What is There Between Bad and Good?

I read the Chronicles of Narnia books in fourth and fifth grade. I liked them enough then but when I returned to them later in life I found them stale and somewhat offensive. I know, I know it's CS Lewis- as a contemporary western Christian I'm supposed to love him. M'eh. From what I hear, as a Christian I'm also supposed to love the National Treasure movies but I'd rather watch a root canal than see those again.

I actually sat through the second National Treasure movie while getting a root canal. I went to a fancy oral surgeon that had beautiful, expensive monitors above the operating chairs. I found myself focusing on the reflection of my mouth surgery in his face shield rather than the movie.

Back to Lewis... the staleness of the books perhaps results from too desperately wanting to foist his Christianity into every aspect of his fiction. That is, with too rigid an agenda, he seemed to prevent himself from telling a story or creating characters that might be... well, stories and characters. As it is, they are merely stand ins for what he deals with elsewhere. That's what symbols are generally I suppose, and every author can only write what they can write, but it seems to me the art of literature is lost in his fiction. If I must, I'll affirm his work as an apologist, even if I could not swallow all of the content. However, for me, his fiction perhaps exists in a similar place as Anberlin's cover of Love Song stands to the world of music.

Like I said, as a child, I enjoyed it well enough. But unlike other books I loved as a child, Watership Down as an example, The Chronicles of Narnia did not survive into adulthood- or whatever else this stage of my life may more appropriately be called. (I'd even returned to Bunnicula as an adult and found it fun, what's with the rabbits?)

The offensiveness of his material is connected to the staleness. Perhaps he could do nothing else, but he is so much of a beautiful=noble=good=dominant=English world that there is little question about what could happen in his stories. Sure, for Lewis, Aslan is a lion is strong is Jesus and he kicks ass exactly as one might expect a lion to be able to do. Any weakness the lion shows is feigned and merely a part of a butt-kicking ploy and, clearly butt-kicking is what Aslan is about. Perhaps, given what things mean to us today, his Aslan would now have to be Chuck Norris or a nuclear warhead. He almost certainly could not use a lamb or a skinny, bald, peaceful, Hindu. That's a good enough segue. To be clearer, Lewis' fiction is likely as much about wagging his finger at a world that was rejecting the good and gracious dominion of English empire- the unquestioned rightness of the White Man's burden to deliver the blessings of civilization to the world tied to a justified fear of growing fascist movements- as it is about his Christian proselytization. And I would guess that expressing it this way separates the two more than they could be in Lewis' world.

So I saw the second movie this weekend. People will speak of the bloodless violence and death, it will be seen as better than the first, and fine for the kids but be careful because it's "darker" (read a bit plodding). And it will make enough money to feed a small nation.

That said It was better than having diarrhea (no one escapes my anus for long, The Blonde Buddha).

ed.-I replaced an open parentheses with a comma. I hope the integrity of the content has not been harmed and that people looking for a helpful review of Prince Caspian find one here.