On LL&W, it’s actually not the first in the series. The first is “The Magician’s Nephew”, but LW&W is the one everyone has heard of and so reads first … and of course that’s the one that gets made into a film first. But it’s from the events in “The Magician’s Nephew” that the lamp-post ends up in Narnia, and the tree whose wood is used to make the wardrobe is brought back from Narnia. But it really is a somewhat silly story.
I won’t bother to check up on someone getting killed in the last one, but it’s “and they all go to heaven with Aslan and (presumably) ‘live’ happily ever after”.
As for the characters being cardboard cut-outs, yes. I felt that the only one who was even a semblance of a real person was Lucy, that she was the only one that C.S. Lewis cared about. This was her story and the others were just there to fill the plot. It comes out in the recent film too, I think … the only one of the four who isn’t totally ham!
I’ll be interested to know what you make of Arthur Ransome if you read them to your son. I have to say, I never read any of this when I was a child, even though I am of the era. At the age of 10 I was into ancient history and mythology, moving on to psychology, Freud and Jung in particular, by the time I was about 13. I didn’t read any of the other classics, Jane Austen, the Brontës, Dickens and so on either. I had Pickwick Papers read to me in class when I was 9, but I was sitting too far from the window to look out … it bored the pants off me, and I still can’t read Dickens; I can’t find any interest in or empathy with any character he created.
The children’s classics — with the exception of “The Hobbit” and LoTR, which I read at university, and unlike you, I couldn’t put the latter down! — came when I read them to my daughter. The others, now that I have to teach the students here a bit about them … but I tell them they’re on their own with Dickens!
I agree totally. Very flat. And the movie underlines it - almost no story.
I have rosy memories of Swallows and Amazons and sequels, enhanced in recent years by learning that Ransome was a spy—well, spy-ish. In fact they triggered a life-long enthusiasm for boats and sailing. But I am reluctant to re-read them in case my memories are exploded.
I never got into the Narnia books either, although I did read them all as a child. “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” was my favourite of the set, but overall it ranked pretty low on my scale of preferences. My overriding memory is of the Snow Queen and Turkish Delight, but I think that was because when younger I had been very scared of the fairy tale – but my children have just told me that the character in Narnia isn’t a Snow Queen at all, but a witch of some description, which says it all really. I suppose that is the problem with allegory; I have ended up remembering things arising from intertextuality rather than from the actual content of the book. My son, by the way, says the Narnia books are “doctrinistic but entertaining”.
As for Swallows and Amazons et al… well, I loved them as a child, and I loved them all over again when my children discovered them. Up until recently, we used to take our boat from the Deben to the Orwell on holiday to mess about there for a couple of weeks each summer, with the children playing pirates and stuff. The first year, the weather was appalling – but the chandlery at Woolverstone marina (close to Pin Mill, on the edge of “We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea” territory) stocked most of the Arthur Ransome books, so we bought two a day until the rain stopped. All four of us fought over them, parents and children alike. And it was rather nice to be able to read the non-Lake-District stories in situ, adding fresh excitement to passing each named buoy at Harwich, or exploring “Secret Water” in the dinghy.
Arthur Ransome seems to have remembered what it was like to go on adventures (real or imagined) and have fun. His work is affectionate, and you get the feeling that he would still have loved to be doing those things himself (a bit like Uncle Jim a.k.a Captain Flint). C S Lewis, on the other hand, always struck me as rather pompous and joyless, like the row of assorted ministers who used to preside over Wednesday-morning assemblies at primary school.
Put me down solidly in the Arthur Ransome camp. I came to S&A later in life, partly from an obsessive-compulsion to mess about with boats and fish, and partly because an elderly English friend once told me she stayed sane hiding in the Tube tunnels listening to German bombs stomping through her neighborhood only by reading Swallows and Amazons and imagining she was camping on Wildcat Island with the gang.
I read all twelve every three or four years (confession: I’m a serial-re-reader–Trollope, Hardy, Austen, Eliot, Conrad, Melville, James, et al), and find them just as engaging and friendly as I did the first time through, back in the 1980s. So much so that I, unwisely or not, have a character in my first premeditated act of fiction, now making its way around Midtown Manhattan (“lovely stuff, but we’re just now taking a break from midlist literary fiction”), who is perhaps unhealthily obsessed with recreating an idyllic seafaring childhood that never quite existed.
So, Swallows and Amazons for ever.
All my friends who read them to their kids found themselves enjoying them just as much as the kids. Which is a pretty good endorsement.
You know, I don’t think I’ve ever read Swallows and Amazons. It’s one of those books that teachers talk about (like The Silver Sword), but looking it up I don’t think I ever read it - so it’s one to look forward to then. At 400 pages, I think it may be a little long for reading to my five year-old just yet, though, despite his insistence on me reading him proper children’s novels these days.
I think most of my boat-hippy friends started indoctrinating their offspring at around five or six. Most of the kids bit right in and demanded more, and so it can be a commitment: there’s 12 volumes, at about 400 pages each (and readily available for 50p at any good used bookstore or boot sale in the UK).
The nice thing is, the kids seem like real kids, doing things real kids do (or at least they did before overprotective helicopter parenting became the vogue), mostly by themselves, with adults intruding only in supporting roles.
Not something you see much anymore. Everything these days seems all clotted up with murky moral messages and Good Examples, and the idea that kids ought to have fun, and find out things for themselves, has begun to seem quaint. There are a few wincers here and there, as you might expect of 1930s lit, and the kids are definitely middle-class, which seems unpopular these days (the English definition of middle-class, not the American one).
But on the whole they’re just ripping good yarns with believable characters you wish had populated your own childhood.
Instead of the friend who ran across me fishing and reading book on a summertime riverbank way back a half-century ago when I was around ten, and he said, “Whatcha doin?” and I said “readin’ this here book,” and he said, “Why?”
I reckon we read them to Fiona when she was about 6 … when she wasn’t reading them to herself. She liked being read to before going to sleep.
My wife loved them when she was young, and actually had a copy of Swallows and Amazons autographed by Arthur Ransome, whom she met at some do as a child, but in the intervening years, it had got lost … the way these things do!
She told me that she never read the last one, although she had a copy, as that would have brought it all to an end.
You might be surprised. My father read The Hobbit as an ongoing bedtime story when I was small, and it took forever – in fact, I’m not convinced he ever actually finished reading it to me. But I vividly remember looking forward to the next instalment, and also thinking how nice it was that there were plenty more episodes yet to come. It was like a commitment to a long-term promise, in a way. There is more to a child’s enjoyment of a story than simply reaching the dénouement!
And you might find that your son takes Swallows and Amazons off you to carry on reading it for himself, especially if you stop at an exciting bit. I reckon my two must have been five or six when they started reading Arthur Ransome (although it is hard to remember exactly, because they have re-read the books so many times).
I’ve a vivid memory of our friends’ boat anchored nearby, and I got up about midnight to pee and saw their cabin dark as a tomb, and in the cockpit, under a boom tent, their six-year-old daughter busily reading Secret Water (one of the Swallows and Amazons series) with a pair of dogleg flashlights duct-taped to a sail-hoop crammed down over her ball cap.
When she got her first boat, a small fifth-hand sailing dinghy, it was of course named Swallow, and her big stupid dog, who sailed with her, was named Amazon.
Nowadays she’s grown, married, recently spawned, lives way over toward Seattle, was an Outward Bound sailing instructor and now makes her living rigging large sailboats and repairing sails.
Those books grow independent children.
BTW, you can safely read the last one (not Coots in the North, because Ransome never finished it), Great Northern?, because the series doesn’t end so much as simply Stop, like a French movie.
Lewis didn’t write the series to make classic literature. He wrote for a under-served market of “prigs” (to use the terms of others) who wanted something to read that wasn’t dreadfully boring. The Narnia series was all that some of us were allowed to read in the “fantasy” realm. LOTR was actually “forbidden” as being “excessively evil” and having no message of value. At least that is the drivel that I was given as a “young scholar”.
So yes, all the criticism is legit if you are not the assumed target audience. If you were a young person in a conservative christian home, Lewis provided us this escape. It was a wonderful world where imaginations filled in the gaps that are being noted as criticism (legitimately). My friends and I could imagine that we were Peter and Edmund. We wondered about Lucy and what we would have done. We saw in Aslan, not a frightening prig, but the idea of a protector that should be feared as much as loved and worshiped.
Jaysen, you are right of course that there is an audience, as you describe, that loved the Narnia books and still does no doubt, but it’s not my understanding that C.S. Lewis was writing for that audience specifically, as I said above.
As for Tolkien, it’s strange, isn’t it, that conservative Christians forbid LoTR as excessively evil, as you say, and yet Tolkien had to struggle against the interpretation that it is not merely a Christian story — inevitably, given that he was a staunch Catholic all his life … though I know that is not likely to be a recommendation in conservative Christian circles in the US … there are many Christian elements that do come in — but that, in the eyes of Catholic literary criticism especially, it revived the Catholic/Christian novel as a tradition.
For him, he saw his world, the world that he created, as an attempt to recreate a mythology for England, something we had lost down the ages along with most of our folk culture.
Mr X, Please note that I used the word “drivel”. Being a bit of a Lewis fan (not an educated fan, just a person who likes to dream about the worlds Lewis creates instead of telling everything about that world (this is in direct opposition to the reasons I like LOTR and Wheel of Time)) In a letter to an American corespondent he stated that the books were intended to be enjoyable stories for kids. I guess I want that to be the end of his motives.
Oh. I cry. But I guess everyone is entitled to their opinions.
I would like to say one thing in response to xiamenese. While some conservative Christians do shun The Lord of the Rings, there are many (myself included) who don’t. Like all religions, there is a great variety of sects. Just thought I would point that out, I don’t mean to criticize or offend
EDIT: I was going to say more about The Chronicles of Narnia, but Jaysen sort of beat me to it.
Jaysen and Ms Africanstardust,
I did note your use of the word “drivel”, Jaysen, and took on board its import. I have never thought that all Christians of whatever denomination condemn LoTR, not even all conservative Christians, though there are definitely those that do, as Mr J so clearly points out. I still think it mystifying that one branch of Christianity can condemn it utterly and another can claim it to be not just a great work but indeed a catalyst for a renaissance in Christian literature.
Furthermore, I am sure CS Lewis would have wanted his books to be enjoyed by children, and in that he succeeded for millions. My comments about the other motivations were more an attempt to find a justification for what many, myself included, see as their short-comings. I think that most of us would be very happy if we could produce 7 books, each in a weekend — if the claims are true — books which have had the continuing success of the Narnia series.
And, of course, Ms A, I take your comments neither as criticism nor as offence.
As do I. But if you think about it, it isn’t that much different than the branches of the various political parties in most nations. In the US there are republicans that actually like the idea of socialized healthcare while some democrats condemn any form of healthcare reform.
Oh, dear. Once again, I am practically alone here. I love these books, and have from the age of 6. Our whole family loves them! A couple of corrections, if you don’t mind, Xiamenese:
Tolkien was Catholic, but did not convert Lewis to Catholicism. Lewis was an Ulster protestant by birth who became an atheist as a teenager and then converted to Christianity and joined the Anglican church as an adult. Tolkien was one of several friends who influenced him.
And the reason many people prefer to read LWW before the others is that this was the original order - the order of publication. According to internal Narnian Chronology, it’s second, and “Magician’s Nephew” which is the first story in the Narnian Chronology, was written sixth. Keith, I’d give that one a try before giving up on the series entirely. It and “Voyage of the Dawn Treader” have some of the loveliest imagery and most interesting ideas of the series. “Dawn Treader” is perhaps the best straight adventure story, and my favorite of the books. My sister likes “Horse and his Boy” best. Oh, well-
Oh, just one more correction, Keith. The girl who wears makeup is the only one who is not killed in a train crash.Lewis kills everyone else. I suppose her survival might still be seen as a pretty harsh punishment, though.
Oh, sorry. Just one more. LOTR is not, and never has been, a children’s story. It was not written or intended for children, but for adults. That children can and do read it with pleasure just points out what a strong story it is, IMHO.
And now I’ll stop ranting! Btu I really get upset by LOTR being lumped in with the Narnia books, which are children’s stories. Apples and oranges, IMO. (And, though I love them both, there is no question in my mind that LOTR is by far the greater work.)
I have never, as child or adult been able to get through the unwadeable stodge that is Lord of the RIngs and nor have I ever got through the Hobbit. There is something about the huge wads of exposition and landscape, combined with the fact that all the characters seemed liked cyphers following the dictates of a plot.
Although as a child I really enjoyed Narnia and read the whole series in a row. I would agree the characters (with the exception of Reepicheep) are largely flat and the plots slight, but I loved the whole escapist element of the whole thing. I was entranced with the notion that I could go through a cabinet or a picture and find myself some where grand and strange where animals talked and I was special.
I’d also agree that Voyage of the Dawntreader is the best of the books and it full of seasalt and curiosity.
