C.S. Lewis | Hacker News Reader

C.S. Lewis

online.hillsdale.edu

2 pointsTxoko4 comments

> storied moral worlds of Lewis’s fiction, including The Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy.

I wonder if they deal with the impossibly bad word building of Narnia? I mean, Lev Grossman's entire "Magicians" trilogy gently mocks Narnia's rubbish worldbuilding.

Beyond the illogical worldbuildig, Narnia has some problems with some characters, too. Susan isn't treated at all well, as Laura Weymouth points out in The Light Between Worlds (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34842042-the-light-betwe...). Come to think of it, Lewis doesn't tell us much about how any of the children who go to Narnia deal with being back in the Real World, a topic so obvious that even the Narnia movies deal with it a little.

The Narnia books are children's novels. If there is plenty of adventure & discovery, some emotionally attractive places for little readers to self-insert, and a few simple moral lessons, that's generally sufficient. Careful & logical world-building won't sell more children's books. Nor will refusing to write another volume in the series, when you're badly short on good ideas for one.

I'd probably agree with you on this, except for the serious consideration that Hillsdale is giving to Narnia. That and how Grossman and Weymouth (and I'll bet other people) have given serious consideration to how to repair Lewis' cheesy worldbuilding and examine the consequences of the adventures on the Pevensey children themselves. I mean, I noticed the illogic of Narnia when I read them as a kid. Narnia doesn't hold a candle to Earthsea, it's not even as good as Hogwarts with respect to worldbuilding, but it is better adventure and has moral lessons.

Ah...I won't say that Hillsdale College (~1,450 students, private, conservative, founded by Baptists, very rural) is bad, but it's not exactly Notre Dame or Stanford. They're just plugging some free on-line lectures. And his fiction writing (however well-known) clearly gets bottom billing in the list of lecture subjects.

Just based on the linked article, I really doubt that the quality of Narnia's world-building is on Hillsdale's priority list.

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