The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch– Melinda Taub
Does exactly what it says on the tin. Pride and Prejudice, except Lydia has magic, and Kitty is a real cat under a spell. It was entertaining enough, but full of weird mistakes that made it obvious it was written by an American who didn’t really know the places. Brighton beach is apparently sandy and full of boulders like somewhere in California, people in Sussex speak with a “southern drawl” in comparison to Hertfordshire (?!?!) and the in-story letters are written in cod-Regency style but with American spelling. She also has a weird issue where she thinks “seaside” and “seafront” mean the same thing in a British context. Margate Shell Grotto is also used as a setting, but Margate is never mentioned, and it’s moved to be somewhere in the countryside near Brighton.
Hungry– Grace Dent
Autobiography of the Masterchef judge and Guardian food critic. This one is a good read. 80s Carlisle is an unlikely origin for a professional food writer, brought up on a diet of Angel Delight (the ad in the cover photo is the same image used on the cover of my library edition) and Vesta curries, which makes the story of her career much more interesting and relatable. She didn’t come via Oxbridge and nepotism unlike most of her contemporaries. There’s all kinds of interesting sociological observations too- for example when Asda superstores appeared at the end of the 80s, they sparked a dramatic change in the way her family ate. Grace’s mother, who had previously been very parsimonious about food shopping at the local supermarket, couldn’t resist the lure of yellow reduced stickers and would bring home whole birthday cakes just because they were reduced, and her dad ended up getting diabetes because he couldn’t resist reduced price treats either.
The Neverending Story– Michael Ende
I re-read this in both English and German to write a section for my book. I essentially learnt German by ploughing my way through the original German edition of the book, and recently got the reissued illustrated first edition on a trip to Austria. The book is much darker than the film, and the ending of the film is still only halfway through the book plot. After saving Fantasia, Bastian gets a magic amulet that grants him wishes. However every time he makes a wish, he loses one of his memories of the real world. He turns into a little shit, starts hanging out with a creepy witch, and tries to do a failed coup on the Childlike Empress. He then has to hunt through a mine to find his memories.
From Spare Oom to War Drobe: Travels in Narnia with my 9 year old self– Katherine Langrish
The Magician’s Nephew– CS Lewis
Prince Caspian– CS Lewis
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader– CS Lewis
The Silver Chair– CS Lewis
Katherine Languish’s book is pretty straightforward: she re-reads the Narnia books as an adult and compares her memories of them as a child with her adult reaction to the material. Years and years ago I started doing a zine project along a similar line, but abandoned it when it turned out a large amount of secondary material about CS Lewis was real Evangelical Christian glurge, and the prospect of accidentally attracting that kind of audience was very unappealing. Thankfully Langrish is not one of them, and the book is a good read. I could maybe have done with less in-depth plot summaries, as surely everyone interested in this book has read the original source material, but it points out several things I hadn’t noticed. For example, Narnia’s neighbouring country of Calormen is an orientalising stereotype of the Middle East which comes in for lots of criticism for its underlying Islamophobia and racism. What Langrish points out is that Lewis takes every stereotype from the Arabian Nights, but takes out all the magic and adventure, which must have been a conscious choice. There’s no genies or magic carpets or griffins, it’s a boring grownup country about taxes and trade, designed to put children off. Which probably explains why I was always somewhat disappointed by The Horse and His Boy. My grandparents had this book of Arabian Nights stories lavishly illustrated by Severino Baraldi, and it was always one of my favourites.
After finishing Langrish’s book, I got the flu that was going around, and I re-read some of the Narnia books. My opinion didn’t really change: CS Lewis was a weird guy who had serious problems with women, but was an excellent prose stylist. I noticed that I still really enjoy his descriptions of places, he’s got a magical way of conjuring them up, but his attempts at cod-medieval gallantry leave me cold. They owe a lot more to the sentimental Victorian novels of his youth than any real medieval literature. Aslan inconsistently jumps back and forth between being your best friend, and controlling and secretive. I think this is meant to illustrate some “mysteries of faith” type thing, but it always left me cold.
I have always hated The Last Battle. Even as a child it left me feeling cheated and like Lewis had tricked me into getting Jesused. Religion played very little part in my life (here is the draft of something I wrote ten years ago for the abandoned CS Lewis zine). My parents aren’t religious (my dad did however attend Sunday School as a preteen because you were allowed to use the snooker table for free), I was baptised bog standard C of E because it was the default and only ever attended church with school, weddings or funerals. Junior school in England involves a lot of hymn singing, but they never expected you to believe any of it. A family friend was the choirmaster of the local cathedral, and I spent a lot of time with that family, yet can’t ever recall them mentioning religion. The C of E is just kind of there, and they’re not pestering you to join in.
Getting evangelised to felt alien and gross. After reading Langrish’s book it suddenly occurred to me the only other time I had encountered the same feeling as reading The Last Battle was at secondary school with the Christian Union. The club wasn’t run by a teacher, but by a school admin, and there was a persistent push to try to get students to join, but very few were interested. They had this weird kind of entitled attitude that everyone should join, and we were all being really unfair and spiting them by not (especially in a school where we had many Muslim, Jewish and Sikh students and even a few Mormons). They always gave me a bad feeling. I laughed when they did a competition to write a school prayer and nobody was interested. After reading the book, I looked up Christian Union on Google, and surprise surprise Christian Union is not some little school club, but an international organisation linked to the grossest kind of American Conservative Evangelism. Which makes me wonder what the beliefs of the school receptionist who organised it were.
Susan’s treatment in The Last Battle has also bothered many people, apparently being into “nylons and lipstick” is a worse crime than trying to sell your family for Turkish Delight. Neil Gaiman did a story about it called The Problem of Susan, but something always felt off about the sexual content. When Gaiman was outed as a sexual abuser, it was one of the first things that popped into my head about things in his work that seemed a bit hmm on second viewing. Re-reading the Narnia books definitely makes it even clearer Lewis definitely had a weird issue with adult women (and famously carried out his promise to his dead army buddy to “look after my mother if I die” by sleeping with her). He can write spirited little girls, and adult villainesses, but he doesn’t seem to be able to do heroic adult women. The White and Green witches are intelligent and seductive, but Caspian’s future wife has seemingly no personality, and I can’t think of any other adult woman in the stories. If you read his adult sci-fi books, it’s even more noticeable. That Hideous Strength is a bizarre fever dream guilty pleasure. One of the villains is a butch lesbian head of secret police named Miss Hardcastle who dresses in black leather, and Lewis is at great pains to describe how awful he finds her, in great fetishistic detail any time she appears.
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