Any fans of C.S. Lewis here?

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It would be an excellent film, but it would be quite intellectual if they did justice to it. But if they did it well, and we could see it all, and see the ghosts hanging onto their sins…that would be powerful indeed!

And to see his descriptions of Heaven and Hell brought to life…the grass like razors, the waterfall, the bus ride, the shining woman with her train of boys and girls, men and women that she had loved on earth…it would be a glorious movie. Oh, and the man with the lizard who turns into a glorified horse!! ❤️

I bet Satan would be working overtime to prevent such a movie from being made…☹️
 
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It needn’t be quite so cerebral as the book. After all, film is a visual medium, not a verbal one. For instance, in the vignettes with the lost souls, rather than having them recount their past lives, we could actually see flashbacks showing the follies that led to their perdition. We could see the horrors of the filthy city that is Hell, and there would be much in Heaven to astound: the waterfall angel, the stampede of unicorns frightening the female Ghost, the Lustful Ghost surrendering to Christ and transforming into a saved soul, etc. I think it would be marvelous!
 
Yes, very true. Seeing them commit those sins would be very powerful…I’m sure we would be able to easily relate to it.
 
ShowersofRoses said:
I bet Satan would be working overtime to prevent such a movie from being made…
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Satan certainly worked overtime to prevent the making of The Exorcist. The number of mysterious deaths, strange disasters and downright spooky happenings that occurred on the set of that film is scary. He tries to prevent any serious proposition that he may actually exist, and thus should be fought and defeated.
 
I adore his writings. My introduction with his books began with Narnia. The Lion Witch and the Wardrobe especially. The Great Divorce, and that hideous strength.
Debbie
 
Was Lewis part of the Oxford Movement? I thought the Oxford Movement had been at least a generation previously and was no longer active during Lewis’ adult life.
 
Cirdan_XII said:
Was Lewis part of the Oxford Movement? I thought the Oxford Movement had been at least a generation previously and was no longer active during Lewis’ adult life.
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He might have been somewhat influenced by the after effects of the Oxford movement. But he was also influenced by the Evangelical thinkers of that era and, especially, by G. K. Chesterton.
 
Cirdan_XII said:
Was Lewis part of the Oxford Movement? I thought the Oxford Movement had been at least a generation previously and was no longer active during Lewis’ adult life.
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You are correct: the Oxford Movement was in the mid-1800’s. It morphed into what we call today Anglo-Catholicism.
 
I don’t know exactly what I should look for in The Magician’s Nephew.
 
I just am trying to find all the Christian allegories and themes. I already got to the part to the queen, but I don’t know if she symbolizes something or not.
 
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Well, my advice is to finish the book, taking notes of characters and events that pique your interest along the way. Once you are done, look back over your notes, and see if some patterns and themes begin to take shape. Lewis was not deliberately writing allegorical literature, but Christian elements do exist in the Narnia books, and they are not hard to find once you begin looking for them. But you must look! You, not your friends or online acquaintances. ☺️
 
One thing you can find in The Magician’s Nephew is a breakdown of good versus evil.

If you read Tolkien and look at the Silmarillion, specifically the opening passages, you read that there was a fallen angel (this is a ver< christian theme) who wanted to disrupt creation as it was happening, but unwittingly added to it.

The underlying logic here says that God is all-powerful. Therefore even Satan / Lucifer can only exist because God tolerates it. So even if Satan works evil and causes suffering at the point where he is working evil, in the bigger picture and context of everything, good comes from it.

In The magician’s Nephew, we meet a very evil magician, but one who is ultimately incapable of seeing what he is doing or seeing the bigger picture. He seeks only personal profit and believes he is able to outsmart everybody else, but actually he has totally underestimated who he is up against.

Compare him to Weston from the Space Trilogy. Same sort of person. Same sort of motivation.

He ends up meeting Jadis. For us readers, this provides some background context and fills in on some of the gaps in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. It helps us better understand who Jadis is and why she hates Aslan so.

The creation story in Narnia is absolutely beautiful. Full of very poetic metaphors. Pure joy and innocence, reflecting what the world was like before the Fall, before Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden. It’s maybe among the most beautiful things that Lewis wrote.

It is also a sort of antothesis to the Last Battle where we see the same being undone and reversed.

So you can certainly read The Magician’s Nephew as a standalone book, but a lot of it cross-refernces other Narnia books, and even the Süace Trilogy…
 
Also, reading The Magician’s Nephew before the other books makes no sense. Whyever it got into a publisher’s head that they should be read in chronological order is beyond me.

hawk
 
It had a number one on the cover so I assumed that it was the first book.
 
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dochawk said:
Also, reading The Magician’s Nephew before the other books makes no sense. Whyever it got into a publisher’s head that they should be read in chronological order is beyond me.

hawk
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Lewis once replied, in response to a child’s letter requesting permission to read the Chronicles of Narnia in chronogical order, that he felt that was the best way to read them. Apparently an editor at HarperCollins got hold of this letter, and used it as justification to renumber the series. Problem is, this makes nonsense of many scenes, like the one in the Beavers’ house in TLTWATW where the Pevensies first learn who Aslan is. If the reader already knows who Aslan is because he read The Magician’s Nephew first, much of the mysterious atmosphere and beautiful lyrical quality of this scene is lost. Lewis intended to revise this scene and others like it with a view to republishing the books in chronological order, but he died before he could tackle the task. The original published order is the only proper way to read the series.
 
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