the chronic(what?)cles of narnia

(Anyone who doesn’t get the title of this post needs to go here RIGHT NOW. Funniest. Thing. Ever.)

For Christmas, I received a boxed set of audio books of The Chronicles of Narnia, read by an assortment of some fabulous British actors: Patrick Stewart, Kenneth Brannagh, Michael York, Jeremy Northam, Derek Jacobi, Lynn Redgrave and… oh, bother, I forget that other one.

(And if you get that reference, you’re just about as obsessed with the series as I am.)

When I was a girl, I used to read most of the series over and over and over again, ever year. For years. I only read The Last Battle once, and really, not going to read it again, ever. Am quite angry at C. S. Lewis over that, 16 years later. Will probably not even listen to it, even though I love Patrick Stewart. I was crying at the end of The Silver Chair today, and I must have read the damn thing twenty times in my life.

Anyway, my favorites were The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, and The Horse and His Boy, which are books 3, 4, and 5 of the series, and will ALWAYS be 3, 4, and 5 of the series, no matter what nonsensical reordering they are trying to foist upon me… but I digress. In fact, I realized while I was doing my page proofs how much this series influenced my writing and my ideas about narrative structure and character growth and whatnot. In fact, I take a particular plot point from one of the books and deposit it directly into Secret Society Girl. When I pointed this out to Sailor Boy, he said, “Well, that’s… obscure” which I suppose means I’m safe from charges of plaigarism, but perhaps I should run a contest. Find out the Narnian elements in my book, win a prize. Not being a fantasy, it’s far more obscure than, say, your average Harry Potter novel.

But now I’m very concerned. You see, all of my childhood copies of the book have died and disintergrated, though I’ve managed to hang on to duplicates of my three favorites. And in the new versions, these terrible new versions that they are forcing children to read out of order, which entirely mucks up the series and I don’t care if Lewis thinks it’s how it should have been done (which I heard he did, and that’s why they’ve been publishing them this way) — it’s complete rot, as Eustace might say, and totally the wrong tactic — anyway, in this new version, there are CHANGES. They are small changes, and when I first pointed them out to Sailor Boy, he told me that I was remembering them wrong, and that’s when I dragged out my battered paperback and showed him just how freaky my memory really is, because I was NOT remembering them wrong, and I knew exactly how the stories went.

For instance: (stop reading here if you haven’t read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader)

After they rescue the Lord Roop from the Island Where Dreams Come True, Roop asks King Caspian to grant him a boon. Caspian does, and in the book, the book I read constantly growing up, the Lord Roop asks Caspian never to make him, or allow anyone else to make him, recount anything about his years spent on the island. The king does, and they sail away.

In the NEW, horrific abomination, the Lord Roop’s boon takes the form of “Never take me back to that island.” Yeah, no problem there, huh? Especially since they immediately turn around and the island has vanished. One of the characters remarks that it has “been destroyed,” presumably by Aslan.

I was standing in line at the Post Office when I heard this change, and I think people were a little frightened by my sudden exclamation of “WTF!”

I can’t even tell you how WRONG this is. Growing up, I always thought that Caspian’s original boon was quite the sacrifice on his part. Maybe he didn’t want to hear the details right then, but later, after the danger had passed… forewarned is forearmed, especially for a king, you know? In addition, the fact that Lewis so neatly sidestepped the description of the horrors on the island really appealed to me as a budding storyteller. He’s actually quite clever throughout the series of explaining away plotholes, like his “Well, I’d describe the other creatures there that night, but then your parents wouldn’t let you read this book” statement at the Stone Table in Wardrobe, and his “I don’t know why the Lone Islands are part of Narnia, but if I ever find out, and the story is at all interesting, I’ll put it in another book” in Dawn Treader. It’s a narrative trick, and it’s utterly brilliant. All my life, I’ve been dying to know what is on that island, out there, and I don’t think I’m the only one. Whenever I watch a TV show or a movie or read a book concerning dreams that come true, I feel that the creator has also always been wondering what it was that Roop didn’t have to tell us. And it’s so much scarier that none of us know, and that we are all imagining something much worse than anything he could have recounted in a children’s book.

And that island IS out there. Not destroyed. (Of course, neither are a lot of things, since I’ve cut book 7 completely out of my lifestyle choices. Much like seasons 6-7 of Buffy, actually.) Because the world is like that. The island is there, a constant reminder of the pain we make for ourselves.

I’ve decided I need to get my hands on a complete set of the old versions (like the digital copy of the original Star Wars my parents store under glass) so that my kids are not someday subjected to these changes. And the Star Wars analogy is very apropos here I think. I abhor the changes. I want my original movie. I want Han to shoot first, I want the Ewok song, and I want to see not a flicker of digitally-inserted Hayden Christiansen. I don’t care what Lucas would rather. I know what I want.

Honestly, I couldn’t care less what the author wanted, or whatever other reasoning they are using to explain these changes. I’m an author, and I say that. The work is out there. It’s out of their hands. I’m all for people being able to say that this is what they MEANT, but surely that’s what DVD extras are for, right? All of this “erasing of the original,” of what people love, what they have loved for decades, to suit some unknown need of the creator’s is heresy! Maybe that was his original version. If so, yay for editors! Maybe they’ve decided that sounds too violent for the kiddies. Whatever. I’m no wimp, and Lewis is dead while I’m alive. I want the books the way *I* remember them.

Is that wrong?