The unavoidable conversation: Christian themes in Narnia

I spent all day Friday in a waiting room, and during that time I finished The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. At one point a man and a woman were sitting next to me in the waiting room. The man was reading Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, the woman was reading a sci fi novel that I am not familiar with, and cannot remember the title of. We talked a few times, and the woman told me a little about the book she was reading. I showed her that I was reading The Chronicles of Narnia, and confessed that I never read the entire series as a child.

"I never did either," she said, "and now that I know about all the religious themes in it, I don't really want to read them." She didn't say this in a mean sort of way, and I actually appreciated her frankness on the subject. I don't often find people in Alabama who can openly say that religion turns them off with out sounding confrontational, but she pulled it off admirably. I let her know that the religious themes are poorly disguised to an adult, but that I also didn't catch them when I was a kid watching the animated film or reading Wardrobe.

Which figures, and is sort of the way it is. I was a teenager when my peers began to tell me that The Chronicles of Narnia were all about Jesus. The teen years seem to be the age at which we are obsessed with disguised meanings. This is the same age at which I learned that the Alice in Wonderland stories are about drug use, and The Wizard of Oz is about politics and economics in the late 19th century. I received these interpretations with interest, or amusement, or disapproval. I decided that all books must be about something deeper than the story they seemed to be telling, and that this was the mark of a good book.

Now that I am no longer a teenager, these deeper meanings don't matter that much. They are interesting bits of trivia that I've picked up along the way, but they are otherwise meaningless. I have a greater interest in whether the stories are good and entertaining. I didn't hesitate to buy my niece the full box set of The Chronicles of Narnia for Christmas several years ago for fear that she will be indoctrinated with Christian subtexts. She lives in Alabama. She attends church. Christianity need not be delivered to her through subtle means.

Besides, children take away from stories what they want, and keep very little of the rest. So even as I easily recognize the subtext in The Chronicles of Narnia, I still read Wardrobe with a sense of comfort, as I remembered so much of the story from the animated series. It was pleasant just to revisit a familiar story.

So that one is finished, and now on to The Horse and His Boy.

In other news, I realized today that a title that I'd been counting as one book is actually a series - His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman is actually a trilogy, not a single book. So the individual novel count is now up to 198. No doubt, I will find more instances of titles that I did not recognize as a series as I continue.

Moving along with The Chronicles of Narnia

Finished The Magician's Nephew. My young niece let me know that this was not her favorite book in the series. That made me feel better, because I was not crazy about it.

I'm now reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which already seems like a much better book. Of course, I've seen the old cartoon and the film, and both of them seem to tell the story very faithfully. Meaning that so far, none of this is new to me.

Sheep finished, beginning Narnia

I finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? today, and also skimmed the afterword, which is all about how Philip K. Dick originally didn't like the idea of the film Blade Runner, but over time changed his mind, and when he saw the first 2o minutes in a private screening, he loved it and said that it would become a classic (Dick was never able to see the full film; he died of a heart attack before it was completed).

The afterword made me realize that I've made mention of the film Blade Runner quite a lot while discussing the book in the blog. It's hard to avoid referencing a sci-fi classic when reading the book that it is based on. However, making constant comparison between the book and the film are not really the point. The point is that I'm reading a lot of books, and having finished the first one that I had not read previously, I am beginning to wonder why I'm doing this.

I think partly, any list that says "these books are worthy" makes me wonder if they really are. There is also my originally stated motivation, which is simply to expand my acquaintance with the genre. Beyond that, I suppose I'm doing it for the same reason that someone attempts to run a marathon or break a world record - just to see if I can do it.

And on that note, one down!

As I neared the end of Electric Sheep, I decided the time had come to pay off some long-standing library fines and check out the next book I would like to read. I set out with the intention of checking out The Man in the High Castle, because I enjoyed Electric Sheep so much that I felt like reading another novel by Dick. That novel had been checked out, and so I went with The Magician's Nephew from the Chronicles of Narnia. Sometimes the universe makes our decisions for us.

As for why I'm not starting with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: When I was a kid, the Chronicles of Narnia were arranged in the order in which they were published. These days, they are arranged chronologically in order of the events that occur within the books. I've decided that I'll comply with the new order, because all the copies at the library are numbered in the new order, and it just makes it easier. Besides, if Wikipedia is to be believed, C.S. Lewis approved of this reading order.

By the way, in that Wikipedia article I'm ammused by the vague reference to "some readers" who think that the novels ought to be read in order of publication, because The Magician's Nephew assumes you have some awareness of Narnia, while The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe introduces you to this new world. In geek circles, it is unimaginable that you would not have at least a general awareness of Narnia and Aslan. That's tantamount to asking someone what his Han Shot First t-shirt is all about.