The Last Battle

What's inside (8 sections)

1. The Ape Gets An Idea By Caldron Pool
2. A King Who Acts First And Thinks Next
3. Help Comes Through The Bushes
4. What Happened Inside The Stable
5. Night Falls On Narnia
6. Morning That Does Not End
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I did not plan to read this one straight after The Silver Chair. I had meant to take a break from Narnia and read something modern and dry. Then I found my old copy with the Cliff Nielsen cover, the lion and the stable door in red light, and I remembered being eleven and skipping to the end in the school library because someone told me Aslan dies. He does not die here, not the way he did on the Stone Table. Something stranger happens. I finished it in two sittings and sat quiet for a while after.

First published in 1956 by The Bodley Head, it is the seventh and last book of the Chronicles of Narnia in the order Lewis wrote them. The first edition ran to 184 pages. It follows The Magician's Nephew and closes the sequence that began with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Jill Pole and Eustace Scrubb return. The Pevensies return too, all except Susan. Tirian, the last King of Narnia, carries the middle of the story. Puzzle the donkey carries more of it than you would expect.

People warned me this one is dark. It is. It is also funny in the first third, in a way I had not been told about. An ape in a scarlet jacket giving orders. A donkey sweating inside a lion skin. A cat who purrs through everything. Then the fun curdles, and Lewis lets it curdle. If you grew up on the wardrobe and the lamppost, parts of this will rattle you. That seems to be the point.

The Ape Gets An Idea By Caldron Pool

Far up in the western wilds of Narnia, near Caldron Pool where the waterfalls meet, lives an ape called Shift. He is clever with words and quick to see what others will carry for him. With him lives Puzzle, a donkey, grey and gentle and eager to agree. Puzzle does most of the work. Shift does most of the talking.

One day they find a thing in the pool. A lion skin, washed down and caught on branches. I picture it heavy and stinking of water. Shift looks at it longer than Puzzle does. He has Puzzle try it on, stitching and padding until the donkey can stand on hind legs in it and pass, at a distance, for something leonine. Puzzle hates the deceit and says so in his slow way. Shift talks him round. It is for his own good, for the good of Narnia, for Aslan. The words come easy.

What Shift wants at first is small. Men from Calormen are cutting trees in Lantern Waste, piling timber for trade. Shift sees a use. If Aslan himself orders the Narnians to work and to pay, who will argue? So word goes out that Aslan has returned to Narnia and commands these things. Talking Beasts who remember the old days are puzzled. They obey anyway, because who wants to disobey Aslan?

Then Ginger the cat puts a sharper edge on it. Ginger is smooth and skeptical and fond of his own comfort. He suggests the Calormene god Tash can be folded in. Tash and Aslan are one, he says. People call it Tashlan. It sounds like a joke a clever schoolboy would make. In the book it works, which frightened me more than any battle scene later. The dwarfs grumble. The Beasts bow. Money changes hands. Trees fall.

Puzzle goes along with it because Shift tells him Aslan would want it, and because saying no to a confident friend is hard. I recognized that too well. Lewis writes Puzzle without cruelty. He is not stupid. He is soft hearted and afraid of making trouble. Every time he asks to stop, Shift finds a new reason to continue for one more day. The donkey sweats under the skin and apologizes to everyone. It is comic until you notice the Talking Horses being sold to the Calormenes for work in the south. Then it stops being comic.

A King Who Acts First And Thinks Next

Tirian is young for a last king. He rules from Cair Paravel with Jewel the Unicorn beside him, and Jewel is the best friend in the whole series after Puddleglum, or so I thought by page fifty. White and grave and fast, unwilling to believe evil of anyone. When news comes of felled trees and forced labor and talk of Tashlan, Tirian swears and calls for his sword. Jewel holds him back by half a thought.

They ride out to Lantern Waste almost alone, which tells you what kind of king Tirian is. Brave to a fault. He sees Calormene soldiers driving a Talking Horse and hears the order given in the name of Tashlan and Aslan. Something snaps in him. He and Jewel draw swords and kill the two men where they stand. It happens fast. Lewis does not dress it up.

Then the reckoning comes. More Calormenes arrive with the ape following, and the ape speaks over Tirian as if the king were a naughty boy. The soldiers seize Tirian and bind him to an ash tree for the night. Jewel is taken elsewhere with a rope round his horn. I had to put the book down here. Not because it is gory. Because Tirian, tied and helpless, starts to see how his own rash stroke made everything worse. He prayed for help and feared no help would come.

Bound to that tree he does the one thing left. He calls on Aslan, and asks that help be sent to Narnia though he himself should die. Far away in England, Jill Pole and Eustace Scrubb feel themselves pulled. They had been on a train with the others, which I will come back to. Lewis handles the crossing with less fuss than in earlier books. One moment school holidays, the next falling through dark and branches into Narnia, half dressed for England. They cut Tirian loose with a hunting knife and share what food Jill thought to pack. Schoolgirl sandwiches for a king. I laughed out loud at that, and needed the laugh.

The four talk through the night. Jewel weeps for his part in the killing. Tirian owns his rage. Jill is blunt in the way she was in the last book, asking plain questions adults dodge. Eustace has grown steadier since his dragon season. They agree on the hard fact. The Aslan at Stable Hill is a cheat, and Puzzle is the center of it whether he means to be or not.

Help Comes Through The Bushes

Morning brings counsel. Roonwit the Centaur comes first, star gazing and grave, saying the stars speak of evil and that Aslan has not returned to Narnia. Then comes Farsight the Eagle with worse news. Cair Paravel has fallen while the king was tied to a tree. The dwarfs have turned sullen. The Calormene captain Rishda Tarkaan holds the ground with Ginger whispering in his ear and Shift growing rich on skins and iron.

Tirian wants to ride straight at them. Jill stops him with sense. She and Eustace and Puzzle slip to Stable Hill in disguise to see the thing themselves. What they find is a low thatched stable with a Calormene guard at the door and a crowd of miserable Narnians kept back by spears. Inside, they are told, sits Aslan, angry, to be seen by ones and twos at night.

Jill does a brave thing here. She leads Puzzle away through the bushes while Eustace creates a stir, and gets the shaking donkey out of the skin and into ordinary clothes. Puzzle confesses everything in sobs. The crowd hears. For a page you think truth will win by itself. It does not. The ape comes out and talks, and Ginger purrs, and Rishda shows his teeth, and fear does the rest.

Poggin the dwarf joins the king. Most dwarfs do not. Griffle and his band declare they will not be taken in, not by Aslan, not by Tash, not by kings either. They will look after themselves. Lewis writes them as comic at first, with their pipes and stubborn jokes. Later their refusal hardens into something cold. I found them the most modern people in the book. Tired of slogans. Tired of being used. Wrong in what they choose, right in what they distrust.

Emeth matters here too, though he gets little space. A young Calormene officer, serious and devout after his own fashion, who wants to see Tash with his own eyes. He walks into the stable out of faith and does not come out when expected. Keep him in mind. Lewis brings him back at the end, and what happens with him annoyed many readers and moved a few. I was moved, then uneasy, then moved again.

The night raid that follows went wrong in my head the first time because I rushed it. Read it slow. Tirian shows Puzzle bare and grey to the crowd and begs them to see the trick. Rishda kills the witnesses who speak up. A fight breaks out by torchlight. Tirian drags the ape himself through the stable door and throws him to whatever waits inside. What waits is not straw and dark. The door opens onto something else.

What Happened Inside The Stable

Everyone expects a shed. Tirian finds highlands and light.

This is the famous turn, and Lewis plays it plainly rather than with thunder. The inside of the stable is bigger than the outside. Green hills roll under morning sun. Fresh air moves. Those thrown through the door by violence find themselves standing in a country they cannot explain. Tash is there too, a huge and vulture headed shape smelling of death, claimed by Rishda and longed for by Emeth, and Aslan sends him back to his own place with a word and a look. I will not pretend I understood every inch of that scene. It is meant to feel too large for Tirian, and it felt too large for me.

One by one the others come through. Peter and Edmund and Lucy arrive, older and shining in a way England never showed. Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer come, the first two wanderers from The Magician's Nephew, now old and kind and unafraid. Eustace and Jill stand with the King. Aslan himself comes last, huge and terrible and tender, and judges as a lion judges in a tale. The faithful dwarfs are there as well, or their bodies are. Their minds are shut.

The dwarf scene hurt to read. Aslan sets feasts before them and they taste straw. He speaks and they hear fancy words. Poggin pleads with his kin and gets mocked for it. Lewis is blunt here. Once you decide nothing is true except soup and safety, no wonder can reach you. Some call this cruel. I read it as Lewis drawing a line he believed in. Whether you accept the line will decide how you take the whole last third.

Emeth steps forward and tells his tale without flinching. He served Tash all his life and sought him honestly. Aslan tells him that all good service done in Tash name was received as service to himself, and all cruelty done in Aslan name belonged to Tash. I know theologians argue over those pages. As a reader I felt relief. The boy who wanted what is right is not lost because he learned the wrong name first. Your view may differ, and the book leaves room to argue, though Aslan does not.

Susan is the absence everyone talks about. Peter says she is no longer a friend of Narnia, fond now of parties and grown up talk, hoping to get through life without bothering about deep things. I hated reading that sentence. It lands like a door shut by someone else. Lewis later wrote in letters that Susan could still find her way back in her own time, that she was not damned, only silly and fond of being grown up too fast. None of that comfort is in the novel itself. On this reread I kept thinking of her at home, getting the telegram. It colored every bright page after.

Night Falls On Narnia

Then Aslan turns to the end of the world.

Father Time wakes under the earth, where he slept with the stars folded in his beard, and at his horn the lights go out one by one. Lewis writes this as story rather than sermon. Dragons and giant lizards crawl from the deep. The sea rises and covers Cair Paravel without malice, the way a tide covers a sandcastle. Peter closes the door at Aslan bidding. The stars fall like sparks. Even the dwarfs, still quarreling in the dark, are carried along into whatever comes next.

The battle before that is short and bitter. Tirian and his few, Jewel and Poggin and Eustace and Jill with bow and sword, Roonwit gored and still fighting, Farsight torn in the air, stand against Rishda and the Calormenes and the sullen dwarfs who shoot both sides. There is no last minute rescue in the old style. No mice with cords. No spring thaw. Tirian fights his way to the stable with blood on his mail and hurls Rishda through the doorway into the dark where Tash waits. Then he follows himself, ready to die, and finds morning instead.

I should say what disappointed me, because the book earns it and the site asks for fair criticism. The middle sags between the rescue and the battle, with councils and messages and marching that repeat beats from Prince Caspian without the same lift. Ginger vanishes too neatly after serving as villain. Rishda talks like a stage tyrant in places. The dwarfs, sharp at first, become a fixed idea. And the handling of the Calormenes still troubles me. Emeth is drawn with respect, and Lewis gives him the best defense in the book, yet most of his countrymen are painted as cruel or oily, set against fair northerners in a way that feels fixed from an older England. It shows its year, the way the earlier books do when Lewis writes girls as tearful while boys get swords.

What holds despite that is Tirian himself. He is not Peter, who grew into rule. He is a young man watching his country end and learning, too late for tactics, how to ask pardon and how to stand still. His apology to Jewel after the killing, his shame before Puzzle, his prayer tied to the tree, these carry more weight than the speeches about Tashlan. Jewel beside him helps. The unicorn never wavers in love, and his last charge, horn forward against hopeless odds, stayed with me longer than the end of the world.

Morning That Does Not End

Past the door everything widens.

The company runs up the hills into a country that looks like Narnia and more than Narnia, every leaf and stone brighter and truer, as if England and Narnia both were shadows of this place. Lewis calls it the real Narnia, Aslan country, and lets the image do the work. Reepicheep is there to greet them, though he sailed over the edge of the world books ago. Old friends crowd round, Talking Beasts and lords and Dryads, Trumpkin and Puddleglum in the distance if you look. I smiled at that sighting more than any other. The Marsh wiggle made it through.

Then comes the plain statement that has divided readers since 1956. The seven friends did not leave England by magic rings or wardrobe. There was a railway accident. They are dead in England and alive here. Lewis writes it without apology. Lucy asks if this is the end and Aslan answers in the words every child of my generation can recite, that for them it is only the beginning of the real story, which no one on earth has read, where every chapter is better than the one before.

People either love this or close the book angry. I see both sides. As a child I wanted more Narnia, not heaven. As an adult with a child of my own, I found the railway pages gentle rather than grim. No pain is shown. No funeral is lingered over. The sorrow is left for Susan, left behind, which is why her absence stings. Lewis believed death was a door rather than a wall, and he wrote what he believed. You can reject the belief and still feel the pull of the image, runners setting off up the hills with no fear of getting tired.

Further up and further in, they cry, and run. The unicorn outruns them all for a stretch. The dogs bark with joy. Digory looks young again. Polly laughs. Peter shuts the old door behind with a grave face, and opens to orchards and stairs and waterfalls that run upward in light. It could have felt pious and thin. For me it felt like waking from a nap in summer grass, confused and glad.

Further up and further in, they cried, and the run became a race and a game.

I put the book down and thought of Puzzle. Of all the figures to carry the last book, a foolish kind donkey who let himself be dressed up and then told the truth when it cost him, seems right. Tirian learns kingship. Jill learns sight. Eustace learns courage past boasting. The dwarfs learn nothing, by choice. Puzzle learns he was loved even at his most deceived, and Aslan breathes on him as he once breathed on Eustace in the mountains. That small mercy, more than the stars falling, is what I will remember when I think of how Narnia ends.

If you read the series in publication order, as Lewis wrote them, this is the farewell. It does not read like the others. It means to unsettle and to comfort in the same hour. Some will dislike the comfort. Some will dislike the unsettling. I finished glad I had stayed to the last page, and gladder still that the lamppost still burns in the first book whenever I want to go back to the start.

FAQ

Is The Last Battle the seventh Narnia book?

Yes, in publication order. It appeared 4 September 1956 from The Bodley Head, after The Magician's Nephew, and closes the series as book seven. The first edition ran to 184 pages.

How does the false Aslan trick work?

Shift dresses Puzzle in a lion skin found at Caldron Pool and claims Aslan speaks through him. Ginger adds Tash to the tale, calling the blend Tashlan, and Rishda Tarkaan uses it to seize timber and obedience.

Why is Susan missing at the end?

In places. Peter says she is no longer a friend of Narnia, fond of parties and grown up talk. Lewis later wrote she could still return in her own time, but the novel itself leaves her at home after the railway accident.