The Last Battle

The Last Battle Review

The Last Battle is the hardest of the Narnia books to read and the one that repays the most careful attention. Lewis received the Carnegie Medal for it, and it is easy to see why the judges chose it: it is the most formally ambitious and theologically serious work in the series, a children’s apocalypse that treats its young readers as capable of confronting ideas about death, false belief, and the nature of reality without condescension or evasion.

The novel begins in corruption. Shift the ape has found a lion skin and dressed his friend Puzzle in it to impersonate Aslan, exploiting the faith of the Narnians for personal advantage. The false Aslan is then rented to the Calormenes, and Narnia begins to collapse under the weight of its own credulity. Lewis is writing about how religious faith can be weaponised — how the sacred is always vulnerable to the manipulative and the cynical — and the portrait is not comfortable. The Narnians who follow the false Aslan are not stupid; they are trusting, which is not the same thing.

The ending is the most radical passage in Lewis’s fiction. After the stable door — Lewis’s image of death — the characters find themselves not in darkness but in a more vivid version of Narnia than any they have known. The old Narnia, they are told, was a copy — a shadow of the real. The real Narnia, like the real England and the real every place, is indestructible. The movement is always further up and further in, each new country more real and more detailed than the last. It is Lewis’s argument that what we love in this world points toward something beyond it, and that death is not the end of our love for particular things but the beginning of our having them more fully.

The controversy over Susan — who is excluded from the final country because she has grown up, become interested in nylons and lipstick, and dismissed Narnia as childhood games — reflects a genuine tension in Lewis’s thought between the seriousness of imagination and the corrupting power of vanity. Whether or not one agrees with his judgment, it is not an oversight: Lewis knew what he was doing, and the exclusion forces the question of what it costs to stop believing in what you once knew to be true.

The End of Narnia

Published in 1956, The Last Battle is the seventh and final book of the Chronicles of Narnia, and Lewis conceived it explicitly as the series’ conclusion — its Revelation, the apocalyptic counterpart to the creation he had narrated in The Magician’s Nephew. Where the prequel showed Narnia sung into being out of nothing, this book shows it ending: the stars called down from the sky, the sun extinguished, the door of the world finally closed and locked by Aslan and by Father Time, who has slept beneath the earth since the beginning and now wakes to bring the world to its end. It is the only Narnia book set entirely against the certainty of catastrophe, and Lewis does not soften it. The reader who has followed the series from the wardrobe onward is asked, at the last, to watch the beloved world die — and then to discover that its death was not the thing it appeared to be.

Shift and the False Aslan

The engine of the plot is one of Lewis’s sharpest portraits of corruption. Shift, a cunning and manipulative ape, finds a lion’s skin washed down a river and persuades his simple-minded friend Puzzle the donkey to wear it and impersonate Aslan. From behind this fraud Shift issues commands in the great Lion’s name, extracting labour and loyalty from the trusting Narnians, allying himself with the hostile Calormenes to the south, and selling talking beasts into slavery — all justified by the authority of an Aslan no one is permitted to see clearly. Lewis’s target is unmistakable: the manipulation of genuine faith by the cynical, the way a sacred name can be weaponised against the very people who revere it. The Narnians who are deceived are not foolish but trusting, and Lewis suggests that this trust, which is a virtue, is precisely what makes them vulnerable to the lie.

The Problem of Susan

The book contains the series’ single most debated passage. Among the human friends of Narnia gathered at the end, Susan Pevensie is conspicuously absent, and the reason given is that she “is no longer a friend of Narnia” — she has grown up, become preoccupied with “nylons and lipstick and invitations,” and dismissed the Narnian adventures as childish games she has outgrown. This exclusion, the so-called “Problem of Susan,” has troubled many readers and provoked sharp responses from later writers, who have read it as a punishment for adolescence, for femininity, or for growing up. Lewis’s defenders argue that Susan is not damned but merely, for now, lost — still alive, still able to find her way back — and that her real fault is not lipstick but the deliberate forgetting of what she once knew to be true. The debate remains unresolved, and Lewis, who knew exactly what he was doing, left it deliberately open.

Recognition and the Final Vision

The Last Battle won the Carnegie Medal in 1956, the highest British award for children’s literature — a recognition of its formal ambition and seriousness rather than its accessibility, for it is by some distance the most demanding and the darkest of the seven. Its difficulty is the price of its purpose. The first two-thirds are genuinely bleak, and some readers find the cumulative despair punishing for a children’s book; but Lewis is withholding consolation deliberately, so that the turn, when it comes, lands with full force. After the stable door — Lewis’s image of death — the characters pass not into nothing but into a Narnia more real than the one they have lost, and the closing movement “further up and further in” reframes everything that came before. The end of the world, in Lewis’s telling, is the beginning of the only world that cannot end.