L'ultima battaglia (1956)

Pretty awful. This is not its own book, it's a weird follow-up to/treatise on the rest of the series, where Narnia is depleted and depressing, racist and Islamophobic stereotypes abound, and we are happy about the death of children because they get to go to heaven. C.S. Lewis still obviously has some powers of vivid description, but I just can't get over the blatant allegory, or the awfulness of death and defeat in this book (the train, the cat who can no longer speak, the massacre of the horses, Eustace borne off into the door, Jill dragged by the hair, the bear killed in his confusion), and how it all supposed to be smoothed over into religious ecstasy of further up and further in. No. It's too unsettling. And Susan is left all alone, without even her parents.

But I see why so many people set out to rewrite or send up Narnia--The Magicians, Piranesi, His Dark Materials. It's an interesting, polarizing series, and there is a lot of it left unwritten. And if you can lean into the disturbing qualities, it can become even more evocative. The most interesting part of this book, in my opinion, is when Jill and Eustace talk about their lives in the real world-- that they know they're the only Friends of Narnia who can come back, so they've been training in archery and swordfighting, and their brief story about Peter and Edmund going back to Diggory and Polly's old row of houses to dig up the rings for them. Also the scene where Tirian appears to the Friends of Narnia like a ghost and Peter is the only one who does not move. Come on Lev Grossman, there's your material for a gritty Narnia-inspired book!

An excellent and fitting end. ( )

Evil threatens to end Narnia.

Case 13 shelf 4

Brilliant stuff. Allegorical storytelling. 'Don't stop! Farther up and farther in!' ( )