The Narnia Code--is this really necessary?!

Talk about taking all the fun out of a series: the Guardian reports about an upcoming BBC documentary about the third layer of hidden meanings within the Chronicles of Narnia. Evidently, each of the books can be linked to a planet in our solar system. To quote the article:

"There are three layers of meaning - it's like three-dimensional chess. Instead of wishy-washy fairy tales, in fact this proves they are quite the opposite - he was writing happily on three levels," said Stone, who has interviewed academics and friends of Lewis for the documentary.

So, not happy with just two levels--the "wishy-washy fairy tale" level and the Christian allegory level--evidently Clever Clogs Lewis was slipping in Medieval Cosmology as well.

Sigh.

I have cherished memories of reading these books as a child. At the time I was more than happy with the wishy-washy fairy tales. As I got older and was able to recognize the Christian allegory, well that was okay too. And kind of cool, because I felt learned for connecting the dots. But this third level is a conspiracy theory too far! It seems as if the Narnia books have been fiddled with quite a bit in recent years; first there was the reordering of the books by publishers so that they could be read chronologically. Now this. Narnia, we hardly knew you.