was to find that all your friends were dead, your time had passed, and you were told that you were now too old to ever return again?

I’d be pretty damned pissed off by all of this. To have a perfect fairytale existence and lose it all – well, I imagine quite a lot of people would convince themselves it had all been make-believe in order to cope with the loss. And then to have your entire family killed in a train accident – what would that do to a person, much less one that had already endured intense loss in her odd double-life? Apparently Lewis received several letters from readers who bemoaned the fate of Susan, and he asserted that Susan was not damned, just lost, and that she had every chance of finding her way back to Narnia “in her own way.”

Hrumph. The way he phrased it still sounds condescending, and I’m afraid that the less-gracious part of my brain is secretly pleased that for all its philosophical discourse and powerful descriptive passages, The Last Battle is best known for its infamous treatment of Susan Pevensie. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Lewis.

***

Now, there are plenty of things about this book that I do in fact enjoy, so I’d better start mentioning them.

The Tirian/Jewel bromance is the most interesting thing about what are otherwise two rather dull characters. The scene in which the Dryad dies as her tree is felled miles away is striking, and a great bit of world-building (that a dryad would die along with her tree regardless of the distance between them makes perfect sense). The fearful animals that nevertheless come to give Tirian food while he’s tied to the tree is a beautiful sequence. The destruction of Narnia is suitably profound, dramatic and terrifying. There’s some neat continuity in regards to the falling stars (from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader), Father Time (from The Silver Chair) and the dying sun (from The Magician’s Nephew). I tear up every time Lucy and Mr Tumnus are reunited in Aslan’s garden, and the cameos from virtually every significant character to ever feature in the past six books is a treat (though Lewis forgot Doctor Cornelius).

There is a well-sustained melancholy air strewn throughout the first three-quarters of the book, with Tirian constantly referred to as “the last King of Narnia” and even the first sentence telling us this story takes place in “the last days of Narnia”, which makes certain other passages feel all the more poignant, such as the beauty of Narnia as they leave the tower, or Tirian’s deep seated certainty that the plan to head into the Western Wastes and start a rebellion there won’t actually happen.

I find it interesting that despite the presence of Jill and Eustace, most of the story is told from Tirian’s point-of-view, not only making this one of two books that focus on a Narnian rather than a human being, but the only book that has an adult as its main character. Perhaps to denote its darker tone? Of course, by the time the characters enter heaven, the point-of-view flits relentlessly between everyone, settling at last (as is fitting) with Lucy.

This poses more questions as to the nature of the omnipotent narrator. In the past we’ve been led to believe that it’s Lewis himself, recounting the adventures as told to him first-hand by the children. But here? How can he possibly give an account of the afterlife is everyone who experiences it is dead? And handwaving that, I remember as a child feeling rather betrayed that all those hints and promises that Narnia was out there, and that one day I might get a chance to visit (see the final sentence in The Silver Chair, for example) are rendered obsolete by the final book. (Unless of course Lewis was referring to the heaven-version of all these wonderful places – which, as I said earlier – doesn’t count considering it’s not heaven that I spent the last six books exploring).

Although some of the action takes place in Lantern Waste, with specific mention of this being the location where the trees of gold and silver once grew, there’s inexplicably no mention of the famous lamp-post. It would have been immensely fitting to see it one more time, but – nada.

I want to finish this re-read with a bang, not a whimper, but The Last Battle makes it difficult. It’s a challenging and frustrating book, whose flaws become more apparent with every re-read; flaws which are so subjective that it’s difficult to say anything definitive about them. There are probably millions of readers out there that adore everything I’ve just complained about. Though The Last Battle won the Carnegie medal, I can’t help but feel that was a symbolic win for all the Narnia books – the panel no doubt realizing that this would be their last chance to award Lewis for his contribution. And that was a deserved win.

So farewell to Narnia, at least for now. The next time I read these books it will probably be to my young nephew, and it’ll be a whole different ballgame experiencing them through his eyes.