The Last Battle

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The final book in the Narnia series proves to be the most exciting and overwhelmingly allegorical of them all…

The Last Battle chronicles the final days of Narnia in which a treacherous Ape convinces a naïve Donkey to dress in a lion-skin and pretend to be Aslan. Soon all Narnia’s Talking Beasts are being treated as slaves under the whip of Calormene soldiers and tricked by the Ape into believing Aslan walks amongst them and is very displeased. When all hope seems lost King Tirian calls on magic from a lost age and Jill and Eustace return to Narnia for one final adventure.

The series’ biblical undertones have been present since The Magician’s Nephew and while they have been a little more reserved in preceding books in this one they are thrown at you in Technicolor. Part of the excitement –and simultaneously the most annoying part- is Lewis’ warning messages of turning away from religious faith and how it will bring about the end of the world. Both Narnians and Calormene characters dabble with atheism and get punished in this book and the references to the Great Flood and the Garden of Eden are so loud it’s as though Lewis is screaming at you and brandishing the cane.

One would think such heavy-handed allegory would become distasteful and ruin the reader’s experience, but it actually works well -despite not being everyone's cup of tea- in bringing more excitement and depth to the events of the story and helps to build emotional responses from the reader. There were a number of points at which I spoke out loud to the characters, chastising them and jeering at them completely taken in by the whole thing. 

The other thing that I enjoyed about this book is that all these terrible events: war, sacrifice, bloodshed, and slavery spark from this tricky, but seemingly harmless prank of the Ape. I’m sure this was not the point, but the dark escalation of events from one simple action reminded me of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil or a Coen Brother’s movie and I got rather a kick out of that.

Image credit: Patheos

Even though the ending is rather bleak and dark for a children’s book, The Last Battle is a great conclusion to the fantastical series of adventures in Narnia and it rekindled a lot of the excitement that was in the first three books, making me want to read on.

Indicative from its title The Last Battle is the final book in C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series. It was first published in Britain by The Bodley Head in 1956.