Full spoilers for the entire book below. Proceed with caution.
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Title: The Last Battle
Author: C.S. Lewis
Publication Date: 1956 (novel) 2005 (audio)
Audio Publisher: HarperCollins
Narrated By: Patrick Stewart
Recording time: 4 hrs and 50 mins
THE PLOT
via wiki
In the western regions of Narnia, the clever and greedy ape Shift persuades the naive donkey Puzzle to wear a lion’s skin (an echo from Aesop’s story of The Ass in the Lion’s Skin) and introduces him to the other Narnians as the Great Lion Aslan. Shift, posing as Aslan’s spokesman, uses Aslan’s name to persuade the Narnians to cut down the trees for lumber. Shift pockets the profits and garners support from the Calormenes – led by Rishda Tarkaan – by claiming that Aslan is another name for Tash, a bloodthirsty deity worshipped by the Calormenes. Those who question Shift’s words are invited into a large stable where “Tashlan” is said to reside, only to be stealthily murdered by one of Rishda’s men.
King Tirian, a descendant of King Caspian X, is warned by Roonwit the Centaur that strange and evil things are happening to Narnia and that the stars portend ominous developments. Tirian and his friend Jewel the Unicorn hear word of the death of the Dryads and rashly set out to confront the danger, instructing Roonwit to gather a small army to join them. Finding two Calormenes abusing a Narnian Talking Horse, Tirian and Jewel kill them both in a blind rage. Ashamed, they give themselves up to “Aslan”.
Awaiting judgment, Tirian recognizes the farce that Shift has fabricated in league with Rishda and the talking cat Ginger. When he accuses Shift of lying, Tirian is tied to a tree for the night to face judgment the following morning. While the woodland creatures are sympathetic to his suffering, they cannot bring themselves to defy “Aslan”.
Tirian calls upon Aslan for help, and sees High King Peter and several others in a vision. He asks them to come to his aid. Shortly afterwards Jill Pole and Eustace Scrubb arrive in Narnia from Earth. They relate that Peter and Edmund Pevensie went to London to dig up the magic rings from the old house of Professor Kirke (mentioned in the previous story) in hopes that Jill and Eustace can use them to get to Narnia. But feeling a shock in their railway carriage on Earth, Eustace and Jill find themselves in Narnia without ever seeing the rings. Tirian gives Eustace and Jill a warm welcome.
They release Tirian and rescue Jewel. In the stable, Jill finds Puzzle, who comes to understand his folly and joins Tirian’s side. A band of Dwarfs are also rescued, but their faith in Aslan has been shattered and they renounce their allegiance, proclaiming “the Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs”. Only one Dwarf named Poggin remains faithful to Aslan and joins the group. Tirian learns that Shift and Rishda have inadvertently summoned the real Tash to Narnia when he and the others see him travelling north towards the stable.
Farsight the Eagle arrives bearing grim news: Roonwit and the Narnian army loyal to Tirian have all been massacred by the Calormenes who have taken Cair Paravel in Tirian’s absence. Tirian and his small force advance on the stable to expose the truth of Shift’s deception. Ginger, sent in to aid in the deception, runs out in terror, having lost his ability to speak. Emeth, one of Rishda’s men and a devout follower of Tash, insists on seeing his god. Rishda tries to dissuade him, but Emeth enters the empty stable. Angry at the deception in the name of Tash, he kills another soldier who was stationed in the stable to murder the rebellious Narnians, but Emeth then disappears.
Outside the stable, Tirian’s group engages Shift and the Calormenes, but most of the remaining Narnians on either side are all either killed or sacrificed to Tash by being thrown into the stable. Tirian throws Shift into the stable and Tash devours Shift. Realising that real danger lies in the stable, the terrified Rishda offers the remaining Narnians as sacrifices to avoid the wrath of Tash. Tirian, left alone and fighting for his life, drags Rishda into the stable and finds himself in a vast and lush plain. Tash seizes Rishda and advances on Tirian, but is stopped by the “Friends of Narnia”: Digory Kirke, Polly Plummer, Peter Pevensie and his siblings Edmund and Lucy. Susan is absent as she has ceased to believe in Narnia. Peter orders Tash to return to his realm and Tash vanishes with Rishda in his clutches.
The real Aslan appears and praises Tirian for his valiant struggle in defense of Narnia. The faithless Dwarfs are present but cannot see they are in Aslan’s country; they perceive themselves to be locked in an actual stable. Aslan demonstrates that, without their faith, even he cannot help them. The Friends ask Aslan to heal Narnia, but he admits that even he cannot undo the evil that has been sown and he brings the world to an end: Father Time is awoken and calls the stars down from the skies into the sea. The inhabitants of Narnia gather outside the barn to be judged by Aslan. The faithful enter Aslan’s country while those who have opposed or deserted him become ordinary animals and vanish in his shadow to a fate unknown even to the narrator. The vegetation is consumed by dragons, salamanders and giant lizards until they grow old, die, and rot into skeletal structures. The sea rises to cover Narnia. The land freezes when Father Time puts out the sun after it destroys the moon. At Aslan’s command, King Peter shuts the door on Narnia. Aslan leads the faithful to his country, telling them to go “further up and further in”. Soon they encounter Emeth; Aslan has accepted his faithful service to Tash because it was offered in good faith and therefore truly done to Aslan, whereas Tash is served only by evil.
Aslan takes the Friends to a “true” version of Narnia, the previous Narnia having been an imperfect and corruptible shadow. As they advance, the Friends meet and reunite with characters from previous adventures who have been dead for centuries; Aslan reveals that the Friends may also stay as they had died in a train accident on Earth. Aslan sheds his lion form (“And as He spoke He no longer looked like a lion”), and the series ends with the revelation that this was only the beginning of the true story, “which goes on for ever, and in which every chapter is better than the one before”.
My Review
The Last Battle is the seventh and final installment of Lewis’ series The Chronicles of Narnia. After some inconsistency in the series with respect to the story chronology and its relationship with the publication order, The Last Battle gets us back on track at the finish, being last in both publication order and chronology. Patrick Stewart does an amazing job as the narrator, hitting all the right notes for me with respect to the book’s tone and its emotional beats. That said, I might feel more internally conflicted about this book than any of the others in the series. My brain liked this book a lot more than my heart did. As a result, I do recommend it, but it’s also probably my least favorite in the series.
The final book in the series is a Narnian version of the Book of Revelation. We see a false god doing wicked things, and among those acts is successfully selling a false religious universalism. We see religiously agnostic people who don’t take false gods seriously accidentally conjuring a real one. We see a great falling away of religious belief in general. In the end, we see something that looks a lot like the Narnian version of a Second Coming and a Great Judgment. That was all very interesting intellectually but it was also strangely underwhelming emotionally. The fake Aslan wasn’t the result of a particularly great scheme – it was just a donkey wearing a lion costume. Compared to The White Witch, and other great risings up of evil from earlier in the series, this felt almost silly. The potency of the story though was not in the evil-doers so much as the very believable religious apathy of the denizens of Narnia. Then we don’t have much time to process how this all came about before the world ends.
This might be a pretty good representation of Christian eschatology (though of course we don’t know yet), but it felt like it was happening quickly and it felt like a story in want of a more serious antagonist. It’s hard to really convey in a children’s tale the frightening reality of apathy. Lewis does an admirable job but it felt a little too rushed. For example – why are the citizens so easily deceived when their King (Tirian) is a righteous king? How did they get to that point? I felt like Shift the ape’s success in misleading them needed a bit more background.
I did really enjoy that in the process of setting up their false god Tash, Shift accidentally summoned the real Tash. Does a demon actually care if you summon him insincerely or ironically? Probably not. Therefore, this type of activity should not be done at all, let alone lightly. In addition to maybe being the most entertaining part of the book, this incident felt strangely timely. Allegedly ironic Satan support in our real world might be at a high-mark for recent centuries. What are you supposed to do if you ironically summon a demon and then that demon shows up? You probably panic.
I have a couple of gripes with this story, though I suspect Lewis had some real reasons for his choices. First, Lewis excludes one of the original four Pevensie children from the final book. Despite her time as a Queen of Narnia, Susan no longer believes. Peter says she’s no longer even a friend of Narnia. Second, and this relates strongly to the first point, we find out as the book ends that the other three Pevensie children, their parents, Diggory, Polly, Eustace, and Jill, all died in a train crash in the real world. We are supposed to celebrate their deaths, as they arrive in Heaven. However, it was hard for me to ignore that Susan Pevensie presumably ends this book in profound grief and misery.
This bothered me so much that I went and looked up C.S. Lewis’s comments on the topic. (via narniaweb.com)
In an early 1955 letter to a girl named Marcia, Lewis first revealed his decision to have Susan lose her way in The Last Battle. “Peter gets back to Narnia in it. I am afraid Susan does not. Haven’t you noticed in the two you have read that she is rather fond of being too grownup? I am sorry to say that side of her got stronger and she forgot about Narnia.”
“The books don’t tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having been turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there is plenty of time for her to mend, and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s country in the end—in her own way. I think that whatever she had seen in Narnia she could (if she was the sort that wanted to) persuade herself, as she grew up, that it was ‘all nonsense’”
Though, contrary to a popular internet rumor, Lewis never planned to finish writing Susan’s story himself. In another letter, he wrote: “I could not write that story myself. Not that I have no hope of Susan’s ever getting to Aslan’s country; but because I have a feeling that the story of her journey would be longer and more like a grown-up novel than I wanted to write. But I may be mistaken. Why not try it yourself?”
Other than Peter’s initial comment about her not being a friend of Narnia anymore, we also don’t get to find out if her family reacted to the fact she wasn’t present with them in the afterlife. Given that she ceased to believe, perhaps it was a mercy that she lived on without them and had a chance to correct her course. We can see that as a potential mercy from our perspective as the reader. It will almost certainly feel as far from mercy as one can imagine for Susan. I just wish Lewis had written the story of her future. Alas.
On the whole, I do like the book. It was fascinating to see how Lewis translated Christian End Time prophecy into a children’s story with talking animals. I enjoyed the imagery of Aslan’s great judgment, the end of Narnia, and the depiction of heaven. Nevertheless, for me The Last Battle felt a little underwhelming with its too weak antagonist and incomplete with respect to Susan at the same time. Life often feels that way, too, but I was hoping for a bit more in fiction. I still recommend the book and the entire series, but I was hoping that going out on a bang might not be the sounds of a train crash. That said, even if my heart isn’t in it for this conclusion, intellectually, I cannot fault Lewis for issuing a “you never know when you’re gonna die so you better be ready” warning to his Readers. I mean, this is a book about the simultaneous endlessness and finality of judgment and eternity.
Mathew 24:44 Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh.
Have you read The Last Battle? If so, what did you think?