Just Finished Rereading The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis

I just finished reading the seventh and final book in the Chronicles of Narnia fantasy series by C.S. Lewis, appropriately titled The Last Battle.  When I had first read this book a few years ago, I was naturally expecting Lewis to wrap things up so that the series could be presented as a whole collective work, from beginning to end.  The degree to which he "wrapped things up", though, was a bit of a jolt!  When surprise endings in stories are first encountered, there can be that kind of shock.  But since I already knew what was going down (or up, depending on how you look at it), this time around I was just in it for the ride.  The Last Battle takes place at the end of the Narnian age, when the final king there has a crisis after a wayward ape presents a disguised donkey (in old lionskin) as Aslan the Lion Lord of Narnia and himself as his prophet.  This ape, named Shift, then proceeds to turn the kingdom of Narnia upside down with his false claims, in the process unwittingly inviting the barbarian kingdom of Calormen to invade them.  The Calormenes don't follow Aslan, who in essence is an allegory of Christ; instead they worship his opposite, the brutal entity called Tash.  In order to fool the native Narnian talking animals about Tash, Shift makes the claim that Tash and Aslan are one and the same, and that by worshiping one you are in fact worshiping the other as well.  This results in a "new" god in Narnia: the composite creation "Tashlan", whom the native Narnians are duped into following, but whom the invading Calormenes reject, knowing the separate nature of their Tash.  In order to convince the Narnians that Aslan has returned, Shift parades the donkey, Puzzle, out of a stable each night for a few minutes...and then back in.  Later, after Puzzle leaves the charade, this stable becomes the focus of the story...and different things happen to different folks who enter through its doors. 

The humans from Earth who were in featured in the six previous Narnia stories make their appearance in The Last Battle...except Susan (this is explained).  Eustace and Polly from The Silver Chair return early on to free King Tirian and help the Narnians see through the deception and to fight the Calormenes in the "last battle".  Aslan makes his indispensable appearance at the right time, but this time he has company: the rest of the Earthling cast from the other stories.  Whoa, I'd better leave something for you, the reader, to discover for yourself!  And what I'm leaving for you...well, it surprised me when I first read it.

There are two subplots in The Last Battle.  One involves the intransigent refusal of the dwarfs to believe in Aslan or the world he created, even when it is right in front of their eyes to see. This sounds to me like Lewis is pointing out the spiritual blindness of skeptics...although I may be mistaken about his intentions here. The other is the Calormene soldier who practiced a virtuous and honest life, but in the name of the false god Tash.  Aslan, though, while emphasizing that he and Tash are distinctly different, still credits that soldier's good behavior as having been in his own name.  I thought this was very interesting of Lewis to put in this story, especially in light of the way many evangelicals tend to view this sort of thing, regarding people brought up in other religious settings as automatically being lost...

The Chronicles of Narnia is fun reading, and each book is pretty short and as such isn't very much of a time commitment.  There have so far been high-budget movies made for three of the stories, although I don't know whether they'll get around to covering the entire series on film if the box office receipts don't keep up with the expenses.  Regardless, I think people should take the time to read the stories before they watch the movies: they'll get a lot more out of them if they do...