The Chronicles of Narnia, Ranked

Because sometimes clicks must be baited

A couple of years ago, I had the idea to boost this newsletter with some clickbait by doing a ranking of the Chronicles of Narnia. But no, I told myself, that’s unworthy of you. But then someone else did it. And they got it wrong. So, of course, now I have to do it.

The other ranking is All 7 Narnia books, ranked worst to best, By Sarah Kenchington, and if you are a well-brought-up modern relativist (and which of us isn’t these days), you are probably saying, how can you say her ranking is wrong and yours is right? Isn’t it just a matter of opinion? Which is actually what makes this exercise interesting. Because, at least to me, the difference between our rankings is more interesting than either one of our rankings individually because it gets at the question of where objective quality ends and personal taste begins.

However much of a relativist you may be, there are, in fact, some things you hold to be a matter of objective quality. Take ice cream, for example. I think we can all agree that ice cream is objectively better when it is made with real cream than when it is made with edible oil products. And we can probably all agree that the fact that I like rum and raisin best while my wife prefers chocolate caramel is purely a matter of personal taste. With the arts, however, the boundaries between objective quality and personal taste are not so clear.

But first, my ranking of the Narnia books. I have attempted to rank them on objective criteria by how well they work as stories. Inevitably, personal taste will play a role as well, at least as a tiebreaker. But my professed criteria is story. There are no points for theological ideas expressed or for good behavior exemplified. A good story is all that counts, and it is about the total story experience, not just the plot. Here goes:

7. The Magician’s Nephew

As a stand-alone book, The Magician’s Nephew would barely be worth reading. Any interest it has is purely as an origin story for Narnia and the White Witch. What possesses publishers to make it number one in the set is beyond me, for I can’t imagine any book more likely to put someone off reading the rest of the series than starting with a book that exists only to answer a bunch of questions that a new reader has no reason to ask. (But read on for a possible glimmer of light on this mystery.)

6. The Last Battle

The Last Battle is burdened by the necessity to wrap up not only the series but the lives of the characters and their immortal destinies. But since there is not actually enough in that to make a story, either in the ground to be covered, or in terms of that striving for a goal around which a children’s adventure story is usually built, the hole that is left is filled with Shift the Ape and Puzzle the Donkey, and a meditation on faith and deception that is fundamentally aimed at adults, not children.

The book, in short, is overburdened by its philosophical and theological preoccupations. There’s still some fun to be had, and Lewis’s charm and lightness of touch are more present here than in The Magician’s Nephew. But fundamentally, I rank The Last Battle ahead of The Magician’s Nephew for the entertainment it provides to the adults, not what it provides for children. Honestly, if Lewis had stopped after five books, I don’t think the world would be missing much.

5. Prince Caspian

Prince Caspian is a good, serviceable children’s story. As a sequel, it depends on the reader knowing The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It does not match up to the charm or the drama of its predecessor. There is something just a little snug and claustrophobic about it. Having given Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy complete and transformative character arcs in Wardrobe, there is no similar scope for development here, and they mostly serve as heroic companions to the rather less interesting Caspian. While far better than the books ranked below it, I don’t think the series would have reached its revered worldwide status on the strength of this story. A good yarn, to be sure, but there are many yarns just as good.

4. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

The charm and the pathos of Wardrobe are undeniable, and the sin and repentance of Edmund is by far the most convincing moral arc of the whole series. Combine this with the extraordinary appeal of Lucy and the charm of the newly discovered country of Narnia, and we here discover the heart of the series’ extraordinary appeal.

Why, then do I only rank it fourth? Well, there is quite a lot of untidiness in Wardrobe. The mixing of mythologies that Tolkien complained about is untidy, to begin with. While the Gospel parallels of the story are well recognized, there are elements of Aslan that come from other mythologies. Aslan is not born; he lands. Like Zeus walking the earth in the form of a bull, he is more theophany than incarnation. This won’t matter to a child reader, and it was clearly necessary as a device to skip the story ahead to the crucifixion and resurrection allegory, but it is, again, untidy.

Finally, in order to give Peter something to do, there is a battle. After the White Witch’s spell has been broken by the resurrection of Aslan, it is not clear why a battle is still needed, either practically or morally. The apostles, we should note, did not take up arms against the Romans and defeat them in pitched battle after the resurrection. It is a point of no small theological significance that the promised messiah turned out not to be a conquering general. But stories require that their characters be given something to do, and so there is a battle, which sounds like it takes place on a school playground, and the teacher, who could obviously stop it, lets it go on just so that Peter can earn his spurs. This, too, is untidy. On story grounds, therefore, Wardrobe comes in fourth.

3. The Silver Chair

The Silver Chair is perhaps the best-constructed pure story of the whole series, and Puddleglum, a creature wholly of Lewis’s invention, not borrowed from any mythology, is one of the series’ best. While one never falls in love with Jill as one does with Lucy or feels Eustace’s reformation as one does Edmund’s, the story itself is much more coherent. Nothing feels out of place or tacked on. The Silver Chair is tidy in the way that Wardrobe is not. And Puddleglum’s speech, on the familiar Lewis theme of preferring the real to the illusory, for all the pain the real can bring, is much more natural and integral here than it is in The Last Battle, where it feels belabored.

What holds it back for me (and this may be taste the tiebreaker at work) is its relatively barren and gloomy setting and mood, and the same second-appearance syndrome for Eustace as affected the Pevensies in Prince Caspian. Jill Pole is a new character, but her temptations are more of the common fairytale kind than the great revolution of Edmund’s temptation and redemption. In many ways, it is Puddleglum’s story, and they are merely his companions.

2. The Horse and His Boy

The Horse and His Boy is, in many ways, a departure from the rest of the series. It does not take place in Narnia, nor depart from there, and there is a significant romantic element in the relationship between Cor and Araviz that is entirely absent from the other stories. It is a classical hidden prince story in which Aslan plays a relatively minor role in forcing the action here and there and providing some exposition at the end.

The Horse and His Boy does not stand alone quite as well as The Silver Chair does, because it depends heavily on the reader’s knowledge of and affection for Narnia — the desirable destination towards which our travelers yearn. But it is brighter, funnier, more varied in its scenes and moods than The Silver Chair, and less concerned with teaching a moral lesson or setting up a speech.

1. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

By my own criteria of story, I probably shouldn’t rank Dawn Treader first. Like Silver Chair and The Horse and His Boy, it is a traveler’s tale and, like them, takes place outside Narnia. But while Chair and Horse have one big story that carries from beginning to end, Voyage is much more episodic, as the ship and its crew voyage from island to island. Yes, there is an overarching quest in the search for the seven lords of Narnia, but that is just a McGuffin to draw the ship on from island to island and finally to the end of the world. But it has Lucy, who we love just as much as we did in Wardrobe, and if Edmund lacks a moral arc this time, Eustace is along to take up the slack. But what really sets it apart for me is its sheer inventiveness. Unlike Wardrobe, where the mythology is borrowed from all over, here it is, or appears to be, Lewis’s own invention and suffused with all the charm he was capable of as an author. It manages to be whimsical and dark by turns and mystical in its conclusion without ever feeling untidy or inconsistent. It is quite simply a gem and a treat to read and to remember.

Now, unless you are busy writing a furious comment about how hopelessly wrong my ranking is (and if so, keep at it), let’s look at Sarah Kenchington’s ranking and some of the reasons for her preferences. Her ranking is:

7 The Horse and His Boy

6 The Last Battle

5 Prince Caspian

4 The Magician’s Nephew

3 The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

2 The Silver Chair

1 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

We agree on the ranking of The Last Battle and Prince Caspian, though Kenchington’s quarrel with The Last Battle is of the tiresome modern kind that, absurdly but predictably, accuses it of racism and sexism. Read it again. Plenty of Calormenes side with Aslan and go to heaven. Plenty of Narnians side with Tash and go the other way. And Susan is exercising her freedom of conscience and is in no sense despaired of.

As I noted above, I would not quarrel greatly with ranking Silver Chair a little above Dawn Treader. Both are brilliant. Dawn Treader simply has a fonder place in my memory than Silver Chair. I can accept that my ranking here could be driven merely by personal taste.

Now for the big differences. Kenchington places The Magician’s Nephew in the middle while I place it dead last. But Kenchington also makes an impassioned plea for reading it first and, in doing so, provides some clue as to why publishers suggest this nonsensical ordering. It’s all about worldbuilding.

As I have noted before, worldbuilding has come to dominate the fantasy landscape in recent years, in many ways surpassing storytelling in importance. But Lewis did no sort of consistent worldbuilding of the modern kind in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Instead, he presents us with a kind of world salad. Fauns. Beavers. A lamppost. Father Christmas. It’s all madly illogical, which suits me fine because I am an old-fashioned lover of fairytales where fairyland is inherently mad and nonsensical. But mad and nonsensical is not what is wanted in modern worldbuilding, but a rigorous consistency based on a set of firm, if fanciful, principles.

The world salad of Wardrobe offended the aboriginal worldbuilder, Tolkien, and I can quite see that his disciples, who are now legion, would prefer to see it tidied up a bit by The Magician’s Nephew. But I never thought it needed doing, and I find The Magician’s Nephew unnecessary and rather a bore. I suppose this also accounts for my affection for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which also passes on madly from one wonder to another without any attempt to make sense of the whole.

Now, as I noted above, I do sense the untidyness of Wardrobe as well because it feels untidy in a way that Dawn Treader does not, and I think that is because it is not just the world that is untidy but the story itself. Full of charm and wonder, and irresistible characters to be sure, but untidy still. And if it tidies up the worldbuilding a little, nothing in The Magician’s Nephew tidies up the story elements of Wardrobe, and I would have been quite happy if the lamppost in the lantern waste had been left mad and unexplained. Because that is what fairyland is supposed to be.

There is something curious in both our lists, however. We both place fourth in our ratings the book that we think people should read first. Why not advise people to start with the best book of the series? Isn’t that the best way to get them engaged so that they read the whole thing? Kenchington does not say if she believes that the books should be read in the order of their internal chronology, as they are now published. But I suspect that if her priorities are with consistent worldbuilding (which I surmise but cannot safely conclude), then that would make sense.

My reason for starting with Wardrobe is quite different. Dramatically, Wardrobe lies at the center of the series, whereas the rest of the books have almost no connection to each other. Caspian carries over from Prince Caspian to Dawn Treader, but you really don’t need to know anything about Caspian’s history to read Dawn Treader. You do, however, need to know about Narnia and Aslan. And that is true for every other story, not simply because they are part of every other plot but because they stand at the moral core of every book. They are its constants and its source of value. They give moral weight to every other plot. The correct reading order is the order of authorship, but once you have read Wardrobe, you can read the rest in any order without much loss.

All of which is to say that while I don’t think Wardrobe is the best book of the series, it is the essential book of the series. None of the others work without it, and it provides the core moral weight that makes the rest of them work. This is why it should be the first you read. Dawn Treader is a better book, but only because of the moral weight it inherits from Wardrobe.

It remains to account for Kenchington’s placement of The Horse and His Boy dead last in her ranking. She explains this as what she sees as an inconsistency in the story:

[I]n The Horse and His Boy, … the political subplot (which then turns into the main plot by the end of the story) feels incredibly weak in comparison with the fast-paced adventure. Yet it is the plot which the novel is meant to hinge upon. It feels like Lewis realized there was a gap in his world which he needed to fill up, and so haphazardly created this storyline which leaves you somewhat confused afterwards.

I find this frankly puzzling. The Horse and His Boy is a classic hidden prince story, like The Once and Future King or The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Prydain, and every hidden prince story has a scheming antagonist intent on stirring up war, be it Mordred or Wormtongue. It is as essential to the structure of the story as the proud princess who must come to see the true worth of the hidden prince, be she Aravis or Princess Eilonwy of the Red-Gold Hair. And, of course, they must marry. If The Horse and His Boy is unique among the Narnia books in having a romantic element to its plot, it is precisely because it conforms so closely to its type.

If there is a flaw in The Horse and His Boy, it is that it retroactively reminds one of all those execrable Disney snide-talking animal companions. For all that he features in the clever title, Bree is not the main character of the book. He is a talking animal sidekick. He is the trope that Disney has made so nauseatingly tedious. But this fault cannot fairly be laid at Lewis’s door, any more than the legion of execrable Promethean fantasies spawned in poor imitation of The Lord of the Rings can be fairly laid at Tolkien’s door.

So, to return to the question of objective ranking vs. personal taste, to what extent am I willing to claim that my ranking is objectively correct and that Kenchington’s is objectively wrong? I would say that I am confident in objectively ranking Nephew and Last Battle last, but I would concede that my ranking between them might be a matter of taste. I stand by Prince Caspian in fifth. But among the top four, I will concede that my ranking, particularly my ranking of Dawn Treader, has a substantial element of personal taste.

But how do I justify this? First of all, I was careful to state my ranking criteria, which is story. My claim is that my ranking is objective per that criteria. But perhaps Kenchington had other criteria. And I can imagine some Christian readers ranking them on the basis of the importance of their theological content, which would put the theological trio of Wardrobe, Nephew, and Battle (redemption, creation, last things) ahead of the moral quartet of Dawn Treader, Caspian, Horse, and Chair.

Is one of these criteria inherently more valid than another? Or is it perfectly legitimate to rank things by different criteria for different purposes? I mean, it is obviously legitimate to rank most things by different criteria for different purposes. Where you rank an RB20 vs. a Nissan Micra depends on whether your criteria is winning Formula 1 races or getting groceries. But I do have a prejudice here. I will concede that novels are used for many different purposes. But I also maintain that they have a purpose in their own right, which is their preeminent purpose on which they should principally be judged. That purpose is to create a truthful expression of human experience, and for that, the criteria of story is what counts.

Kenchington, probably not anticipating a response on my level of pedantry, does not state her ranking criteria explicitly, but at least some part of her criteria are modern social norms. And while I think some of her specific criticisms miss the mark, it is, of course, true that there are many aspects of modern culture that Lewis would not hold with, and we know this because he criticized the manifestation of those same ideas in his own time.

This points to another issue in the ranking of books. Should they be ranked based on their quality as of their time of composition by the milieu in which they were created, or by their appeal in the current milieu? The former is the only thing that the author can be held accountable for. But are we ranking the books based on how much of the author’s skill is expressed in them, or on how well they will work for a contemporary reader?

I rank Dawn Treader best because it is the book that charms me the most, but also because it is the book in which I think Lewis’s authorial powers are at their height. But are either of those criteria relevant to the typical modern reader? And if they aren’t, should they be? Is the point that we should fully appreciate the talents of the artist, or that we should have a beneficial experience of the art?

Lewis himself made the case for the objective appreciation of art in The Abolition of Man. In his view, it was the responsibility of the schools to train children in correct taste so that they could appreciate art and nature according to their objective quality.

In principle, I am with Lewis entirely on this. I think art should be judged by objective criteria and that if my taste does not accord with those criteria, then my taste needs educating. But at the same time, I recognize the practical difficulties of this.

Taste is not something that is created simply through the accumulation of information, and thus it cannot be corrected simply by supplying new information. It is well understood that our tastes in all kinds of things are formed early and become difficult to change later in life. The brain craves what it has become habituated to, regardless of quality. For instance, it is said that the musical tastes formed in your teenage years remain largely fixed for the rest of your life, which is why we have oldies stations playing the music of particular decades for the listeners who have been listening to those same songs for, literally, decades.

This tendency of the brain to consolidate taste early makes evolutionary sense. Liking the things that we can easily access is efficient. It takes less time and burns fewer calories, and these are important survival attributes. Thus, our tastes become programmed in, even to so fine a point as preferring Coke to Pepsi, or preferring the first performance of a song that you heard over all later cover versions, or preferring a particular cover to the original if you heard the cover first.

Is this a wrong thing that we ought to fight against? Should I, for instance, be actively trying to break my habituated musical taste for folk and baroque and trying to develop a taste for jazz or opera? Or is this actually what is supposed to happen, and that by habituating our tastes to what is available to us early in life, the brain keeps us happier and frees mental energy for focusing on other things? Because it seems pretty clear that I don’t have enough years left to live to learn to like dance or basketball or jazz or licorice allsorts.

Part of the answer to this is that the tendency of our tastes to become habituated to what we know can be exploited to make it easier to sell us things. Food companies have studied the most habit-forming foods and trained us from an early age to prefer their particular brand of food. No, McDonald’s does not put toys in the Happy Meals because they love your children. They do it to train the next generation of consumers to love their burgers and fries.

The big publishing houses and TV and movie companies do exactly the same thing, deliberately training our tastes for particular genres and tropes. Why are most movies sequels and remakes? Why are there basically half a dozen TV formulas that are repeated over and over? Our tastes are being programmed so that we are easy to sell to.

Does this matter? As long as we are kept fat and happy, is anything lost? That depends on whether you think there are higher pleasures, or whether any pleasure suffices as long as it suffices. It’s not an unreasonable question. Is it really better to be made happy by complex things if you can be made happy by simple things? To which the best answer I can think of is that it is better to be made happy by truthful things than by untruthful things, even if both the quality and quantity of happiness are the same. And yes, the truthful things are often more subtle and complex than the untruthful things.

But I would also argue that there are indeed higher pleasures, that there are pleasure centers in the brain that take more reaching but deliver greater rewards when you do reach them. But getting to them does require educating our taste, and if our parents and teachers didn’t give us that training when we were young, it will require a more laborious retraining now we are older. Is it worth it? Well, the pleasures are there to be had if we want them. The more correctly attuned our taste becomes, the more virtues we discover in art. But please note that I am in no way suggesting that contemporary literary fiction is where those virtues lie and the higher pleasures are to be found. Contemporary lit fic is as debased as any genre.

So yes, I am arguing that there is an objectively correct ranking of the Narnia books (though it is not, perhaps, the most pressing aesthetic question of our time). But does that mean that the ranking I have given is the objectively correct one? I acknowledge that my personal taste is far from being ideally trained or even diligently nurtured. Defects in my taste may have colored my rankings.

If you would rank the Narnia books differently, help me out by showing me the defects in my taste that have led me to get my ranking wrong. I hope as a result that I may learn to appreciate them more fully.

While you are thinking about that, though, the Catholic Reads review of The Needle of Avocation is out, and as a consequence, the ebook is priced at 99 cents and the paperback at $9.99 for the next few days. Strike while the iron is hot. Oh, and the series now has some new covers. Check them out:

As far as ranking goes, The Needle of Avocation is the best of the series so far. Don’t believe me? Read the whole series and rank them for yourself.