Favorites

The supper-table conversation turned to which of the Narnia books was favorite. I said that wasn't easy--sometimes I had a taste for one and sometimes another. It would be easier to answer which I liked the least.

I was, of course, completely outvoted. The Horse and His Boy was fine, but is my least favorite.

Granted, there's no accounting for tastes, but I like to try to figure things out, and I think I came up with an explanation.

I like "high fantasy," mysterious possibilties, and epic myth--and the eucatastrophe. The Magician's Nephew offers the end of a world, the beginning of another, and a wood between the worlds of endless possibilities. So too, in a fuller way, does The Last Battle.

I think Out of the Silent Planet is fine, but Perelandra is far better--and it partakes more of the mythic. That Hideous Strength I had trouble with the first time I read it (freshman in college, I think), but I have since come to appreciate it much more. It mixes the ordinary and mythic in a way that Tolkien thinks owed a lot to Charles Williams. I think Williams generally did a better job finding the supernatural in the ordinary, but Lewis was very ambitious with T.H.S. and included many more moving peices than Williams ever did.

The Pilgrim's Regress has a mythic arc to it too, but it was one of Lewis' earlier works, and as he himself confessed, was excessively obscure. Till We Have Faces is good, and has a mythic climax, but somehow never quite caught my imagination the way some of the others did. But I've gone back to The Man Who Was Thursday many times.