George MacDonald books - they leave Lord of the Rings, CS Lewis and JK Rowling in the shade!

[redrubyshoes]

Anyone a fan? Not adult fiction I know but the imagery is just beautiful.

The Princess and the Goblin is just so imaginative and the author sums up an image in ten words that recent authors would take two hundred to say.

The Princess and Cuddie..................

"An attic in moonlight with a hour glass made from crystal and the sand was of a drift of moonbeams..........................."

Do they come with a toy?

It would be a hoop and a stick.

I think you'll find it's The Princess and Curdie.
I liked them as a child, they were packed with beautiful descriptions and elegant phrases, but better than LOTR?

I wrote my English dissertation on George MacDonald (and philip pullman) and had a very interesting discussion with a priest on him just last week

I love live love his imagery.

The Golden Key, At the back of the North Wind...

He is totally underrated IMO

“The boy should enclose and keep, as his life, the old child at the heart of him, and never let it go. He must still, to be a right man, be his mother's darling, and more, his father's pride, and more. The child is not meant to die, but to be forever fresh born.”
? George MacDonald, The Princess and Curdie

“Once, as I passed by a cottage, there came out a lovely fairy child, with two wondrous toys, one in each hand. The one was the tube through which the fairy-gifted poet looks when he beholds the same thing everywhere; the other that through which he looks when he combines into new forms of loveliness those images of beauty which his own choice has gathered from all regions wherein he has travelled. Round the child’s head was an aureole of emanating rays. As I looked at him in wonder and delight, round crept from behind me the something dark, and the child stood in my shadow. Straightway he was a commonplace boy, with a rough broad-brimmed straw hat, through which brim the sun shone from behind. The toys he carried were a multiplying-glass and a kaleidoscope. I sighed and departed.”

Another G Mcd fan here. He was a huge influence on C S Lewis, though he is a much better writer than CSL.

CSLewis can suck it.

All you kids are in heaven... Except you Susan because you like boys and lipstick you slllaaaaaaggggg

Much better than LOTR - that is just a story of a walking holiday.

Yeah, Susan. You know, as a kid I did not give a flying fuck about her. What I cared about was the way the bastard destroyed my Narnia.

As an adult I am dubious about the critiques of Susan's exclusion, and the Philip Pullman equation of female sexual maturity with lipstick and nylons and invitations. This isn't desire and orgasm at all, but the wish to be the object of desire. Ick. I'd kick her out too. Bloody cheerleader. She sounds really boring.

I loved the beginning of The Princess and the Goblin as a child (secret staircases and all that) but as with many books, I lost interest when it got all adventure-y!

Some of those passages above are also a wee bit purple, IMO!

sieglinde - do you think Philip Pullman does that? I always quite liked his Lyra and the way she grows up! I always hated Susan because she called Lucy a silly goose about the wardrobe anyway!

Original SN, I don't mean in PP's books but in his critique of Narnia. Here's a quotation from it:

" "She's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up." In other words, Susan, like Cinderella, is undergoing a transition from one phase of her life to another. Lewis didn't approve of that. He didn't like women in general, or sexuality at all, at least at the stage in his life when he wrote the Narnia books. He was frightened and appalled at the notion of wanting to grow up. Susan, who did want to grow up, and who might have been the most interesting character in the whole cycle if she'd been allowed to, is a Cinderella in a story where the Ugly Sisters win."

He completely omits Polly's comment. " Grow up indeed! I wish she would grow up."

Susan bored the crap out of me when I read the Narnia books because she was such a whiney wet blanket. The stuff about nylons and lipstick can be taken the same way - tedious grown-up crap, like their crappy parties where everyone stands around talking instead of playing party games.

The sex stuff did interest me though. I remember being filled in on the facts of life at around the time I first read the Narnia books. I'd have been about 10 I suppose. I was pretty incredulous and simply couldn't believe any of it happened.

Then I would read Narnia and the four kids go through puberty to adulthood, and in Susan's case to being a babe the lecherous Calormenes want to keep. And then they walk back through the wardrobe and they go through puberty again, but backwards. What on earth would that be like? As they approach the wardrobe they start to forget their Narnian selves, but do they also forget their own adult sexuality? How could you adjust from having breasts and periods and working ovaries back to being an androgynous child? Could you just forget?

Perhaps Susan was the one who had the greatest difficulty doing so, or perhaps she never really did. So Narnia is then where she was shown and chose the temptations of the flesh, and she chose the flesh, so for her it was the road to hell or to limbo. Is that what CSL had in mind?

There is a line in TLTW&TW about Edmund entering the virgin snowy forest and feeling afraid of being "alone in this strange, cold, quiet place". Perhaps that's how Susan saw going back to Narnia? A place that stripped you of your sexuality and left you a child in need of magic lions?

Dunno. I read them recently to my nephew and they were nowhere near as absorbing as I remembered. The Magician's Nephew I still liked and Prince Caspian because it reminded me of Malory somehow.

Neil Gaiman wrote a short story about what happened to Susan when she was old - I forget the exact title, but it's in the Smoke and Mirrors anthology iirc.

'The Problem of Susan'. I love that story, but it's not anti-Narnia or very pro-Susan. It's anti-Aslan, perhaps, and mainly bovvered about the megadeath ending of TLB. He - Gaiman - adored Narnia as a child.

Even more telling on Aslan is Lev Grossman's The Magicians. Aslan is a giant, controlling sheep-god.