Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1950

I don't remember if I connected it to religious allegory, but I do remember it made me feel uncomfortable because of the huge guilt trip the book laid on Edmund (was that his name?) for BETRAYING Aslan, when from my perspective he was a kid who'd been drugged by an adult and none of this was his fault.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Booooooo!

i went with "the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe," which i first read when very young and have always loved in spite of everything. as i've gotten older the flaws of the narnia books have gotten harder for me to overlook. i can see why tolkien didn't care for them: narnia doesn't have the solidity of middle-earth, where you can come back from a quest and visit the pub you left behind a thousand pages ago to find it more or less unchanged, and finally find the pony you were tearfully parted from eight hundred pages ago. narnia is a place where it can be winter for hundreds of years but animals still have no trouble finding food. narnia is, basically, whatever lewis felt like writing about. and the central concept of the books crumbles apart if you try to take it seriously: whatever else aslan is, he is not much like the jesus of the gospels. if lewis really thought he was, that's baffling to me. 

and yet he came up with so many indelible, dreamlike images: the snowy wood in the wardrobe, the faun with the packages, the witch on her sledge, aslan on the stone table, the vanishing white stag. and lewis's obsession with the potential evil lurking in our most ordinary actions, which only annoys me in his apologist writings, is one of the things that makes some of his fiction great to me. the passage where edmund tries to convince himself that he is doing the right thing in betraying his siblings, fails to do so, and yet somehow can't make himself turn back, has haunted me all my life. 

Yeah, I very much expected Lewis to win this one, actually - I guess ILX is always a little less British/anglophilic than it is in my mind.

I remember rereading TLTW&TW on a plane and tearing up a bit at the part where Lewis explains that, in Narnia, no one would ever be blamed for crying. Mind you I have plenty of little embarassing moments like that, I tend to well up a lot when reading on planes. Must be the air pressure.

Anyway:

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1951