In the dead of night, young Caspian, future King of Narnia, stands with his tutor Cornelius atop the central tower in the great castle at the center of the realm. They have come to witness the conjunction of two noble planets. Tarva, the Lord of Victory and Alambil, the Lady of Peace, will pass within one degree of each other. Such a meeting, Cornelius instructs his pupil, has not happened for two hundred years, and signals fortune for the sad land; which, we soon learn, manifests in Caspian’s commanding an insurrection of dwarves and talking beasts in The Great War of Deliverance that liberates Narnia from the usurping grip of his evil Uncle Miraz.
By some accounts, all of this is a bit too much. Phillip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, asserted that the Narnian Chronicles “is one of the most ugly and poisonous things I’ve ever read…[it demonstrates]…a sado-masochistic relish for violence.” Quite similarly, a pair of literary critics charged that among the books’ offenses are the “glorification of conflict and retribution” and the “legitimizing of cruelty.” They might well have had Prince Caspian particularly in view: blood, battle, betrayal, maiming, and death feature frequently. Indeed, the High King Peter, just a schoolboy, is described as having felled one enemy by “slash[ing] his legs from under him and with the back-cut of the same stroke, wallop[ing] off his head.” It’s grim, to be sure. But to Pullman it’s much more: “The highest virtue – we have this on the authority of New Testament itself – is love, and yet you find not a trace of that in the [Narnia] books.”
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