As an adult, I appreciate the way he balances his love for the one with his devotion to the other; as a child, both spoke to my as-yet-unformed spiritual self. And it’s in _Caspian_ that Lewis does the best job to thresh out his feelings around his two great loves, Classicism and Christianity.

Of course this movie-maker is not going to capture all of that. I can only hope there will be echoes–it’s pretty clear from the marketing that the makers of the movie are well aware of the Christian market. But the director does seem to have enjoyed it as a child mainly as an adventure story… and to feel perfectly comfortable re-writing the stories, not just to make them better movies, as Peter Jackson did with Tolkien’s writing, but to make them into the stories he would have preferred for them to be.

It’s too bad he feels so secure that his judgment is superior to Lewis’s. But there it is… he pretty obviously does, and we’ll be stuck with the result.

My fingers are crossed anyway!

Back to Caspian: I’m having a hard time deciding just how Pagan-friendly a movie it is, which I suppose is why I didn’t speak to that question in my review. I don’t want to offer you any spoilers, so I’ll just suggest that you be prepared for a storyline that has been considerably rewritten. If you’re a Lord of the Rings fan, here’s a comparison: Prince Caspian is less faithful to the book than was the movie adaptation of The Two Towers. But yes, Lucy’s yearning to touch the spirit of the trees is in the movie. I was disappointed that Silenus and Bacchus didn’t survive the transition to the silver screen — but the river god did. Anyway, after you see it, please let me know, either here or via email, what you think of it.

The scene in which Lucy wakes up, restless, and tries, through the force of her longing alone, to fully wake the trees around her, spoke to me so well as a child. And the scene, such a short while later, where she is the only one of the Pevensies to see Aslan, and has the unhappy privilege of having to wake her older siblings and try to get them to follow her, means a lot to me now that I’m a Quaker. Poor Lucy! It is always hardest to be faithful to the unpopular messages; and yet, for us as for her, that’s the job, isn’t it? To follow where we’re led, even when we feel sure we’re being seen as self-important idiots for it?

I love this book. I hope the movie will do it justice!