Narnia: A Foray

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I finally did something I should have done several years ago.

My friend and I watched The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the latest in the series of movies based on C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.

Dawn Treader, though, on the face of it, a typical British children's adventure, has a number of twists that give it a lot of charm, especially if you're an insider to the mythology that Lewis had set up in the sequence of books that led up to Dawn Treader.  I don't know enough of the history of the series to be able to comment on the whole business, but between C. S. Lewis and the director of the movie, they have put together a movie which is very appealing, not least because of the casting of the young protagonists.  Edmund and Lucy this time find, to their dismay, that an annoying cousin has been dragged along, and to my surprise, this fellow becomes one of the most important elements in the story.

A central problem Lewis has to confront in the entire series (and even in other series of his books) is how individuals committed to non-violence have to choose to act in the face of desperate violence.  This echoed the quandary of so many enlightened British during World War 2, which was the setting in which Lewis's writing took place.  Lewis tries to resolve this in a way that would be understandable to a teenager, but perhaps does not quite succeed.  Still, not many authors have taken on this problem seriously; J. K. Rowling and Tolkien, in their different ways, have done so.  Their solutions, at both the literary and philosophical levels, has been to objectify evil, and distill it into a symbolic entity that must be destroyed, though this entity evolves, over the course of time, co-opting different individuals, each of whom must be defeated.

George Lucas, in his Star Wars stories, very deliberately portrays the evolution of the hero into the villain, surely a representative and symbolic process, largely missed by most young people who might have enjoyed the movies.  It is not that heroes always become villains; rather, it is that many villains did not start out as villains.

The actress who portrays Lucy was so appealing that her portrayal of the character prevented me from dismissing the movie (Dawn Treader) and moving on.  Eventually, my friend and I decided that this last movie probably made more sense to those who had seen the earlier ones.  So we decided to watch The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

I must say that that first movie was amazingly effective, and made it clear that the first book was a complete and, in many ways perfect, little gem of invention, and the remaining books, though jolly adventures in their own ways, and clever allegories, suffered in comparison.  To be honest, having seen only the first and last movie, I can only say that Dawn Treader did not have the logical transparency that Wardrobe did, but paradoxically, the latter had the harder task of setting out the context for all the movies.  Nor did the acting in the last movie come close to what seemed the utter conviction of that of the first movie.  Lucy, in particular, was played brilliantly, by a young lady (Georgie Henley) who could scarcely have been older than ten.