Narnia is Not Tame

 I have watched Trollhunters: Rise of the Titans and I had thoughts about that ending; I was going to revolve this Note around that. But on the off chance that one of the three people who reads these Saturday Notes, y’know, cares, I didn’t want to spoil a movie that was just out. For the record though if you don’t watch the Netflix series, Trollhunters is actually pretty darn good? If you’re into kids’ action series.

Friday was a rough day at work too, so I kind of want to crawl into a hole and hide for the rest of my days. But hopefully my dad and I will get to see The Green Knight this weekend, and hopefully we’ll enjoy it.

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Narnia is Not Tame

I reread The Voyage of the Dawn Treader this week, and that book is weird. But we’ll talk about that in the Book Diary post. Another thought I had while reading though was that very often I see The Chronicles of Narnia talked about as if it’s a cutesy story about a saccharine group of kids having a safe romp through Candyland where nothing bad ever happens. This is perpetuated by blockheads like Lev Grossman--in his book The Magicians (or as I sometimes think of it, “Fantasy Sucks and You Suck for Liking It”), the sequence in his Narnia analogue, Fillory, is filled with the protagonists being astonished at actual bad things happening.

This attitude towards the books reminds me of a complaint I made a few years ago, in which I pointed out that so many times people making their own takes on fairy tales make the claim, or their reviews make the claim that it’s “Like a fairy tale, BUT DARKER!!!” Someone with a passing knowledge of fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood or the Three Little Pigs knows that there are versions of the story where good characters get devoured by an angry wolf.

Cue my friend’s admonishment: “But dude, fairy tales ARE dark.”

There are plenty of bad things that happen in the Narnia novels. Sometimes they happen to good people! There is plenty of violence as well! To be sure, these are children’s books, and so most of the worst of it isn’t on-page, but there are plenty of horrible things that happen. Do we forget that Voyage of the Dawn Treader sees our heroes nearly trapped in slavery? That Prince Caspian tells us that Miraz had all his political enemies assassinated, executed, or set up to die? That Peter beheads a Telmarine lord coming at him in the same book? That the monsters that try to summon the White Witch are killed as well? That there are giants eating a talking animal in The Silver Chair (and the heroes had unwittingly already bitten into it, much to their revulsion)? That Jadis killed her entire universe in The Magician’s Nephew? And then in LWW she goes and kills Jesus?!

[Again, not a metaphor for Jesus, actual Jesus. Not an allegory. Stop saying that.]

And the heroic characters are far from perfect people! Edmund is the obvious one, but there are plenty of others. In Voyage of the Dawn Treader the characters grapple with their baser instincts quite a lot. Caspian’s reaction upon finding a pool that turns things into gold is to try to claim it for the crown and make himself the wealthiest man in history. He also tries to abandon his country to go to Aslan’s Country, which every other character calls him out on. In The Horse and His Boy, Aravis has to be point-blank told by Aslan that disregarding someone’s pain isn’t okay even if that someone is lower class than you--something that Shasta is pretty shocked she hasn’t already worked out.

There is plenty of material in front of us to show that this isn’t a fun ride all the way through. There is a lot of struggle, a lot of violence, and a lot of battle. Because we don’t get graphic descriptions of the violence in front of us I think many people think that it isn’t there, but that’s just silly. Somehow, people get the notion that because they are Christian books written for children, they obviously must be dumbed down.

We know that children’s stories, especially old-fashioned children’s stories, are not usually that dumbed down, right? There’s a lovely quote that I think is from a Terry Pratchett book (and I can’t remember which one, for the life of me) about how adults try to make stories appropriate for children by removing the violence and blood, but that it turns out children don’t really mind that violence, as long as it happens to the correct parties. Or a statement by Neil Gaiman talking about Coraline, in that children read it as an adventure and love it, whereas adults find it all terrifying and think that their kids will have nightmares about it all.

The idea that Chronicles of Narnia is a saccharine and cutesy story is one of those ideas that has less to do with text and more to do with assumptions made by those who have either forgotten the source material, or never bothered to get acquainted with it in the first place. If you like graphic descriptions of on-page violence in stories and are disappointed by the lack of it in these novels, that’s a different criticism altogether.

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