There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
Showing that it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good, the philosophically horrible movie version of TLTW&TW (obSluggyFreelance: The Bug, The Witch, and The Robot) has dragged me off my butt and gotten me to reread The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It's still terrifically good, even though some of the shortcomings of the writing are more apparent to my 45-year-old sensibilities (the last time I read the Chronicles of Narnia was probably when I was a teenager, and I was a much bigger science fiction fan then than I am now.) C.S. Lewis certainly ended the book with a pretty hamfished slab of christian propaganda, didn't he? Look, it's a LAMB, capitalized so you know it's a supposed to be Jesus wearing false glasses and mustache! And it's his FATHER's kingdom. Aaand it turned out to be so forgettable that it was a complete surprise to go 245 pages into the book and crash headlong into the "oops, I was too busy writing my fantasy story to keep up on the christianity, so we'll wrap up the story with a little sermon" conclusion.
The whole business of Eustace turning into a dragon, then having to shed his skin and be baptised by Jesus-With-A-Rocking-Hairdo before he could be restored (or, if you're going to be snide, "born again") to his human form, now that's good christian propaganda; I suspect that if I was a christian I could find many other cases where subtle references to the New Testament were wedged into Dawn Treader, and it really makes me regret the clumsy Deus ex Deo at the end.
I need to read through the rest of the first six books; The Last Battle left a sour taste in my mouth that survives almost 30 years after reading that book, and if the christian allegory was enough to discourage a 15 year old agnostic, it would be infuriating for a 45 year old republican socialist.
I do wonder what the Chronicles of Narnia would have been like if C.S. Lewis had chosen a more realistic Jesus-With-A-Rocking-Hairdo? I suspect it would not have been so good; without having Mr. Nosy Parker Jesus show up occasionally to yell at characters, glower at characters, or walk impressively around in the middle background, many of the moral choices and arguments would have had to be worked out by the characters themselves, and that would slow down the pace of the book.