Review: The Last Battle, by C.S. Lewis

[Russ Allbery]

The Last Battle
by C.S. Lewis

Illustrator: Pauline Baynes
Series:      Chronicles of Narnia #7
Publisher:   Collier Books
Copyright:   1956
Printing:    1978
ISBN:        0-02-044210-6
Format:      Mass market
Pages:       184

The Last Battle is the seventh and final book of the Chronicles of
Narnia in every reading order. It ties together (and spoils) every
previous Narnia book, so you do indeed want to read it last (or skip it
entirely, but I'll get into that).

In the far west of Narnia, beyond the Lantern Waste and near the great
waterfall that marks Narnia's western boundary, live a talking ape
named Shift and a talking donkey named Puzzle. Shift is a narcissistic
asshole who has been gaslighting and manipulating Puzzle for years,
convincing the poor donkey that he's stupid and useless for anything
other than being Shift's servant. At the start of the book, a lion skin
washes over the waterfall and into the Cauldron Pool. Shift, seeing a
great opportunity, convinces Puzzle to retrieve it.

The king of Narnia at this time is Tirian. I would tell you more about
Tirian except despite being the protagonist that's about all the
characterization he gets. He's the king, he's broad-shouldered and
strong, he behaves in a correct kingly fashion by preferring hunting
lodges and simple camps to the capital at Cair Paravel, and his close
companion is a unicorn named Jewel. Other than that, he's another
character like Rilian from The Silver Chair who feels like he was taken
from a medieval Arthurian story. (Thankfully, unlike Rilian, he doesn't
talk like he's in a medieval Arthurian story.)

Tirian finds out about Shift's scheme when a dryad appears at Tirian's
camp, calling for justice for the trees of Lantern Waste who are being
felled. Tirian rushes to investigate and stop this monstrous act, only
to find the beasts of Narnia cutting down trees and hauling them away
for Calormene overseers. When challenged on why they would do such a
thing, they reply that it's at Aslan's orders.

The Last Battle is largely the reason why I decided to do this re-read
and review series. It is, let me be clear, a bad book. The plot is
absurd, insulting to the characters, and in places actively offensive.
It is also, unlike the rest of the Narnia series, dark and depressing
for nearly all of the book. The theology suffers from problems faced by
modern literature that tries to use the Book of Revelation and related
Christian mythology as a basis. And it is, most famously, the site of
one of the most notorious authorial betrayals of a character in
fiction.

And yet, The Last Battle, probably more than any other single book,
taught me to be a better human being. It contains two very specific
pieces of theology that I would now critique in multiple ways but which
were exactly the pieces of theology that I needed to hear when I first
understood them. This book steered me away from a closed, judgmental,
and condemnatory mindset at exactly the age when I needed something to
do that. For that, I will always have a warm spot in my heart for it.

I'm going to start with the bad parts, though, because that's how the
book starts.

MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW.

First, and most seriously, this is a second-order idiot plot. Shift
shows up with a donkey wearing a lion skin (badly), only lets anyone
see him via firelight, claims he's Aslan, and starts ordering the
talking animals of Narnia to completely betray their laws and moral
principles and reverse every long-standing political position of the
country... and everyone just nods and goes along with this. This is the
most blatant example of a long-standing problem in this series: Lewis
does not respect his animal characters. They are the best feature of
his world, and he treats them as barely more intelligent than their
non-speaking equivalents and in need of humans to tell them what to do.

Furthermore, despite the assertion of the narrator, Shift is not even
close to clever. His deception has all the subtlety of a five-year-old
who doesn't want to go to bed, and he offers the Narnians absolutely
nothing in exchange for betraying their principles. I can forgive
Puzzle for going along with the scheme since Puzzle has been so
emotionally abused that he doesn't know what else to do, but no one
else has any excuse, especially Shift's neighbors. Given his behavior
in the book, everyone within a ten mile radius would be so sick of his
whining, bullying, and lying within a month that they'd never believe
anything he said again. Rishda and Ginger, a Calormene captain and a
sociopathic cat who later take over Shift's scheme, do qualify as
clever, but there's no realistic way Shift's plot would have gotten far
enough for them to get involved.

The things that Shift gets the Narnians to do are awful. This is by far
the most depressing book in the series, even more than the worst parts
of The Silver Chair. I'm sure I'm not the only one who struggled to
read through the first part of this book, and raced through it on
re-reads because everything is so hard to watch. The destruction is
wanton and purposeless, and the frequent warnings from both characters
and narration that these are the last days of Narnia add to the
despair. Lewis takes all the beautiful things that he built over six
books and smashes them before your eyes. It's a lot to take, given that
previous books would have treated the felling of a single tree as an
unspeakable catastrophe.

I think some of these problems are due to the difficulty of using
Christian eschatology in a modern novel. An antichrist is obligatory,
but the animals of Narnia have no reason to follow an antichrist given
their direct experience with Aslan, particularly not the aloof one that
Shift tries to give them. Lewis forces the plot by making everyone act
stupidly and out of character. Similarly, Christian eschatology says
everything must become as awful as possible right before the return of
Christ, hence the difficult-to-read sections of Narnia's destruction,
but there's no in-book reason for the Narnians' complicity in that
destruction. One can argue about whether this is good theology, but
it's certainly bad storytelling.

I can see the outlines of the moral points Lewis is trying to make
about greed and rapacity, abuse of the natural world, dubious
alliances, cynicism, and ill-chosen prophets, but because there is no
explicable reason for Tirian's quiet kingdom to suddenly turn to
murderous resource exploitation, none of those moral points land with
any force. The best moral apocalypse shows the reader how, were they
living through it, they would be complicit in the devastation as well.
Lewis does none of that work, so the reader is just left angry and
confused.

The book also has several smaller poor authorial choices, such as the
blackface incident. Tirian, Jill, and Eustace need to infiltrate
Shift's camp, and use blackface to disguise themselves as Calormenes.
That alone uncomfortably reveals how much skin tone determines
nationality in this world, but Lewis makes it far worse by having
Tirian comment that he "feel[s] a true man again" after removing the
blackface and switching to Narnian clothes.

All of this drags on and on, unlike Lewis's normally tighter pacing, to
the point that I remembered this book being twice the length of any
other Narnia book. It's not; it's about the same length as the rest,
but it's such a grind that it feels interminable. The sum total of the
bright points of the first two-thirds of the book are the arrival of
Jill and Eustace, Jill's one moment of true heroism, and the loyalty of
a single Dwarf. The rest is all horror and betrayal and doomed battles
and abject stupidity.

I do, though, have to describe Jill's moment of glory, since I
complained about her and Eustace throughout The Silver Chair. Eustace
is still useless, but Jill learned forestcraft during her previous
adventures (not that we saw much sign of this previously) and slips
through the forest like a ghost to steal Puzzle and his lion costume
out from the under the nose of the villains. Even better, she finds
Puzzle and the lion costume hilarious, which is the one moment in the
book where one of the characters seems to understand how absurd and
ridiculous this all is. I loved Jill so much in that moment that it
makes up for all of the pointless bickering of The Silver Chair. She
doesn't get to do much else in this book, but I wish the Jill who shows
up in The Last Battle had gotten her own book.

The end of this book, and the only reason why it's worth reading,
happens once the heroes are forced into the stable that Shift and his
co-conspirators have been using as the stage for their fake Aslan. Its
door (for no well-explained reason) has become a door to Aslan's
Country and leads to a reunion with all the protagonists of the series.
It also becomes the frame of Aslan's final destruction of Narnia and
judging of its inhabitants, which I suspect would be confusing if you
didn't already know something about Christian eschatology. But before
that, this happens, which is sufficiently and deservedly notorious that
I think it needs to be quoted in full.

  "Sir," said Tirian, when he had greeted all these. "If I have read
  the chronicle aright, there should be another. Has not your Majesty
  two sisters? Where is Queen Susan?"

  "My sister Susan," answered Peter shortly and gravely, "is no longer
  a friend of Narnia."

  "Yes," said Eustace, "and whenever you've tried to get her to come
  and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says 'What
  wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all
  those funny games we used to play when we were children.'"

  "Oh Susan!" said Jill. "She's interested in nothing nowadays except
  nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight
  too keen on being grown-up."

  "Grown-up indeed," said the Lady Polly. "I wish she would grow up.
  She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and
  she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her
  whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick
  as she can and then stop there as long as she can."

There are so many obvious and dire problems with this passage, and so
many others have written about it at length, that I will only add a few
points. First, I find it interesting that neither Lucy nor Edmund says
a thing. (I would like to think that Edmund knows better.) The real
criticism comes from three characters who never interacted with Susan
in the series: the two characters introduced after she was no longer
allowed to return to Narnia, and a character from the story that
predated hers. (And Eustace certainly has some gall to criticize
someone else for treating Narnia as a childish game.)

It also doesn't say anything good about Lewis that he puts his rather
sexist attack on Susan into the mouths of two other female characters.
Polly's criticism is a somewhat generic attack on puberty that could
arguably apply to either sex (although "silliness" is usually reserved
for women), but Jill makes the attack explicitly gendered. It's the
attack of a girl who wants to be one of the boys on a girl who embraces
things that are coded feminine, and there's a whole lot of politics
around the construction of gender happening here that Lewis is blindly
reinforcing and not grappling with at all.

Plus, this is only barely supported by single sentences in The Voyage
of the Dawn Treader and The Horse and His Boy and directly contradicts
the earlier books. We're expected to believe that Susan the archer, the
best swimmer, the most sensible and thoughtful of the four kids has
abruptly changed her whole personality. Lewis could have made me
believe Susan had soured on Narnia after the attempted kidnapping (and,
although left unstated, presumably eventual attempted rape) in The
Horse and His Boy, if one ignores the fact that incident supposedly
happens before Prince Caspian where there is no sign of such a
reaction. But not for those reasons, and not in that way.

Thankfully, after this, the book gets better, starting with the Dwarfs,
which is one of the two passages that had a profound influence on me.

Except for one Dwarf who allied with Tirian, the Dwarfs reacted to the
exposure of Shift's lies by disbelieving both Tirian and Shift, calling
a pox on both their houses, and deciding to make their own side. During
the last fight in front of the stable, they started killing whichever
side looked like they were winning. (Although this is horrific in the
story, I think this is accurate social commentary on a certain type of
cynicism, even if I suspect Lewis may have been aiming it at atheists.)
Eventually, they're thrown through the stable door by the Calormenes.
However, rather than seeing the land of beauty and plenty that everyone
else sees, they are firmly convinced they're in a dark, musty stable
surrounded by refuse and dirty straw.

This is, quite explicitly, not something imposed on them. Lucy rebukes
Eustace for wishing Tash had killed them, and tries to make friends
with them. Aslan tries to show them how wrong their perceptions are, to
no avail. Their unwillingness to admit they were wrong is so strong
that they make themselves believe that everything is worse than it
actually is.

  "You see," said Aslan. "They will not let us help them. They have
  chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own
  minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in
  that they cannot be taken out."

I grew up with the US evangelical version of Hell as a place of eternal
torment, which in turn was used to justify religious atrocities in the
name of saving people from Hell. But there is no Hell of that type in
this book. There is a shadow into which many evil characters simply
disappear, and there's this passage. Reading this was the first time I
understood the alternative idea of Hell as the absence of God instead
of active divine punishment. Lewis doesn't use the word "Hell," but
it's obvious from context that the Dwarfs are in Hell. But it's not
something Aslan does to them and no one wants them there; they could
leave any time they wanted, but they're too unwilling to be wrong.

You may have to be raised in conservative Christianity to understand
how profoundly this rethinking of Hell (which Lewis tackles at greater
length in The Great Divorce) undermines the system of guilt and fear
that's used as motivation and control. It took me several re-readings
and a lot of thinking about this passage, but this is where I stopped
believing in a vengeful God who will eternally torture nonbelievers,
and thus stopped believing in all of the other theology that goes with
it.

The second passage that changed me is Emeth's story. Emeth is a devout
Calormene, a follower of Tash, who volunteered to enter the stable when
Shift and his co-conspirators were claiming Aslan/Tash was inside. Some
time after going through, he encounters Aslan, and this is part of his
telling of that story (and yes, Lewis still has Calormenes telling
stories as if they were British translators of the Arabian Nights):

  [...] Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are
  one? The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but is wrath was not
  against me) and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but
  because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast
  done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no
  service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile
  can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his
  oath for the oath's sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn,
  though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do
  a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is
  Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted. Dost thou
  understand, Child? I said, Lord, thou knowest how much I understand.
  But I said also (for the truth constrained me), Yet I have been
  seeking Tash all my days. Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy
  desire had been for me, thou wouldst not sought so long and so
  truly. For all find what they truly seek.

So, first, don't ever say this to anyone. It's horribly condescending
and, since it's normally said by white Christians to other people,
usually explicitly colonialist. Telling someone that their god is evil
but since they seem to be a good person they're truly worshiping your
god is only barely better than saying yours is the only true religion.

But it is better, and as someone who, at the time, was wholly steeped
in the belief that only Christians were saved and every follower of
another religion was following Satan and was damned to Hell, this
passage blew my mind. This was the first place I encountered the idea
that someone who followed a different religion could be saved, or that
God could transcend religion, and it came with exactly the context and
justification that I needed given how close-minded I was at the time.
Today, I would say that the Christian side of this analysis needs far
more humility, and fobbing off all the evil done in the name of the
Christian God by saying "oh, those people were really following Satan"
is a total moral copout. But, nonetheless, Lewis opened a door for me
that I was able to step through and move beyond to a less judgmental,
dismissive, and hostile view of others.

There's not much else in the book after this. It's mostly Lewis's
charmingly Platonic view of the afterlife, in which the characters go
inward and upward to truer and more complete versions of both Narnia
and England and are reunited (very briefly) with every character of the
series. Lewis knows not to try too hard to describe the indescribable,
but it remains one of my favorite visions of an afterlife because it
makes so explicit that this world is neither static or the last, but
only the beginning of a new adventure.

This final section of The Last Battle is deeply flawed, rather
arrogant, a little bizarre, and involves more lectures on theology than
precise description, but I still love it. By itself, it's not a bad
ending for the series, although I don't think it has half the beauty or
wonder of the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It's a shame about
the rest of the book, and it's a worse shame that Lewis chose to
sacrifice Susan on the altar of his prejudices. Those problems made it
very hard to read this book again and make it impossible to recommend.
Thankfully, you can read the series without it, and perhaps most
readers would be better off imagining their own ending (or lack of
ending) to Narnia than the one Lewis chose to give it.

But the one redeeming quality The Last Battle will always have for me
is that, despite all of its flaws, it was exactly the book that I
needed to read when I read it.

Rating: 4 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-08-08

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-02-044210-6.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>