Y'all. I get that C.S. Lewis wrote this as a white man from Britain in the 1950s, but this shit is P.R.O.B.L.E.M.A.T.I.C.

I THINK there's supposed to be some kind of metaphor in here about yoking yourself to the world and making yourself a slave even though, if you chose to become a Christian/Narnian, you could be free, but... if that even was the intended message, it's heavily buried in SO MUCH racist subtext (and actually overt text) that you can barely pick it out.

All of the brown people in this book are presented as some degree of barbaric. They keep and abuse slaves. They don't eat the "right" food (eggs and bacon), and they wear "curious clothes" which are perceived as less nice than the Narnian (read: British) clothes. They beat, enslave, and sell their kids, they arrange child-marriages, they go back on their word to their friends, family, and possible love interests, they are vapid, self-interested, and unnecessarily cruel, they LITERALLY WORSHIP A DEMON GOD*, etc, etc, and because of all of this, it is of the upmost importance that we get the one white kid who's stuck there back up to Narnia where he belongs (with the other white people).

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It even turns out that Aslan's been literally watching over him all his life to help guide him back home to Narnia, where, you know, the white people are.

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And don't even get me started on the stuff about Shasta/Cor being of a royal bloodline and this making him inherently more dignified and noble than other people and thus predestined for greatness.

It just felt... gross.

Plus, there are some weird implications from how self-impressed Bree was, and how HE was a Free Narnian who didn't deserve to be a slave, but fuck all those other non-Narnian horses, amirite?

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Admittedly, he did get a dose of humble pie about halfway through, but then Lewis just used that to double-down on how Bree, as a talking horse, was still superior to all those other, dumb, non-talking horses. Who, I guess we're supposed to conclude, just deserve to be slaves?

Yeah, that's a good message.

Overall, it was a muddled, uncomfortable mess, and it does not translate as anything but xenophobic in this day and age. I will not be reading this one to my kids, and if they decide they want to read it, we're gonna need to have some serious talks about the cultural perceptions of that time period and how none of this is accurate or okay.




*Which is REALLY icky because the brown people in this particular book are pretty effing clearly meant to be analogues for Muslims, what with how they wear turbans and other traditionally Islamic clothing, use the term Vizier, don't eat pork, live in the Middle East... It's not outright stated in this book that Tash is a demon god, but... he is.