'Conversations with Dead People'
Discussion of episodes currently airing in Un-American locations (anything that's aired in Australia is fair game), as well as anything else the Un-Americans feel like talking about or we feel like asking them. Please use the show discussion threads for any current-season discussion.
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to have that horrid Christian Platonism tacked on at the end just feels like a betrayal to me.
Angus speaks for me. Honestly, not to make too much of it, I'd say that between the conclusion to the Narnia series and some of his other books ( Mere Christianity , for one) Lewis was instrumental in my gradual detatchment from Christianity.
[So there, C.S. Heh.]
I was particularly irritated by the treatment of Susan, was it? Rather condescending.
Oh, rather! (As Peter might say.) "She's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations." That's the exact quote--I still have the book here from doing my tagline!
OTOH, I loved Shadowlands. Though Anthony Hopkins has a lot to do with that.
You better be careful. If JZ catches you ragging on C.S. Lewis she'll be in here toot sweet explaining how his philosophy changed over time becoming more open and inclusive. She's read every damn thing he ever wrote.
And you're right, the last book did rather change the flow of the series. Not in a good way. I was particularly irritated by the treatment of Susan, was it? Rather condescending.
Still, I had the same issues with the end of the Narnia series.
The hell of it, for me, reading The Last Battle, was that the whoel rapture/end times thing didn't work as a plot element.
I was coming to the end -- I think I read it when I was 9 -- and then it was getting worse and worse for Our Heroes, and then suddenly it all turned into a Greatest Hits of Narnia album, with a psychedelic ending.
And I was like, This is how you get yourself out of a bad situation? Hope Aslan shows up and then have some strange hallucinations involving a door?
I also wasn't entirely clear that Peter and Lucy and Edmund ended up in Narnia at the end because they had died in our world. I realized that on re-read when I was 12 or so and felt even more cheated.
Yes, well, women with sexuality are eeeeevil. Only little girls and mothers are OK.
What? Me? CS Lewis issues? Just because I've read Mere Christianity and That Hideous Strength? In the latter of which it is revealed that birth control is a direct tool of Satan?
I planned to do that JZ-thing but I sort of gave up after The Screwtape Letters.
Angus - nope - completely wrong!
I'll keep my tag for a little while but I don't mind being called Raffles - I am elsewhere.
That Hideous Strength made me furious, and if there's an afterlife, I'm going to hunt Lewis down and Have Words with him about it. Though, IIRC, it's of his earlier works, from before he met his wife, so it's entirely possible she did it for me during his lifetime. But I've never had the issues with The Last Battle that it seems everyone else does. But I probably read him a little differently because I come out of a fundamentalist background--to me everything he wrote with the exception of THS is a breath of fresh air. And, if it weren't for him, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have any faith left at all. Maybe some would say that'd be no great loss, but I really want to believe if there's any way I possibly can, so I'm grateful to Lewis's works for showing me there's a way to be a Christian that allows me to think and question and use my imagination.
I liked The Last Battle as well-- primarily because of the expansive expression of the Kingdom of God but also because when I die I get to go to Narnia.