A blog of books I've been reading, and what I've thought of them. I KNOW I don't read enough etc. Don't make me feel any more guilty about it than I already do.

Monday, January 30, 2006

C.S. Lewis - "The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe"

I originally bought this to read again before seeing the film. As a child, I adored the Narnia books. I clearly remember buying the whole boxed set from the Penguin Book Club at school (along with the Moomins, Dr. Doolittle and Gerald Durrell's "My Family and Other Animals" series) and loving the fact that it was a proper series, designed to be read in a specific order and with its own lore and history. As always when it comes to a childhood favourite, I was slightly apprehensive about tackling them as an adult. The experience was much faster this time round (three hours on the Eurostar and it was all over) but just as satisfying. There are two things I love about this kind of literature: the fact that the children are much more grown-up than I would ever have been at that age (and, therefore, deserving of my admiration), and the descriptions of wonderful "nursery meals" full of sandwiches and cakes and all manner of delicious goodies. I don't fully understand why either should appeal to children particularly, but they do and it's a recipe that's still being used very successfully today, notably by JK Rowling. The plot was a little not thinner exactly but maybe simpler and more linear than I remembered, but then again, this is kind of the first book in the series and we're discovering Narnia at the same breakneck pace as the children. A lot of people here in France (where the books aren't as well-known) criticized the overtly Christian morals promoted by the book, but I think that's a bit of a red herring. Morality is a feature in nearly all literature and to dismiss these stories as Christian propaganda is like dismissing Harry Potter as an apology for the Wicca religion. The trouble is now I've reread one, I want to reread them all, so I'm hoping they're going to republish the whole series, which I shall thumb my way through while eating piles of hot buttered toast and battenburg cake :-)