It takes a children's book discussion to rile me up.

One of my slowly growing number of readers sent me a link to this blog post, regarding the Chronicles of Narnia. I was aghast. As I stated in a previous post, I am both excited and nervous to see the movie.

I will reiterate my statements from the earlier post: I am not a radical Christian. A brief perusal of some of my other posts on this site (Here and Here, for example) should convince you of that.

However, what mystifies me about the linked review/post is the author's characterization of Lewis' message. What Mr. Myers misses completely is that Lewis, first and foremost, set out to write a children's novel. AWlthough there is clear Christian allegory, the principal goal was the story. Children like adventures. Lewis gives them adventures.

Mr Myers claims that it was "simply not a good story", which is fair enough, I guess. Obviously our tastes differ. However, the quotes he provides from a "heartwarming" review go well beyond a criticism of the story.

Over the years, others have had uneasy doubts about the Narnian brand of Christianity. Christ should surely be no lion (let alone with the orotund voice of Liam Neeson). He was the lamb, representing the meek of the earth, weak, poor and refusing to fight.

...And this is represented by the mighty lion, with the ability to easily crush all opposition, willingly placing himself on the stone table for sacrifice. What would the sacrifice have meant if Aslan were, in fact, a powerless, meek easily-defeated opponent? It would have meant nothing. The power in this analogy is that Aslan lays himself down before an inferior foe in order to redeem the meek, poor souls who cannot fight for themselves. Lucy and Susan, watching the sacrifice, even comment on this.

Philip Pullman - he of the marvellously secular trilogy His Dark Materials - has called Narnia "one of the most ugly, poisonous things I have ever read".

I have to say that this quote reveals the reviewer's biases. I have read (and enjoyed) "His Dark Materials". However, it should be pointed out that Mr. Pullman's work is a similar "fantasy" work to Lewis'. It is, in fact, clearly intended to be a counterpoint (although, in my humble opinion, less artfully done). Mr. Myers (and several commenters) state that they missed the allegory in the Chronicles at first. It would be impossible to miss the allegory in Mr. Pullman's work.

Where Lewis, as I stated earlier, attempts to express to his reader the beauty of the story of Christianity (which exists regardless of whether you believe Christianity to be true) while primarily telling a fantastic story, Mr. Pullman beats you over the head with his secularism. God is presented (explicitly, not allegoricall) as a fraudulent old dotard who deserves nothing better than to be scattered to the wind. The child protagonists of the book are, in the end, separated forever and told that they will vanish forever when they die. Now, maybe this is a message Mr. Pullman felt he had to get accross. However, I think he would have benefitted greatly by reading Lewis' work "On Three Ways of Writing for Children".