Why The Chronicles of Narnia is a director’s worst nightmare

Maybe the abandoned Narnia film that John Boorman worked on with the Jim Henson Creature Shop in the 1990s would have been a hit, but somehow I doubt that. It’s not so much that the good aspects of the adaptations are undermined by the less good aspects: for example, the stirring effect of Tom Baker’s brilliant rendition of Puddleglum’s defiant speech to the Green Lady in the BBC version of The silver chair (1990) is spoiled by its comic transmogrification into a particularly non-scary monster snake. The problem is more that Lewis was a special, eccentric writer with a powerfully idiosyncratic vision that inevitably gets diluted when put on screen.

Movies cannot capture the paternal, ironic narrative voice that provides a comforting comic counterpoint to the physical dangers and emotional trials that Lewis’s young human heroes undergo in Narnia. There are few finer opening lines in literature, I would say, than those of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: “There was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”

And it is virtually impossible to find young actors who can convincingly deliver the dialogue that the defiantly old-fashioned Lewis deliberately kept outdated. (“They’re E Nesbit children; they ‘jaw’ instead of talk; they say ‘By gum!’ and ‘Crikey!'” Lewis’s biographer AN Wilson once observed. “They don’t look like the middle any more of the 20th century as Lewis did.”)

Then there’s the sexism. In the era of The Hunger Games, you can see why modern audiences recoil at Santa Claus ordering the Pevensie sisters not to participate in the coming skirmish with the White Witch’s forces: “fights are ugly when women fight.” However, if this irritates feminists, it is nothing compared to the outrage with which they discover in the final Narnia book, The Last Battle, that Susan is “no longer a friend of Narnia” and is “nowadays interested in nothing but nylons, lipstick and invitations. ” “She has essentially become irreligious because she has found sex,” are the words of JK Rowling. “I have a big problem with that.”

The Disney films sidestepped these objections by making Susan skilled with a bow and arrow, and by stating that she need not be distracted from an interest in Narnia by sex by allowing her to kiss the Narnian prince Caspian. But these changes are at odds with the roots of the stories in medieval literature that inspired Lewis (whose day job was as an Oxford don) for Narnian codes of chivalry and ideas about how women should behave.