Arachne Kallisti

Let's get one thing straight - I quite liked Narnia. Lewis had a real knack for striking imagery, and for mixing the cosy with the compellingly bizarre - behind the coats in the old wardrobe, there's a snowy pine forest with a lamp-post in the middle of it, where a faun emerges from the woods with an umbrella and invites you to tea. That's good children's fantasy in microcosm, there - Enid Blyton reimagined by Rene Magritte. Criticising it for inconsistent world-building is kind of missing the point, since this is pure Fantasy Soup, running entirely off Lewis' personal Rule of Cool. That's why you get Father Christmas in one book, Bacchus and the Maenads in the next, and a medieval romance complete with trippy and bizarre islands after that. Even if, as you get older and more critical, the Christian allegory starts to look a bit heavy-handed, and the authorial voice seems to take on a certain smugness as it describes the Important Moral Lessons the characters learn, and the Dante-like relish for inventing comeuppances for the kind of people Lewis didn't approve of starts to grate, there's plenty of good, powerful stuff in there.

Let me also make it clear that I loved Northern Lights and quite liked The Subtle Knife, although I felt that The Amber Spyglass got me over the back of the head with a dull thud. As an attempt at post-Christian mythmaking, trying to create a narrative about growing up, the loss of innocence and the awareness of death that doesn't draw on cultural assumptions inherited from the Church, it was a brave but ultimately unsuccessful experiment. As a deconstruction of Narnia, it really didn't cut the mustard.

Thing is, the deconstruction of Narnia's been done, in the 60s, by Alan Garner. It's called Elidor.

( Cut for rambling and spoilers )