by Mornche Geddick » May 24th, 2009, 3:46 pm
I found Dr Ward's advertised on .
It strikes me as being spurious pattern-recognition. War breaks out in two of the other books and is threatened in a third (TSC). And what on earth have TMN and THAHB got to do with Venus and Mercury? The dominating images in TMN are the Magician and his rings (Mercury, because of his cunning), the wood between the worlds (Venus perhaps but also Luna owing to its mysterious nature and the subtle danger that besets it) the Dead World (Saturn) the Witch (probably Mars) the creation of the Young World (Venus and Sol). The Forbidden garden may be Venus because it is a garden, but the golden gates make it Sol and the curse gives it a Saturn character. So what is TMN really?
By the way, this is how you can tell a spurious pattern; the first couple of examples may fit like a glove but you soon find yourself having to shoehorn the others into place. I suspect myself that if anybody consciously set out to write a series of novels embodying the seven planets, or the four humours, it probably wouldn't work.
Besides, if Lewis had been allegorising the seven planets, wouldn't he have said so to his friends? I'm reminded of something Lewis said himself in Fernseed and Elephants, that every week some clever undergraduate suddenly discovers the "real" meaning of one of Shakespeare's plays, and it's generally rubbish.