Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I’ll admit: I was worried about this one because it’s my favorite book of the series but also because I’d heard a long time ago they’d added a character that wasn’t in the book. That scared me. I’m also, of course, always nervous that they’re going to Christian up these stories the same way everyone else seems to, which, imho, is poor scholarship. They’re pagan books, not (only) Christian ones.

But the film is really beautiful, deeply satisfying to the 9 year old me who lived in these books year after year. It’s nice, at 41, to see the Narnian world come alive – it’s really well-done and looks damned near what I always imagined. There are some inventions for the sake of plot – like the three new characters and the green mist and some slicing & dicing of the islands – but still it holds up, very well in fact, and yes do bring tissues if you’re the type to cry.

For me, the really uncanny bit is that two of the three new, invented characters are named Gail and Helen. I didn’t catch the father/husband’s name, but how’s that for weird? It’s the kind of detail that makes me wonder if I’m only dreaming it all, this blog included.

Now please go see it, in the theaters, too,  so that they can make The Silver Chair. If i don’t get to see a marshwiggle up on a big screen I’ll be very sad indeed.

4 Replies to “Voyage of the Dawn Treader”

  1. Not Christian books? I don’t think that’s exactly what the article says; it seems to me that the author is saying (and I agree) that Lewis intended to write a Christian allegory, but that his imagination transcended the allegory except at the points (especially at the end) when the allegory became most explicit:

    “a fairy tale that includes, encyclopedically, everything he feels most passionate about: the nature of redemption, the problem of pain, the Passion and the Resurrection, all set in his favored mystical English winter-and-spring landscape. Had he tried for less, the books would not have lasted so long. The trouble was that though he could encompass his obsessions, he could not entirely surrender to his imagination. The emotional power of the book, as every sensitive child has known, diminishes as the religious part intensifies. The most explicitly religious part of his myth is the most strenuously, and the least successfully, allegorized. . . .

    In the final Narnia book, “The Last Battle,” the effort to key the fantasy to the Biblical themes of the Apocalypse is genuinely creepy, with an Aslan Antichrist. The best of the books are the ones, like “The Horse and His Boy,” where the allegory is at a minimum and the images just flow. . . .

    Everything began with images,” Lewis wrote, admitting that he saw his faun before he got his message. He came to Bethlehem by way of Narnia, not the other way around. Whatever we think of the allegories it contains, the imaginary world that Lewis created is what matters. We go to the writing of the marvellous, and to children’s books, for stories, certainly, and for the epic possibilities of good and evil in confrontation, not yet so mixed as they are in life. But we go, above all, for imagery: it is the force of imagery that carries us forward. We have a longing for inexplicable sublime imagery, and particularly for inexplicable sublime imagery that involves the collision of the urban and the natural, the city and the sea. The image of the street lamp in the snow in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”; the flock of crying white birds and the sleeping Narnian lords at the world’s end in “Voyage of the Dawn Treader”; the underground abode of the surviving Narnian animals in “Prince Caspian,” part “Wind in the Willows” badger hole and part French Resistance cellar; even the exiled horse’s description of his lost Northern home in “The Horse and His Boy,” called Narnia but so clearly a British composite (“Narnia of the heathery mountains and the thymy downs, Narnia of the many rivers, of the plashing glens, the mossy caverns and the deep forests”)—these are why Lewis will be remembered.”

    Read more http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/11/21/051121crat_atlarge#ixzz17xfZ37T6

    All of which perhaps explains why I loved the Narnia books so very much when I read them at the age of about 8 (I still have vivid memories of reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, including where I was sitting), but was so bitterly disappointed and upset when I finally realized in the last book (hey, I was only 8!) that Aslan was Jesus and it was a Christian allegory, and not everyone got to go to Heaven. Perhaps I shouldn’t have let that spoil my memories of the earlier books, but I’m afraid it did, at least to a significant extent.

    Donna

  2. i think there are different points where people had the “hey, what’s this about?” moment in these books. mine was pretty early, & i remember deciding i really didn’t care. that whole tash/aslan bit especially made it clear: you can worship a bad god but do good things, & you can worship a good god but do bad things.

    which i still think reeks of a kind of moral relativity that (christian) scholars of the books choose to ignore.

    to me, these books have always been about conscience more than anything else. not even guilt, but redemption.

    i think Lewis would be horrified by the sanctimonious bullshit that surrounds them these days.

  3. Well, you were raised Catholic, whereas I was a nice unsuspecting Jewish child, so I’m not surprised that you at least recognized the allegorical aspect much earlier than I did! What did I know from death and resurrection? Pretty much all I knew about Jesus as a young child was what my mother had told me a couple of years earlier when I asked who he was, and she said that he was a Jew who lived a long time ago who thought he was God.

    As to your point, particularly the last sentence, I have no doubt that you’re correct. My negative associations with the ending of the last book didn’t stop me from reading the first few out loud to my son when he was little, although he was so young that he doesn’t remember them at all now, unfortunately.

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