Last Battle pt 4


These endless days are finally ending in a blaze

One of the reasons why TLB is different from all other books of its genre is how it ends. Basically, the good guys get creamed. And they don’t stop the world from ending. This is not the way these things are supposed to go! The good guys are supposed to ultimately save the world, no matter how hard it is or even if they have to lose a couple characters…but they’re not supposed to lose everyone. And it’s not supposed to end no matter how hard they try to avert it.

Someone’s not playing by the rules. Or is it our fault, for expecting the author to play by rules that hadn’t exactly become the rules yet? This is the one of the pioneering classics of twentieth century children’s allegorical fantasy, he kinda wrote the rulebook and all those tropes where the good guys produce a risky but surprisingly effective last minute plan and pull the world back from the brink hadn’t become tropes yet.

But they’ve already done stuff like that anyway. To keep threatening the end of the world and not going through with it, well, that’s crying wolf and you have to keep upping the stakes. But someday, there will be an Apocalypse that can’t be averted. Someday, the world’s really gotta end. For good. If this is the result of a war, the only thing undecided is who will have the most people still standing on their side when everything ends. You’d like to hope that’ll be the white hats, but the world’s still gonna end. And sometimes, vastly outnumbered people backed into a corner do lose and lose badly. Even if they’re good people who don’t deserve it.

What amazes me is the way TLB describes that feeling so well. That “they took our world and made it theirs”** feeling, of a small nation hopelessly out manned and out gunned by a ruthless empire- they’re gonna kill you and there’s nothing left you can do about it but go down swinging. It reminds me of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising or any number of similar historical events (including the previously mentioned Armenian Genocide, which the documentary "Clash of Empires" describes as "like War of the Worlds" , and the slaughter and abuse of the Native Americans). Their world comes to an end out of nowhere, their freedom is taken away by more powerful strangers, who have strange customs and an unfamiliar, frightening god.

This is something else those of us from a different generation often forget. C.S Lewis lived through two world wars. He was wounded in World War I, the “War to End All Wars” which decimated a generation of Britain’s young men. World War II was one of the worst wars in the history of humanity. The Blitz, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, it is not hard to imagine that people thought this was it, Goodbye World. As they say on tvtropes, “World War II was one giant I Am Not Making This Up”.


But I’m sure a lot of us feel the same way these days...


** This is a quote from the Buffy episode “Prophecy Girl”. The full quote (I paraphrased) is "It wasn't our world anymore. They made it theirs. And they had fun." Vampires broke into the school and killed a couple of kids in the AV room, a violation of their space by an enemy, the first time Willow realizes that this can happen in broad daylight in a place that's supposed to be safe. But Buffy took place in our world, with our conventions. TLB manages to communicate how such a violation would feel, even though we don’t hold the same things sacred in our world as they do in Narnia. But the world is richly drawn enough so that we *know* when Narnian rules have been broken.