life is fucking nuts, isn't it?

For many years I have been saying 'I must reread the Narnia books,' a thing I somehow have not done in the seventeen or so years I've been actively keeping track of my reading habits. I said this in the late 2000s when the new movies were coming out, and I said it again a couple years ago when I read Til We Have Faces for the first time, and then I said it several times over the past few months while I was rewatching all the 1980s BBC Narnia adaptations with local friends, and then last week my friend was doing a blitz reread of the whole series for a con panel and I had finally said it enough times that I decided to join her instead of just talking about it.

For background: yes, the Narnia books were some of my favorite books when I was a child; they're the first books I actively remember reading on my own, that made me go 'ah! this thing, reading, is worth doing, and not just a dull task set to me by adults!' (This goes to show how memory is imperfect: my parents say that the first book that they remember me reading, before Narnia, was The Borrowers. But they also say that I then went immediately looking for Borrowers behind light sockets which perhaps is why I do not remember reading it first.)

I also cannot remember a time that I did not know that the big lion was supposed to be Jesus. This did not really put me off Narnia or Aslan -- I had a lion named Aslan that was my favorite stuffed animal all through my childhood -- but I did have a vague sense As A Jewish Child that it was sort of embarrassing for everyone concerned, including the lion, C.S. Lewis, and me. My favorites were Silver Chair, Horse And His Boy, and Magician's Nephew. I reread The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe often simply because it was the first one; Prince Caspian didn't leave much of an impression on me and I only really liked Dawn Treader for Eustace's dragon sequence; The Last Battle filled me with deep secondhand embarrassment.

Rereading, I discover that I had great taste; Silver Chair simply stays winning! The experience of reading the first three Pevensie books is a constant hunt for little crumbs of individuality and personality in the Pevensie children beyond their Situations and how willing they are to listen to advice from Big Lion; Jill and Eustace and Puddleglum, by contrast, have personality coming out their ears. I cherish every one of them. The dark Arthuriana vibes when they meet the knight and his lady out riding ... the whole haunted sequence underground .... Puddleglum's Big Speech .... this is, was, and will ever be peak Narnia to me. For all the various -isms of Horse And His Boy, it feels really clear that Lewis leveled up in writing Character somewhere between Dawn Treader and Silver Chair; Shasta and Aravis and the horses and Polly and Diggory all just have a lot more chances to bonk against each other in interesting ways and show off who they are than the Pevensies ever do.

However! I also had bad taste. I did not appreciate Caspian as it ought to have been appreciated. Now, on my reread, it's by far my favorite of the Pevensie-forward texts -- and partly I suppose that, as a child, I could not fully have been expected to appreciate the whole 'we came back to a place we used to know and a life we used to have and even as we're remembering the people we used to be there we're realizing it's all fundamentally changed' melancholy of it all. It's good! The Pevensies also just get to do more on their own and use more of their own actual skills than they do in either The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, where they're mostly led around by the nose, or Dawn Treader, where they're mostly just having a nice boat trip. Just a soupcon of Robinsoniad in your Narnia, as a treat.

I also came away with the impression that Dawn Treader -- which really is primarily about Eustace and Reepicheep -- would be a better book if either Edmund or Lucy had gone on that trip but not both of them. The problem with Dawn Treader is that Edmund/Lucy/Caspian all kind of blob together in a cohort of being Just Sort Of Embarrassed By Eustace -- Edmund and Caspian particularly -- and don't get a lot to individuate them or give them Problems. Edmund and Caspian's dialogue is frequently almost interchangeable. But an Edmund who has Lucy's trials at the magician's tower and has to deal more with his existing/leftover issues from the first book is more interesting, and a Lucy who is stuck more in the middle of Caspian and Eustace without Edmund to over-balance the stakes is more interesting. I expect people will want me to fight me on this though because I know a lot of people have Dawn Treader as their favorite ....

Other miscellaneous observations:

- obviously I am aware of the Susan Problem but man, reading for Susan and Lucy through the later books it is clear how much the gradual tilting of the scales to Lucy Good/Susan Bad does a disservice to both characters. This is especially noticeable IMO in Horse And His Boy; it makes no sense for Lucy to go to war with a bow while Susan stays behind in context of anything we know about those characters from Lion and Caspian, it is so purely an exercise in Lucy Is The Designated Cool Girl Now. Anyway, what I really want now is an AU where Susan does marry out of Narnia sometime in the Golden Age and instead of becoming the One Who Never Comes Back becomes the One Who Never Leaves

- it is very very funny that every King or Queen of Narnia talks like Shakespeare except for Caspian, who talks, as noted above, like a British schoolboy. My Watsonian explanation for this is that the Pevensies were like 'well, kings talk like Shakespeare' and consciously developed this as an affectation whereas Caspian, who met the Pevensies as schoolchildren at a formative age, was like 'well, kings talk like British schoolchildren' and consciously developed it as an affectation --

- if you are on Bluesky you may have already seen me make this joke but it is so funny to be rolling along in Narnia pub order and have C.S. Lewis come careening back in for Magician's Nephew like 'WAIT! STOP!! I forgot to mention earlier but Jadis? She is hot. You know Lady Dimitrescu? yeah JUST like that. I just want to make sure we all know'

- Last Battle still fills me with secondhand embarrassment

There is a subgenre that I wouldn't have thought to describe as a whole subgenre until I read Kerstin Hall's Asunder and immediately thought 'like Deeplight!' and also 'like those Max Gladstone books!' and also come to think of it 'like The Archive Undying' -- second-world fantasy set in a society that's been shaped around gods, and now those gods are [quite recently] dead or gone or murdered, and everyone is trying to reckon with the shape of the world that they left behind. I like this sort of subgenre quite a bit because it lends itself to interesting complexity; people can have all kinds of different messy feelings about the divine, and about their destruction, and about whatever new powers have come in to fill the void they left, and it's rarely as straightforward as 'it was better before' or 'it's better now.'

Asunder is kind of a weird book and it passes through a lot as it goes; I'm not sure it structurally holds together, and the ending feels in some sense incomplete, but it leaves its world messy in ways I really enjoyed. Our Heroine Karys' country used to be under the charge of a set of variously powerful, variously petty localized divinities, who created much of the important infrastructure, and who all died about twenty years ago, resulting in a major conquest. People Feel Various Ways About This. Now Karys has contracted herself to a different kind of powerful and terrible [divinity?/cosmic horror?] in exchange for the ability to talk to the dead, which serves as her main source of income. The job on which we meet her, however, is immediately in the process of going horribly wrong, as the shipwreck she was investigating turns out to have been caused by a weird monster that traps her in a cavern, where she finds a gravely injured survivor, a young diplomat from a foreign empire. Then in the process of trying to help him escape with her she accidentally traps this whole diplomat inside her subconscious, and the rest of the book is a long strange road trip for the purpose of Getting Him Out Of There, complicated by:

- the various debts of obligation and favor that Karys is obliged to incur to sneak through and past various borders
- the scholar who decides to come along for the ride because she thinks Karys is not only cute but also the most interesting potential research subject she's ever met
- the small unhappy town that Karys ran away from as a child, and her childhood friend/ex-girlfriend?? who has some kind of connection to Karys' childhood god/ex-god??
- Karys' powerful and terrible patron, who has informed her that she is destined to be summoned to him soon for a Great Honor, which does not seem like a good thing at all at all
- the fact that everyone keeps telling Karys and her new passenger Ferain that if they don't Fix This Immediately one of them is inevitably going to have to kill the other for survival, which does not help with building the trust and cooperation that they need to develop in order to keep escaping from
- the weird monsters that are still persistently trying to chase them down

And meanwhile we, the readers, are picking up slowly on all the complicated past between these countries and these gods as we pass through it, and also on what's going on with Karys herself. ( spoilers )