Planet Narnia redux (for C. S. Lewis anoraks only)

A while ago I posted on The Narnia Code, a documentary based on Michael Ward’s book Planet Narnia. This is a follow-up, taking into account my promise to chilperic that I would go off and read the actual book. That I have now done.

I’m not going to engage seriously with the main body of Ward’s argument. As I think I said in one of the comments to my earlier post, I don’t find it intrinsically implausible that Lewis might have had a scheme in mind that linked the various Narnian books with the different planets. Astrology is certainly a subject that interested him, and Ward produces a prodigious amount of circumstantial evidence, some of which – such as the idea that Corin and Cor in The Horse and his Boy were inspired by Castor and Pollux – I find quite persuasive. I do think it’s almost impossible to produce a knock-down argument for this sort of thing, though, given the richness of associations that exists for the various planets and their deities. The sheer abundance of material makes it too flexible for certainty.

But let’s concede for the sake of argument that Ward’s case is watertight, and that he has established that Lewis associated each book with a particular planet. The question that follows is: so what? How can he elevate this from being a particularly interesting and lengthy footnote into being “the key” to the whole sequence – as he repeatedly claimed it to be in the documentary? He does so by trying to establish that his theory solves some existing and widely-acknowledged problems. And this is where I seriously part company with him, because to my mind the problems he cites are not problems at all. He sets them out at the start of the book:

1. Why did CSL suddenly turn to writing for children – as a bachelor in his fifties, with no children of his own?

2. How can we explain the obvious flaws of the Narnia chronicles – by which Ward primarily means a) its inconsistencies; b) its being a hodge-podge of different types of mythology and c) its lack of an overall ‘unifying’ theme?

3. Why is it still so popular, given the above flaws?


( Let's address these in turn... )

Planet Narnia redux (for C. S. Lewis anoraks only)

A while ago I posted on The Narnia Code, a documentary based on Michael Ward’s book Planet Narnia. This is a follow-up, taking into account my promise to chilperic that I would go off and read the actual book. That I have now done.

I’m not going to engage seriously with the main body of Ward’s argument. As I think I said in one of the comments to my earlier post, I don’t find it intrinsically implausible that Lewis might have had a scheme in mind that linked the various Narnian books with the different planets. Astrology is certainly a subject that interested him, and Ward produces a prodigious amount of circumstantial evidence, some of which – such as the idea that Corin and Cor in The Horse and his Boy were inspired by Castor and Pollux – I find quite persuasive. I do think it’s almost impossible to produce a knock-down argument for this sort of thing, though, given the richness of associations that exists for the various planets and their deities. The sheer abundance of material makes it too flexible for certainty.

But let’s concede for the sake of argument that Ward’s case is watertight, and that he has established that Lewis associated each book with a particular planet. The question that follows is: so what? How can he elevate this from being a particularly interesting and lengthy footnote into being “the key” to the whole sequence – as he repeatedly claimed it to be in the documentary? He does so by trying to establish that his theory solves some existing and widely-acknowledged problems. And this is where I seriously part company with him, because to my mind the problems he cites are not problems at all. He sets them out at the start of the book:

1. Why did CSL suddenly turn to writing for children – as a bachelor in his fifties, with no children of his own?

2. How can we explain the obvious flaws of the Narnia chronicles – by which Ward primarily means a) its inconsistencies; b) its being a hodge-podge of different types of mythology and c) its lack of an overall ‘unifying’ theme?

3. Why is it still so popular, given the above flaws?


( Let's address these in turn... )