Lewis

Apr. 8th, 2009 02:40 pm
altariel: (Default)
I really do like Lewis, which is as enjoyable and attractively made as Inspector Morse, but doesn’t have that miserable misogynist snob spoiling my fun. I like it even though they cruelly bumped off Lewis’ missus at the start of the first episode, just so that he could pretend he was mourning her and not Morse, which I probably shouldn’t like for all sorts of reasons.

I also like how the Lewis-Hathaway relationship replicates the Morse-Lewis one, only this time the over-educated misanthrope is the junior partner. It makes you believe that this dynamic stretches back and back, even unto the Middle Ages, where the medieval equivalent of a grumpy grammar school boy and a put-upon working class boy are forever together in the green wood, fighting crime.

Last week’s episode, “The Point of Vanishing” made much use of The Hunt in the Forest by Paolo Uccello. It made me think of Pauline Baynes’ illustrations for the Narnia books, particularly the end of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, when the young kings and queens of Narnia go on a hunt in a forest and vanish from the world. Lewis did an episode about the Inklings at the start of the season: I’m surprised that’s not turned up in the Morse-verse before.
altariel: (Default)
I have no idea whether the bit about Mithraism is true or not (I'm sure someone can tell me), but I loved this piece of Narnian revisionism (from here):
"The moral force of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible—a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation—now, that would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth."

Another piece of Narnian retelling that I adore is Spoilers for China Mieville's 'Perdido Street Station' )

Profile

altariel: (Default)
altariel

September 2018

S M T W T F S
      1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
30      

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated May. 23rd, 2025 06:34 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios