Wow! That was fast! I thought you'd be away by now!
It's been a very long time since I read the book - but actually it was the destruction of Narnia, even before the train accident - that turned me off of Lewis's world, or rather, not so much the destruction, but the way it turned out not to matter. Or at least, in my reading of it.
It came across, to me, as all sort of "ho, ho, ho! all that death and pillage and destruction and pain and death of all the unseen and unamed inhabitants of Narnia! Just forget that now!" And I was all, "whoa!!" "that doesn't heal that fast, buster"....unless it was all a puppet show for the central characters, and therefore insubstantial in the first place. Or so I reasoned.
Anyway - it destroyed Narnia for me as a place that it would be desirable to be in, because it wasn't stable - instead it was arbitrary. Again - utterly failing to see any allegory at all in the story, and having no idea that Narnia was supposed to be Heaven.
The onion metaphor just confirmed my first impression for me, because you can peel an onion right down to nothing - and yes, the bigger/smaller glorious/less glorious thing didn't work for me at all - it only seemed to emphasize the unreality of it all, or at least, to my apparently terribly prosaic 12 year old immagination.
So, yeah, my thought on reaching Susan standing alone at the train station was definitely along the lines, "whew! Go Susan! You just had narrow escape from a horrible fate!"
I think by then I must have had an inarticulate suspicion that Lewis had been playing with me all along, and instead of telling me great stories about a magical place he was really trying to teach me something about RL. And like a good pre-teen I resisted like hell. *g*
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Re: Wandered in from metafandom -
Date: 2005-09-01 04:54 pm (UTC)It's been a very long time since I read the book - but actually it was the destruction of Narnia, even before the train accident - that turned me off of Lewis's world, or rather, not so much the destruction, but the way it turned out not to matter. Or at least, in my reading of it.
It came across, to me, as all sort of "ho, ho, ho! all that death and pillage and destruction and pain and death of all the unseen and unamed inhabitants of Narnia! Just forget that now!" And I was all, "whoa!!" "that doesn't heal that fast, buster"....unless it was all a puppet show for the central characters, and therefore insubstantial in the first place. Or so I reasoned.
Anyway - it destroyed Narnia for me as a place that it would be desirable to be in, because it wasn't stable - instead it was arbitrary. Again - utterly failing to see any allegory at all in the story, and having no idea that Narnia was supposed to be Heaven.
The onion metaphor just confirmed my first impression for me, because you can peel an onion right down to nothing - and yes, the bigger/smaller glorious/less glorious thing didn't work for me at all - it only seemed to emphasize the unreality of it all, or at least, to my apparently terribly prosaic 12 year old immagination.
So, yeah, my thought on reaching Susan standing alone at the train station was definitely along the lines, "whew! Go Susan! You just had narrow escape from a horrible fate!"
I think by then I must have had an inarticulate suspicion that Lewis had been playing with me all along, and instead of telling me great stories about a magical place he was really trying to teach me something about RL. And like a good pre-teen I resisted like hell. *g*