"The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" by C. S. Lewis

This is another one of those books so classic it feels weird to review them. Like, sure I've *read* Pride and Prejudice, but I'm not going to review it.

Except I have this lovely thing called my first completed quest (which wasn't really ongoing for a while but now it is again), and The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe happens to be part of it. So... here we go.

Again, this is so classic that pretty much everyone knows the basic story (and if you don't, read the book, it's good and you'll suddenly get a lot of references). The Pevensie children go through a wardrobe into Narnia and go on an epic Aslan-assisted quest to stop the White Witch; also it's an allegory for Jesus. In this review I'm going to assume everybody knows the basic story and just expound at length about minutae.

Minutae, I choose you!

With 90% certainty C. S. Lewis didn't actually intend to make a whole series out of this. It's not like Tolkien, who I'm pretty sure had a mostly complete picture of the Legendarium's lore in his head even before he finished writing The Hobbit; there's bits of the lore in this that don't quite mesh with the rest of it, particularly The Horse and His Boy and The Magician's Nephew.

With The Horse and His Boy, I ask you: What's going on in Archenland and Calormen while all this is going on? The White Witch's paranoia about humans and surprised reaction to the Pevensies showing up would be kind of weird if she had two entire nations of humans within army-sending distance of Narnia. So I'm going to guess that Lewis hadn't come up with Calormen or Archenland when he wrote this one.

(Actually I do have a diegetic theory about what's going on with those two countries, and it boils down to: She's waging a border war with Archenland, and she and Tash [the evil god of Calormen] have a mutual thing where they stay the heck away from each other because neither is sure who'd win if they fought. That would explain why Archenland has a reasonably good standing army despite not having been invaded by Calormen for a while, explain why Calormen the Imperialist hasn't invaded Narnia already, and provide a reason other than "sheer overpowering paranoia" for why the White Which has maintained an anti-human police force all this time despite the Pevensies being the first humans to enter by portal since The Magician's Nephew.)

(Granted, I haven't read The Horse and His Boy in a while, so I may be remembering stuff wrong and have to revise my theory when I reread that one. Feel free to poke holes in it.)

The discrepancies with The Magician's Nephew are mostly to do with lore on the White Witch herself; her Magician's Nephew origin as Deplorable-Word-using Empress of Charn conflicts with Mr. Beaver's exposition of her origins here. My diegetic theory for that problem is that Mr. Beaver was just mistaken about it.

But enough about lore discrepancies.

Aside from being famous for, y'know, being Narnia, this book is also famous for being an allegory for Jesus. Unlike many allegories (coughPilgrim'sProgresscough), it can stand on its own merits as its own story without needing "Look at me I'm an allegory" to carry it. Not everything in it represents something, it's actually pretty light-handed as allegories go. It hits that sweet spot between the two extremes of "so subtle as to be unnoticeable" and "IN YOUR FACE".

The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is the most obviously allegorical of all the Narnia books (except, perhaps, The Last Battle). You can tell what it's representing, whereas with some of the others I honestly have no idea if they even are allegories or if they're just their own books.

 

Lewis is quite insistent in the early parts of this that You Should Never Ever Shut Yourself Inside A Wardrobe. I assume this is to prevent adventurous children from deciding to imitate the book, shutting themselves inside wardrobes, and getting stuck.

 

Edmund is a pretty interesting character because his bad deeds and his bad personality traits are almost completely divorced from each other. He's a jerk, but he doesn't betray his siblings because he's a jerk, he betrays his siblings because the White Witch makes him.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+.

4 stars.  

(Endnote: I may or may not ever review the rest of this series. If I did there would probably be a lot less minutae.)