/ 6 June 2008

God in the machine

For reasons unknown, Disney is not following the sequence of CS Lewis’s Narnia books in its film versions. Well, to be precise, Disney is going according to the order in which Lewis wrote them, rather than the sequence he later filled it out, which would have made more sense in narrative terms. He wrote The Magician’s Nephew (1955) as a prequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) and the stand-alone The Horse and His Boy (1954) was later sandwiched between the 1950 novella and Prince Caspian (1951).

Like the BBC in its four-part Narnia series, Disney jumped straight from its first instalment, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (a hit in 2005), to Price Caspian or, to give it its full cumbersome title, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. For my money (though, I note, not for others’), this is a marked improvement on the previous film, which was overly cute, poorly CGI’d and too obviously in thrall to its crypto-religious message.

In the meantime we also have had The Golden Compass, the first part of Philip Pullman’s counter-Narnia trilogy. Pullman powerfully contests Lewis’s prudish and sentimental Christianity, supporting instead the progressive values of secular humanism, science and the Enlightenment and opposing reactionary and repressive religiosity. This he does exceptionally well, though the film of The Golden Compass is nowhere near as good as the book. In the case of Prince Caspian, by contrast, I think the movie improves considerably on the book.

Apart from making Prince Caspian himself a lot older and casting a hunky 26-year old, director and co-scriptwriter Andrew Adamson successfully re-organises the storyline. For instance, instead of a second-hand narrative in a later chapter, we get a thrilling opening sequence as Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes) escapes from his murderous uncle, Miraz, leader of the Telmarines.

The Telmarines are a bunch of quasi-Saracens who have conquered Narnia in the centuries since the last movie. For, as the four Pevensie children will discover, hundreds of years have passed since they first stumbled through the wardrobe into that magical realm. Now they are mystically called back from World War II London to help Narnia once more.

The narrative flows smoothly from there and, despite its running time of two hours and 20 minutes, the film feels swift. Adamson adds in some extra fighting action and expands the battle that ends the story, perhaps in an attempt to trump the battle scene that ended the previous film. Here I think he overplays his hand. The assault on Miraz’s castle is well done but, by the time the final battle has dragged itself out in a long sequence of successes, reversals, successes and reversals, the viewer is a bit exhausted.

Then there is the issue of Aslan — the great talking lion who is Lewis’s stand-in for Christ, and the redeemer-figure in the world of Narnia. One can legitimately ask, as one does in this world, why the divinity allows so much suffering before coming to the rescue at the last minute. At least he does finally come to the rescue in Narnia, unlike on Earth. Clearly the delay is good for narrative suspense, but it begs the big theological question.

I’m sure anyone who has pondered the prevalence of evil and suffering in the world would relish the opportunity of asking that question of their god face to face. Lucy Pevensie (Georgie Henley) is given the opportunity in Prince Caspian. As the youngest of the Pevensies, Lucy has the most faith — she is the one who gets to see the absent Aslan first and gets to ask the burning question. But, disappointingly, the redeemer’s answers are bland homilies that simply evade the issue.

Perhaps it’s best not to ask such theological questions, even of a god, and just treat Aslan for what he is — the deus ex machina of the story (and all the Narnia stories). Still it raises a couple of noteworthy points about Narnia. The fact that Lucy, as the youngest child, has the most faith, reveals Lewis’s prejudice against growing up and dealing with the real world. Lewis and the film, like much of our cinematic culture, yearn for an infantilised state in which belief in magic is possible and wishes come true.

In some ways, with the opposition between good Narnians and bad Telmarines as the basic structuring principle of this narrative, Lewis is refighting the Crusades in his mind. The Telmarines are very Arab to look at, dark of skin and pointy of beard. This is obviously a case of European culture (classical as well as Christian) versus the Islamic hordes. But it is also, for a Lewis writing during World War II, the world of religious belief versus the godless Nazi types.

Which leads to the next point. The Christianity at the Narnia stories’ heart is obvious but, watching Prince Caspian, something else dawned on me. Yes, Aslan clearly represents Christ — but what kind of Christ? Besides their answer to Lewis, Pullman’s anti-Narnia novels are also in dialogue with John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the epic poet’s take on the fall from Eden and his attempt to ‘justify the ways of God to men” as he put it. Lewis’s Narnia books might be seen as a similar justification.

Pullman, though, takes seriously William Blake’s view that Milton was ‘of the Devil’s party without knowing it” and one wonders whether Lewis, in the Narnia books, wasn’t also of another party without fully knowing it.

In fact Narnia is essentially a pagan world of fauns, centaurs, dryads and talking animals — the world of classical antiquity, a pre-Christian universe. And Aslan is really not very like the Christ we know from the gospels. He is, rather, a pagan hero-god, one who dies and is reborn, like all those Tammuzes and Osirises historically assimilated into the Christ myth. He’s also pagan in that he doesn’t have to justify his actions. He doesn’t even have to be particularly good. Pagan gods are like that. This idea makes me like the Narnia chronicles somewhat more.