unstable narrative

Check out this passage from The Last Battle, the final book in the Chronicles of Narnia.

This passage is classic Lewis — seemingly effortless, elegant fantasy, an irresistible bit of magic.

And then Lucy says her thing.

It has always jangled against me. It's wrong, cheap. It punctures the magic for me.

But it may be a bit hard to put one's finger on this: what *exactly* is wrong here? Let's name it.

My friend Sean says, "it smacks uncomfortably of the zealot, who is so excited about a thing that she can't discuss anything else without bringing it around to her pet topic, regardless of whether the conversation was going there organically."

Yeah! Like a preacher's clunky everything-yanked-into-the-Bible thing. Or a bumper sticker, suddenly thrust into a children's fantasy classic.

This is one of the big problems with Last Battle. The book threatens to capsize the story with all the preaching from author to audience. A clunk like this ends up nearly breaking the promise of Wardrobe, with its fully-digested death/burial/resurrection. (I note in passing that Pullman's His Dark Materials is more of a tribute in this way than Pullman imagined.)

My friend Justin says, "It’s a fourth wall break. If a movie were to adapt this literally, the actress playing Lucy would break character and turn directly to the camera to deliver the line." Yes. I tend to think of this as Lewis speaking, and not Lucy.

Part of the problem here is that it's a digression.

The stable that Lewis would have believed Christ's birthplace was indeed 'big' in the sense that Donne talks about with his great phrase "Immensity cloistered in [Mary's] dear womb".

But that's not what's happening here. The stable in this book is more of a portal, of the sort encountered in all the Narnia books. So Lucy's comment is a drive-by. Not only it is [a] puppetry (because that's Lewis speaking), and not only is it [b] a clumsy pastor-style reach, but it's also [c] not pertinent to the situation.

And on top of all that, it's [d] out-of-character for Lucy. Lewis is so careful to put all his characters' words in character. (Those who don't see Susan's Last Battle treatment coming need to go back and read everything she says in the previous books.) But this just doesn't fit.

One of the great storytellers of his century. Just goes to show you, no one's perfect.