I read some of CS Lewis’s Narnia books when I was a youngster (The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and Prince Caspian) and enjoyed them and have been re-reading them recently as an adult and have become very uncomfortable with their content.
I am currently listening to The Last Battle on audio-book and am finding them racist and full of upper class snobbery. I have read criticism before on CS Lewis’s works but that was always based upon the books being labelled as “religious propaganda”. This in itself I have had little or no issues with as many authors place their religious beliefs within the theme of their books. Ursula Le Guin’s Taoist beliefs are in her Earthsea novels and they are all the stronger for it.
There was however one line in particular in The Last Battle in which CS Lewis described a couple of Calormens as having dark faces and smelling of onions and garlic. This is an almost identical phrase that David Farland also uses in one of his Runelords books. Although this does not insult me personally I think that this type of literature no longer has a place in a country that is struggling with race relations and I believe that young adults should not read these works without at least being warned that they contain possibly racist overtones. I don’t believe that children should not be able to read his books as that kind of censorship is in its own way as dangerous as racism.
I spent some time looking at further information on the Internet, in particular what Philip Pullman had to say as I remembered an interview in which he was scathing about CS Lewis.
Philip Pullman says “”I realised that what he was up to was propaganda in the cause of the religion he believed in. ” and went on to state that “It is monumentally disparaging of girls and women. It is blatantly racist. One girl was sent to hell because she was getting interested in clothes and boys.”
Polly Toynbee, of The Guardian, wrote “Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America — that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right.”
I may be completely wide of the mark on this whole topic but can only go by the feelings that the book gives me.