The Last Battle

In C.S. Lewis' final book of the Narnia Chronicles, the kingdom of the talking animals is in its time end. The children's masterpiece was written exactly fifty years ago. Curiously, its sombre mood reminds me of nothing more than international events today. Even its dialogue has resonances with the newspaper headlines today.

The old English Queen was quoted several years ago by her ex-butler as saying unexpectedly – 

‘There is evil afoot in the land.’

She appears to be the last Western person in high places to bear a sense of official gravitas. So there is no coincidence her words seem to jump straight from the lips of the Narnian King's elderly Centaur – 

‘Some great evil hangs over Narnia,’ Roonwit tells King Tirian at his rustic hunting lodge.

As far as I know the poor old Queen has never been a reader of the Narnia stories. Adults, unless they read them as children, don't like them. No adult can escape a slight nauseous reading them. C.S. Lewis carries for ever the mark of cant which completely escapes children. Like aged Roonwit the Queen's antenna has picked up on something auspicious in her Kingdom.

In the book's incomparable prose, a monkey Shift has found a lion's carcass in its simian domain. It – with the cunning and deceit utterly credible today – manipulates its donkey slave companion Puzzle into wearing it. The foolish donkey is turned by the monkey into a counterfeit Aslan. Aslan is the monotheistic lion God, and analogy to Christ of the Narnians.

The medievalist Professor Lewis creates names that uncannily evoke in Europeans their proto-culture. I was one person personally thrilled that the terrorist (now deceased) leader of the Checknans carried that name Aslan. I have been informed Aslan means lion in the old Turkish language.

The counterfeit Aslan is trotted out at twilight by the monkey and its henchmen to be displayed to the naive talking animals and dwarfs. Meanwhile the Calormenes, alien human enemies, infiltrate Narnia in the guise of merchants. While the land is distracted and demoralised by the power of the monkey and its counterfeit God, they seize the capital and the Kingdom. Then Aslan, deus ex machina turns up and the story fades into incomprehensible Saint John language.

Why should an adult be bothered with this pretentious children's classic? There are only a handful of copies surviving in Auckland public libraries.
The children, of course, go after the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe – if they have somehow survived Harry Potter.

I at least cannot shake off the image of a donkey in a god-lion costume being led and whispered to by a monkey. The image fits the surrealistic age we live in. The so-called reality is now so fantastic we all have to often pinch ourselves that we are not in such a giant universal hoax or nightmare. Is not Puzzle, the befuddled donkey, something like the squeaky, present Prime Minister of Great Britain? Both the donkey and the Prime Minister are clearly out of their depth and locked into control by a simian force in the land. Some might uncharitably think of Bush as Shift. Bush's facial movements do remind one of an alert monkey.

I however go deeper than a shallow shot. The chattering, whispering monkey on the donkey's back is commerce. That is the transference of the world's public wealth into liquid gold, and slavery of the masses by the bankers and their underlings. In the story, when the talking animals lose their private gold to the monkey and the Calomenes, they are treated the same as their dumb cousins. They are compelled by the Calormenes' harness and whips to dig out the gold and tear out the forests. The Dryads, who are the forests' sentient speaking forms, perish.

Only last year in Argentina, the bankrupt Government, under the orders of the World Bank, seized all their citizens' private bank accounts. Today I read on the internet the U.S.A. is effectively bankrupt. There is now a dearth of Government bond purchases and warnings are being put out via the internet that the public take their money out of the banks and secretly store it. Meanwhile the nation is now under a permanent terror watch and the Pentagon is calling the internet, ‘The enemy's weapon system’.

My imagination may be working overtime and I am putting my own dark thoughts into the OxBridge Professor's children's fiction. But I do know in every age the sages bypass the censorship by putting their truth via parables – sometimes through talking animals. The sniffing, cunning monkey Shift, with his needle and ball of thread, shapes a lions skin to one day sew up Narnia. The Professor must have been aware of atavistic Christian images very close to that.

Curiously after that opening scene, the story moves to the king's hunting lodge. The young King Tirian relaxes in the open air. At his side there stands – polishing its blue horn – his closest companion, the unicorn Jewell.

Jewell stands in counterpart to the donkey with the monkey on its back. As the donkey and the monkey represent gold and the corruption of the body and will, the unicorn represents gold or jewels in a Christian fable and a dream of paradise.

C.S. Lewis seems to be saying to the cabalists among us,

You can either be the monkey and perish the fate of the traitor and the thief, or you can be Jewell, the boon companion to royalty. If you remain just the donkey, you will be forgiven and sent out to eat thistles.

When Tennel illustrated Alice Through The Looking Glass, with the agreement of Lewis Carrol, he drew likenesses of Gladstone as the lion and Disraeli as the unicorn.

King Tirian and his faithful ban of followers from our world and Narnia expose the monkey plot to the Narnian dwarfs. They quickly comprehend it. But instead of – as assumed – joining the King, they cease to believe anything they can't see with their own eyes. As they say,

‘We've been fooled once and we are not going to be fooled again. The dwarfs are for the dwarfs.’

I have heard that is exactly the state of affairs in the ex-communist western countries. The people now believe nothing that their governments tell them

As my final thought. The Narnian dwarfs remind me of nothing so much as the present time's English soccer hooligans. How will they and their continental cousins respond when they soon find out that how they have lived all their lives is a lie?
I fear it will be something like ‘Hooligistan for the hooligans.’