I gotta talk about the ending, so spoilers spoilers spoilers!
Out of all the Narnia books published, I felt that this has the most weight on its shoulder. It is the Avengers: Endgame of Narnia that ties all the stories together. In this regard, it finds success. But in terms of gratification, I feel a bit let down though the ending was so grand, and the last couple of pages were just plain shocking. I haven’t read anybody else’s reaction to this but I felt that the ending — that the Pevensie children died in a train crash — felt out of place.
The Last Battle is set generations after King Rilian, Narnia now ruled by a 25 year old King Tirian. After generations of peace, there is evil lurking in the kingdom from a very unlikely source: an ape and his best mate who was a donkey. With a discarded lion’s skin, the Ape managed to convince the talking beasts of Narnia that he is a messenger of Aslan, and the donkey wearing the lion skin is Aslan himself.
We talked about allegory in The Silver Chair and I feel like the message is the most transparent in The Last Battle than any other Narnia books. I felt that Lewis was taking a jab at other false religions and there are some parallels with Calormenes and those of the Middle Eastern descent. This is where I feel the book falters.
We can argue, like Gone in the Wind the racism in the book is a product of its time and is now irrelevant to the time and place. But I don’t think that these sorts of messages should be encouraged for younger readers. Lewis is brutal in his otherisation of the Calormenes portraying them as wicked, opportunistic and greedy. The main characters themselves put on the “blackface” á la Jim Crow to dress themselves like Calormene soldiers. I can’t help feeling that The Last Battle is a racist and xenophobic book.
But I do feel strongly about the Ape who dressed himself as a man, who bore fake news to the masses. Isn’t the Ape Trump and the animals trying to convince themselves of a true message Americans; that they’ll do anything to make Narnia great again, even by storming the Capitol, I mean cutting down trees? I can see the parallels of this message to where we stand now in the world, being at the mercy of the news from our social media.
Narnia when it came in the end, ceased to exist and swallowed by a giant tsunami. The world that exist through a magical giant door is the “true” Narnia, which is more real than Narnia itself and is a gateway to other worlds. Everybody in the world then had died, this is armageddon and even the Pevensie children are killed in the accident. Yes, I feel a sort of “what the?” in the back of my mind, and it feels too vast, too abstract yet too convenient that it should end as such.
