I much prefer Lord of the Rings - revealing the triumph of strength of character or the Aubrey & Maturin series by O'Brian revealing the human condition (and with a pretty good Darwin proxy character).
Regards,
Psi
Actually, I also prefer "The Lord of the Rings" as a story - fundamentally, it is a grown-up story. However, from a lit crit perspective, this analysis has made me look at the Chronicles of Narnia in a completely new light. They may be fairy stories, but there are whole new levels of depth, which tie into the (grown-up) SF trilogy, Lewis's poetry (which is vastly underrated) and of course, his non-fiction theological writing.
But of course, given that monkeys could ultimately produce the complete works of Shakespeare, I don't suppose you believe in layers of meaning ... or perhaps think they are no more than artificially constructed patterns. "A Meaningful World" helps as a prologue to this book ....
I don't think Ward would like the term metanarrative - the word he uses is donegality (which is pretty ridiculous... really isn't it) - but I think it's a good notion to attempt to grasp - its more the infused character which pervades the stories. I know I'm being picky but Ward's main argument hangs upon the fact that the Ptolemaic cosmos isn't simply a system (in the sense that, as Ward and Lewis admit, it doesn't 'work') - it's not simply a hermeneutical framework through which the books need to be read (we've been reading them for years no problem). It's simply more rich than a framework within which the stories are squeezed - it's precisely this donegality which Ward is trying to evince.
Ha, yes, you are probably right. But how do I try and convey what is in the book to people who haven't read it but yet who may have read my blog? I was aware that even in the excerpted section, there were a selection of terms that require definition if you want to really understand what Michael is talking about.
The three things that Ward's book did for me were
a) exposing connections between Narnia and the rest of Lewis's writing, which has made me substantially more interested in the other things Lewis was saying;
b) showing that even the second, allegorical, layer of the Narnia books doesn't exhaust their significance - which makes more credible the narrative oddities, which caused me to consider them more "childish" than, say, Tolkein;
c) providing an antidote to the reductionistic naturalism in science (this time astronomy) which is determined to paint the universe as being "no more" than aggregations of atoms and blind natural forces. Dawkins sees the limitation of this attitude to the world, with books like "Unweaving the Rainbow" trying to put back the magic. The sense of trying to regard the universe as a place that has been built around us as human beings - we are the focus of it, not just a random outcome - is one that Lewis was trying to convey from a literary point of view. "A Meaningful World" approaches this more scientifically and "Privileged Planet" seeks to argue from a specifically astronomical point of view that this is indeed the case.
Speaking of Narnia, have you seen M. S. Corley's redesigned covers? They're really quite lovely.
The same artist has done this with other series, as well, though you'd probably be more interested in the Narnia ones.
Yes, excellent. Though I'm now looking forward to designs that pick up the themes that Ward identified ...!
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