Revisiting Narnia: The Silver Chair (or, Adventures in Autonomy)

Hi, everybody! This summer, I'm rereading C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and blogging about each book. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

You can read the post on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe here.

You can read the post on Prince Caspian here.

You can read the post on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader here.

To say that The Silver Chair is one of the strongest entries in The Chronicles of Narnia is the sort of statement that should be an easy one to make. So I'll just say it: The Silver Chair is one of the best books in The Chronicles of Narnia, and barring some radical re-appraisal of the last three novels in the series once I get around to rereading them, I'd comfortably place this book among the top three out of the seven, sitting right up next to Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Magician's Nephew.

But if you've read my previous posts on the series, you'll know that I've set myself up for a more complicated task than just simply declaring this novel good. "Good by what rubric?" might be the perfectly natural response after reading my ideas about how the Narnian books function far less frequently as good novels than as good vehicles for fantasy invention and fairy tales (and the one that actually tried to be a good novel, Prince Caspian, just ended up just being plain not good anyway). So, what do I mean when I say that The Silver Chair is good? Is it a good novel or a good fairy tale?

Well, it's sort of both. In fact, if you put my feet to the coals, I'd probably say it's an even better novel than it is a fairy tale. And that's just one of the ways in which The Silver Chair sets itself apart from its peers.

But this will all be easier to talk about once I've established just what happens in the book. So here it is: It's been a year since Eustace Scrubb returned from Narnia, and he's now at a boarding school called the "Experiment House"[2] with a girl named Jill Pole. Cornered by bullies one day in the yard, Eustace and Jill retreat into some foliage and through a mysterious door, and they soon find themselves in Narnia—or, more accurately, atop a mountain in Aslan's country at the end of the sea east of Narnia. Unfortunately, Eustace falls off the mountain, and Jill is left alone until Aslan himself shows up and tells her that Prince Rilian of Narnia (son of Caspian from Dawn Treader—in Narnian time, decades have passed since the events of the previous book) has disappeared. Naturally, it is up to Eustace and Jill to find him. Aslan gives Jill four signs to help them in their search and then sends her off after Eustace, who has been rescued from his fall by the lion's breath and is now flying toward Narnia. When the two land in Narnia, they meet a Marsh-wiggle (sort of a cross between a human and a frog) named Puddleglum, and together, the three set out on their task to find the prince. Initially, they strive to follow the signs that Aslan has given to Jill, but eventually, fatigue, carelessness, and cold (it's wintertime in Narnia) soon lead them to stray from those instructions to seek shelter at Harfang, a castle of giants that they learned about from a woman in green (who was traveling with a mysterious, masked knight). As it turns out, these giants at Harfang are not as pleasant as they initially seem and in fact have distinctly unpleasant plans to cook up Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum in their annual feast. The three escape Harfang and hide in a cave, where they fall down a crevice into the Underworld. The Underworld's inhabitants, a civilization of rather morose gnomes, capture them and take them to their leader, the Green Lady, who is actually the very same woman who directed them to Harfang. In a further twist, the masked knight turns out to be Prince Rilian himself, though under an enchantment that prevents him from remembering who he really is except for one hour every day. Our valiant heroes free the Prince and slay the Green Lady (she can turn into a serpent, too), and the gnomes, overjoyed that their cruel leader is dead, sing "Ding-Dong the Witch Is Dead" and escort them back to the surface. Mission accomplished.

Puddleglum, livin' the good life

At first blush, probably the most remarkable thing about The Silver Chair from a reviewer's standpoint is that this book lacks the lumpy irregularities of the previous three books. This is a novel that has a clear, clean structure, a defined quest punctuated by specific dramatic beats along the way (aka Aslan's signs); unlike both LWW and Dawn Treader, its fairy-tale elements are not digressions but actually advance the plot, and unlike Prince Caspian, its leaner plotting does not come at the expense of fantasy or character. As far as fairy tales and fantasy invention are concerned, The Silver Chair is a triumph, and C. S. Lewis accomplishes a rather commendable feat in that the entire book is set inside Narnia but recycles only a few fantastic elements from previous descriptions of the setting. Most of The Silver Chair takes place in the previously unexplored northern reaches of Narnia, and in this way, it's got a bit of the spirit of discovery that animates its immediate predecessor, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In this book, you've got not just the introduction of two[3] whole new species of Narnian inhabitants (the Underworld gnomes and my favorite, the Marsh-wiggles) but also the fleshing out of a culture (the giants) only alluded to in the previous books. After the relative stagnation of Prince Caspian, C. S. Lewis seemed set on expanding and defining the boundaries of his magical world in subsequent entries: Dawn Treader to the east, and The Silver Chair to the north and below. The results are marvelous.

Comparing The Silver Chair too much to Dawn Treader would involve ignoring what is arguably an even greater strength of the book, which is its characters. Eustace, of course, we've already met from the other book, but it's worth noting (and commending) that Lewis doesn't pull an Edmund here and make Eustace turn bland now that his major redemptive storyline has wrapped up. In The Silver Chair, Eustace is still recognizably that petulant boy from a year ago, only older and wiser now. He's a decent guy, but that doesn't make him an uninteresting guy; in particular, his alternating affection for and frustration with Jill makes for some great moments (Lewis himself says it best, of course: "He meant well, but he did talk rather like someone beginning a lecture"). Even better is Jill, the novel's protagonist and bearer of the book's most prominent moral weight: thanks to her showing off that leads to Eustace's fall from Aslan's mountain, she is tasked with the overwhelming responsibility for rescuing the prince. Like Eustace, she's a decent human undercut by her tendency to be a bit smug and a bit prickly. She's also got an undercurrent of sadness to her—when we first meet her, she is in tears, a victim of the Experiment House bullies—that makes her empowerment as quest leader feel meaningful. What's even better is the chemistry she and Eustace have; this is the first Narnia book with any real banter, and while not quite screwball, it's definitely fun and the best inter-party dynamics since the beginning of LWW (ya know, before the Pevensies got all boring and mature). Finally, there's Puddleglum, who is basically a combination of a frog, Eeyore, and Han Solo. The Narnia books don't always have great non-human characters, but Puddleglum is the happy (or, in his case, morose) exception.

I could go on for some length about the various successes of The Silver Chair because I obviously think it's great. But there's one thing that I think is important to how Lewis manages to cohere all these individual triumphs into a functional novel: mystery. The Silver Chair is a mystery novel (what has happened to Prince Rilian?), and this sets it apart from the other Narnian books in one very important way: a mystery undermines the concept of trust.

Let's talk about trust in The Chronicles of Narnia for a moment.

The protagonists in these books are very trusting. Some might say insanely trusting. Now, this might just be the late-twentieth-century upbringing in me, but if you met a nervous stranger (maybe a faun?) in a magical forest, would you follow him home to his cave and let him feed you tea and cakes for hours? Furthermore, if you later found out that that stranger intended to drug you and hand you over to an evil, fascist child-killer, would you proceed to promptly follow the next strange creature you met in that same forest back to his beaver dam and eat dinner with him? I don't think you would, but apparently, the narrator of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe finds these actions much less worrisome than the prospect of being shut into a wardrobe[1]. Clearly the Pevensies never got the British equivalent of "don't take candy from strangers" (don't take tea and cakes from strangers?) from their parents.

Obviously, C. S. Lewis wrote The Chronicles of Narnia in the context of a much different social climate than the one that we live in today, one that was not nearly so distrustful of strange adults. And there's also the fact that most of Lewis's protagonists are young children, who tend to be trusting anyway. But mostly significantly is how interested Lewis seems in the indiscreet goodness or evilness of things: if something (or someone) is evil or good in Narnia, it will show. Just look at how characters react to Aslan—at the very sound of his name, they are immediately struck by his power and goodness. Or, if that example is too theologically-charged, take Tumnus: even though he intends to betray her, Lucy's initial instincts about his basic trustworthiness are correct, since the guy has a change of heart before anything truly bad happens to her. In Narnia, instincts are to be trusted, and those who are wrong about someone's character (Edmund with the White Witch, for instance) are generally just ignoring their gut feelings about the person. If you feel like you should trust someone, you probably should.

Except in The Silver Chair. The Silver Chair is unique among the Chronicles of Narnia thus far in that it is the only one that rewards paranoia. When the children (and Puddleglum, of course) meet someone—say, the Green Lady—it is not readily apparent to them (and oftentimes, not even to the reader[4]) if this is a person who is worthy of their trust. The giants initially seem kind, but they turn out just to be hungry. The Green Lady seems helpful, but she's ultimately evil. It works the other way, too; Prince Rilian, under the Green Lady's spell, comes off as kind of a douche bag, but when freed from the enchantment, he's revealed to be a noble man. These are all standard moves for a mystery novel; characters lie, hide their true nature, are misunderstood. But for The Chronicles of Narnia, this move is pretty radical. Uncertainty is not a feeling these books traffic in often, but it's something that is almost standard in The Silver Chair. In fact, the novel's climax, when Prince Rilian is tied to the silver chair, is maybe the most profound moment of uncertainty in the entire series; he begs for the heroes to release him, but in that moment, it is entirely unclear (until he appeals to them in Aslan's name) if they should listen to him or not. This is the main dramatic thrust of the book in a nutshell: the heroes receive instructions of an ambiguous nature, and they must decide for themselves how to act.

Here's where I think Lewis is doing some fascinating thematic work with this novel, and it's what I think ultimately gives this book its main drive. The Silver Chair is a book about the twin-pole issues of authority and autonomy. More specifically, it's a book about how to function in a world in which there are multiple authorities vying for your attention and obedience—you must make a choice about whom to follow, and The Silver Chair shows the agonizing ambiguity that often greets us when we try to sit down and parse out that decision. The children encounter someone who tells them to do something; should they obey? Or should they rebel? Can the Lady of the Green Kirtle be trusted as a worthwhile authority?

The short answer is no: she's a dirty liar.

You'll notice I haven't mentioned Aslan for most of this review, and that's because Aslan himself plays into this uncertainty. Of course, Aslan, being roughly synonymous to Jesus/God, is the one character in all of Narnia who is never, ever anything but trustworthy. Jill, a complete stranger to Narnia, takes hardly any time at all to realize that this is a guy worth listening to, and that's pretty much a uniform experience for anyone who encounters him. But what about when you aren't encountering him? The interesting thing here is that the Aslan of The Silver Chair is almost nonexistent for the actual plot of the book. In every other Narnia book so far, Aslan's role in the story has been one of savior; he steps into the plot to set everything right again. But something I only noticed this time through the novel is that The Silver Chair is the only Narnia book in which Aslan never steps foot in Narnia. Aslan doesn't save the day. He never even leaves his mountain. What's more, even though he's the most innately trustworthy authority in Narnia, he is very hands-off with his rule. His instructions to Jill for the quest are nearly riddles, and as she and Eustace and Puddleglum go through their adventure, they are often unsure of what exactly Aslan meant by each of them. And Aslan never shows up to clarify. In the abstract, Jill and Eustace and Puddleglum (and we readers) know that they need to follow Aslan's instructions. But what should they do when those instructions don't seem cut-and-dried? In other words, what do you do when following your lion god is just as hard as, you know, following God in real life?

The Silver Chair never really gives an answer to this question other than, "Well, just do what Aslan says, even if it doesn't make sense." In a way that's sort of frustrating, but I also get the sense that it's Lewis being very honest with his readers, and it's an honesty that I think has been mostly absent from the previous Narnia books. "I think we should follow what God put in the Bible," he seems to be saying, "but darned if I know what that looks like in the specifics. It's not easy, that's for sure." By having a true mystery, by having the Narnian intuition fail his protagonists, all Lewis leaves his characters with are their own reasoning and some confusing things a lion said a while back.

It's interesting to note how different Aslan's approach is from the Green Lady's. While Aslan's tact seems to be to give his subjects general guidelines, the Green Lady uses coercion and enchantment to make her instructions clear. She not only enchants Prince Rilian but also ties him to a chair, and that's not even considering the entire race of gnomes that she enslaved into a faceless workforce. Narnian villains tend toward totalitarian and fascist philosophies, and the Green Lady is the fullest realization of this trend; unlike the White Witch and King Miraz, she isn't content to conquer; she must control every minutiae of her world. Aslan encourages free will, whereas the Lady of the Green Kirtle undermines autonomy at every turn, up to and including the final confrontation, where, in a last ditch effort to get them to do what she wants, she tries to control the heroes' actual perceptions of the world. So of course, the final heroic action of the novel takes the form of a radical act of free will[5], with Puddleglum stamping out the witch's burning spell with his own foot, wounding himself in the process.

And let's not forget that wound. I've gotten awfully philosophical in these past few paragraphs, and I hope that doesn't do anything to mask the fact that there are real characters at stake in these battles. Puddleglum, Jill, Eustace—these are all people we care about, and we care about these philosophical issues by extension of our affection for these people. What makes The Silver Chair great is that it's able to toss around these ideas in a way that facilitates character growth. This isn't a novel with a moral so much as it's a novel that shows how people act in different situations, and as such, any moral commentary is grounded in how characters interact with each other.

I've been yammering on for way longer than I ever intended here, so I guess with that I'll bring this post to a close. I hope that makes sense. Even if it doesn't, can we at least all agree that The Silver Chair is magnificent? Well, maybe we don't even agree on that. But regardless, let me know what you think!

Until next time!


1] A fate the book advises its readers against no less than four times, which leads one to wonder if being caught in a wardrobe was something the people of 1940s England were particularly afraid of. The way Lewis talks about it, those things are veritable death traps.

2] I'll get into this in more detail in Footnote #5, but I just want to point out how obviously and hilariously C. S. Lewis has his knives out for this "mixed" (i.e. co-ed) school. To wit: "Some said it was not nearly so mixed as the minds of the people who ran it." Lewis's problem doesn't seem to be so much that it's a school with both male and female students but that the inmates seem to be running the prison, so to speak, by which I mean that the pedagogy of this particular school seems to be of the more progressive ideology that student needs and interests should override more traditional educational priorities. There's definitely a strawman-ish quality to the ridiculously terrible Experiment House (Lewis was no fan of progressive education, as he makes quite clear in The Abolition of Man), but I can't deny that there's a kind of awesome disdain to the book's depiction of this institution.

3] Three, if you count the owls, who aren't mentioned in any of the previous books. It's not exactly groundbreaking what Lewis does with the owls (they think humans are weird for sleeping during the night? You don't say!), but it's entertainingly rendered. Their parliament is a lot of fun, and I personally love how their dialogue relies heavily on words with "oo" sounds.

4] I mean, it's not exactly hard to figure out that she's up to no good, but the warning signs are much more subdued than in the other books. Plus, the characters themselves are unsure of her nature, which alone is unique among Narnian protagonists.

5] I'm not going to have a chance to bring this up in the body of this post, but I think there's actually a point to all the progressive school hate besides Lewis's politics, and that's a point that has to do with this whole issue of autonomy and authority. The Experiment House is a place whose philosophy is one of absolute autonomy for individuals—Lewis says that the school's leaders "had the idea that boys and girls should be allowed to do what they liked," and, as Lewis sees it, this is a disastrous way to structure this institution. The whole Experiment House situation seems to be a counterexample to the Green Lady's villainy. The Green Lady is an example of control and authority gone awry, whereas the Experiment House is an evil of the opposite kind, where freedom and individualism has been taken too far. For Lewis, it seems that guided freedom (Aslan's vague instructions) is the best way to go.

Revisiting Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (or, an Archipelago of Fairy Tales)

Hi, everybody! This summer, I'm rereading C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and blogging about each book. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

You can read my post on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe here.

You can read my post on Prince Caspian here.

 "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

Thus begins not only The Voyage of the Dawn Treader[1], the third book published in The Chronicles of Narnia, but also one of the meanest, most wickedly funny passages that C. S. Lewis committed to print. Lewis goes on to describe Eustace's life in more detail, explaining his parents' vaguely progressive lifestyle (Eustace calls them not "Mom" and "Dad" but "Alberta" and "Harold"), his social life (the narrator: "I can't tell you how his friends spoke to him, for he had none"), and his recreational interests—and this last one deserves to be written in full, outside of parentheses, if only for its glorious absurdity: "Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card. He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools."

I love this book so, so much.

Any review is subject to bias and personal preference (that's one of the main reasons these things exist!), and here's mine: I have read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader more than any other book in the series; it contains the best single chapter Lewis ever wrote; it is my most consistent answer for my favorite book in the series; it is one of my favorite books of all time. So yes, you're in for a bit of a rave.

You're also in for a bit of an unmoored rave because golly, is The Voyage of the Dawn Treader difficult to write about in any focused fashion. This is not a focused book in the way that we normally think about novels having a plot and a protagonist and a central theme. Basically, here's what happens: Another year has passed in England since the events of Prince Caspian, and Lucy and Edmund must spend the summer holidays with their Aunt Alberta and Uncle Harold and their reprehensible cousin Eustace (or, as Edmund colorfully calls him, "that record stinker Eustace"). Eustace, as described in the opening passage I quote from above, is an unimaginative prig of a child who likes to make fun of what he assumes is the made-up land of Narnia he hears his cousins talking about. This all changes when one day, he and Edmund and Lucy magically fall into a painting and find themselves back in Narnia, only this time, they're on a ship (the eponymous Dawn Treader) commanded by the now-three-years-older King Caspian. Since Caspian has taken the throne, he has set about undoing much of the evil that his Uncle Miraz committed, and the final thing Caspian must rectify is his uncle's banishment of the seven great Narnian lords over the eastern sea. So with a crew that includes both new faces (Captain Drinian and and First Mate Rhince) and old (the bloodthirsty, murderous[2] mouse Reepicheep, not to mention Lucy and Edmund and Eustace), the Dawn Treader sails east in search of these lost men. They have lots of adventures on the various islands they encounter along the way, and eventually, they find all seven lords and even make it all the way to the world's edge and the border to Aslan's country.

And the events covered in that last sentence make this a very difficult novel to write about. Dawn Treader[3] is not a cohesive book; in fact, it's a decidedly episodic one. The "they have lots of adventures on the various islands" part of that sentence encompasses about 90 percent of the entire novel. I thought about starting this post by calling Dawn Treader a "return to form" after the relative misstep of Prince Caspian, but any comparisons I can make to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe are probably just more convoluted ways of saying that Dawn Treader is a book that throws off almost all of LWW's pretense of being a novel and runs wild with the idea that Narnia is a playground for fairy tales. And the results are absolutely breathtaking.

Pauline Baynes's illustrations are fantastic throughout the

series, but they're especially great in this book.

When it comes to Narnia, C. S. Lewis is often at his best when dealing in pure, often imagistic imagination (the lamppost in the wood, the stone animals coming to life), and Dawn Treader sees Lewis's imagination at its most wild and unfettered[4]. Plot, character, conflict, logic, coherence—these are subordinate to whatever crazy, out-there stuff Lewis can think up. What if the Dawn Treader encounters a sea serpent? What if there was an island where dreams (not daydreams—we're talking David Lynch stuff) came true? What if there was an island full of one-legged creatures that hop around like sentient pogo sticks? What if the world really was flat? What if Eustace turned into a dragon? In a way, simply posing these what-ifs is a summary more effective at evoking the experience of the reading the book than a more traditional, narrative one is. With a few exceptions, each island the Dawn Treader comes across basically serves as its own self-contained fairy tale microcosm where the book works out one or two (or even dozens) of cool fantasy ideas with little regard to whether or not the island's events will contribute meaningfully to the long-term advancement of the story other than a vague feeling of "I hope these characters make it off this island so they can find those seven lords." That sea serpent, for example? It never comes up again, and you could pretty much skip that passage without risk of being confused by subsequent pages. The serpent appears, the crew of the Dawn Treader fight it, and then they move on. The end.

The effect of this structure is that reading the book often feels like reading a picaresque or a more episodic myth like The Odyssey (Ulysses even gets name-dropped at one point) or even just an anthology of fantasy stories. Dawn Treader is an archipelago of stories of all different stripes: there are morality tales; there are tense yarns that verge on horror or the surreal; there are swashbuckling adventures; there are episodes whose entire purpose is just to inspire awe. Recurring characters pop up, sure, and often one of these characters will face a dilemma or experience growth through a moral choice in a way that feints toward character development. Lucy and Caspian especially get their fair share of spotlight in these stories. But if you pay attention, you'll notice that little of this development builds off existing conflicts for these characters, and very rarely does it lead to any long-term changes in their personalities or role in the story. It's mostly just in service of the of-the-moment experience of the episode. The beauty of this book is in the details and cul-de-sacs, not the road forward. And what beauty it is.

This beauty is no better captured than in the novel's tenth chapter, "The Magician's Book," which, for my money, is the crown jewel of the entire Narnia series and one of my favorite passages in all of literature. Lucy must enter a mysterious magician's study and find his spell book in order to turn the invisible inhabitants of the island visible again. Of course, to do so, Lucy must read through a good portion of the magician's book, and therein lies the chapter's genius, for Lewis uses her perusing of the book as an excuse to throw in every last bit of fairy tale anecdote that he can. Each spell Lucy finds is a gorgeous nugget of imagination that has no purpose except to let us readers experience the joy of reveling in that imagination. Whether it be a simple image (cure for warts: "wash in a silver basin by moonlight") or a more complex narrative spun from the spells (what would happen if Lucy were to make herself immortally beautiful, for example), these bits and pieces of the magician's book are told elegantly and with the aching sense of the sublime, ineffable feeling one gets from the best of folk tales. Here, in the magician's book, is Dawn Treader's central conceit taken to graceful abstraction: there is no story, no attempt to construct a coherent reality out of the assorted bits of fantasy; what drives the words forward is the joy of the reader (either Lucy or us) inhabiting, if only briefly, these worlds that sprung forth from a fertile imagination.

This idea becomes even more obvious in the loveliest passage in this loveliest of chapters, when Lucy reads a spell "for the refreshment of the spirit," which turns out to be more of a story than a spell[5]. The novel says, "Before she had read to the bottom of the page she had forgotten that she was reading at all. She was living in the story as if it were real." Isn't this our experience when reading a great book? The sensation that we have left our own world and been transported to a different, more magical one? In these two sentences, Lewis hints at one of the central metaphors of Narnia, that it is a land that represents storytelling in its ideal form (or at least, Lewis's ideal). This metaphor gets even more interesting once Lucy finishes the story and she finds that the story has disappeared from the book and she can't remember a thing about it except for the euphoric feeling she got from reading it. In this moment, it doesn't matter what the story was about; what's important is that Lucy can remember the experience of reading it, even if she's lost all the textual trappings. A lot is made of the moral and theological components of fairy tales, and I won't dispute that those components, particularly the Christian underpinnings of them, play into the Narnia books[6]. But with passages like this, I can't help but feel that Lewis also was arguing that storytelling is theology enough. It doesn't need a moral or coded religious imagery; the experience of reading a beautifully told story has its own meaning. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is when Lewis decided to take this idea as far as it could go within the context of the Narnia books. This isn't a really novel; this is a storytelling experience.

There's a reason I began this post talking about Eustace, though, and it's not just because he has one of the most memorable character introductions in English literature. No, I started with him because of all this book's cast, he's the one who most closely resembles a character in the traditional, literary sense. And as such, he's a bit of a departure from this idea of pure, abstracted storytelling. But that doesn't matter one bit, because Eustace is a wonder to behold. In fact... oh, what the heck. I've been throwing out so many superlatives in this post, so I don't see the harm in tossing out another: Eustace is the best character in the entire Chronicles of Narnia. I mentioned in my LWW post that Lewis has a particular knack for writing sulky, mean children, and my goodness, Eustace is the Citizen Kane of sulking meanies. What's even better is that he's a character whose sulk is uniquely designed to react to the more fantastical nonsensical elements of Dawn Treader. In concept, it almost sounds like a joke: "Hey, what if we took this stuck-up kid who had no imagination and no familiarity with fantasy whatsoever and drop him into the most imaginative, fantastical Narnia book of the bunch?" And admittedly, a lot of it reads like a joke, too. The book's opening pages describing Eustace are hysterical, as are many of the other passages at Eustace's expense. Lewis seems to get a perverse, Roald-Dahl-esque joy out of describing all the ways that Eustace is terrible in the early goings of the book. Case-in-point, as seen in an excerpt from Eustace's diary: "Perspiration really cools people down, so the men would need less water if they were working." Classic Eustace.

All of this would come across as a little mean-spirited[7] if it weren't for the way that Lewis also seems to entirely empathize and even identify with Eustace. This becomes especially apparent in the lengthy sequence in which Eustace has a first-hand run-in with fairy-tale land and gets turned into a dragon. Even though the book has built Eustace up into a character who deserves just such a punishment, there is not a note of pleasure or superiority in the telling of Eustace's trauma. The entire episode is wrapped in compassion for the boy, and one passage in particular, in which Eustace comes to grips with the isolation he feels as a dragon, is one of the saddest in the whole series. "He realized that he was a monster cut off from the whole human race," the book says, and the implication is that this had been the case long before he had turned into a dragon. Edmund's redemption in LWW may be more biblically loaded, but I find Eustace's fall and redemption to be the much more personal and affecting account.

Pictured: Sad Eustace dragon.

So of course, there are some themes in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader—renewal being maybe the most prominent. Also present is the idea that Caspian is trying to reclaim the past for the sake of future generations: finding his father's seven lost friends is the obvious example, but also there is the recurring theme of the crew arriving at islands after a big event has happened—after pirates have ravaged the countryside of a once-inhabited island, after one of the lords has taken a deadly swim in water that turns him into gold, after the Duffers have turned invisible and bouncy. But these themes work only erratically. It's actually very frustrating to try to come up with a unified thesis about any of these ideas because the book is always taking pit stops to give Caspian a chance to put the mack on a starman's daughter or to tell us about what happens to that one guy who stayed on the last island while the rest of the crew sailed east to the end of the world[8]. Even less so than LWW, Dawn Treader just isn't very good at that sort of thematic consistency.

But you know what? It doesn't matter one bit. That's because, as I discussed above, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a book about the experience of reading it. It's unique among the Chronicles of Narnia in that its chief meaningful theme is actually one conveyed mostly through its aesthetics, not its text: that of the beauty of pure fantasy. This is a work that really couldn't care if you approach it intelligently. It just wants you to be eager for the telling of new experiences. And if you give it that, I'd say it pays out in spades. A story well-experienced is its own reward.

I could write about this book for pages and pages (or whatever the digital equivalent is), but I've got to stop sometime. Let me know what you think! Obviously, I'm over the moon about this book, but if you feel differently (or even just want to join me over the moon), feel free to share your thoughts.

Until next time!


1] The title of this book is actually kind of awkward to write out. Unless you're The New York Times, modern editing convention dictates that the titles of books should be italicized; it also dictates that the names of boats should be italicized. This creates a sort of conflict of interests in the formatting of this book's title, since it includes the name of a boat (Dawn Treader) as well as the typical title text to be italicized. Technically, the correct way to write out the book's title is "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" (since the double italics on the boat's name cancel each other out). That looks like a hot mess, though, so I'm just going to italicize the whole thing and brace myself from any editorial fascists out there who might call me out on it.

2] I'm not kidding about this, though obviously, he's one of the good guys so it's okay that he's all "kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!" Also, he's a mouse.

3] I thought about abbreviating the title to an acronym, but VDT looked a little too much like an unpleasant STD.

4] With the possible exception of The Magician's Nephew, which, if memory serves, is often equally as free-wheelingly fantastical with its events and imagery. I guess we'll see about that in a few posts.

5] Though let's not forget that the word spell meant "story" in Old English. I doubt that this connection was lost on Lewis, who in his academic career, specialized in the English Middle Ages, and I get the feeling that if you had asked him about it, he would have said something about magic and storytelling being the same thing.

6] As if we needed any reminder of the symbolism, Aslan shows up as a lamp cooking fish at the end of the book. It's a wonder he didn't make Doubting Eustace put his hands into the lion's White-Witch scars.

7] In fact, some of it does seem mean, especially the cracks about Eustace's parents. So what if they're vegetarians and teetotalers? It's one of the rare moments in these books (the other comes next time, in The Silver Chair) that Lewis tips his hand to reveal an ugly disdain for a certain type of person. It's kind of awesome in its self-righteousness, I'll admit, but it's also kind of petty for Lewis to be duking out his political squabbles all Dante-style in what's supposed to be a book for kids.

8] Seriously, his name is Pittencream, his story is on page 234 of my edition, and what happens to him is both hilarious and a little heartbreaking. I had totally forgot this was in there. Just another example of Lewis's emphasis on episodic storytelling.

Revisiting Narnia: Prince Caspian (or, Adventures in Sequelitis)

Hi, everybody! This summer, I'm rereading C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and blogging about each book. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

You can read my previous post, on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, here.

It must be hard to write a sequel. I've never done it (I'm going to be doing well if I ever finish my first novel), but, being a regular dissenter of sequels, I can imagine the pressures involved. It's hard enough the write a good novel the first time around, and doing that twice in a row must be even more difficult. You obviously can't write the same novel as the first time around, or your readers are going to get suspicious ("Hey, there was a major character death on p. 133 in the last book, too!"). By the same token, though, you also can't diverge too much from the formula and techniques that were so successful in the original book, or you run the risk of either alienating your established audience or, worse, missing what was good about the first book to begin with. Writing a sequel is, among many other things, a careful balancing act between preservation and change.

I write all this to soften the blow of what I'm about to say: Prince Caspian, C. S. Lewis's sequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, is probably my least favorite book in the whole Chronicles of Narnia saga. Obviously, much of this has to do with arbitrary personal preference, and I'm not discounting that. But a large part of my discontent with the novel also has to do with how it handles its sequeldom. And make no mistake: Prince Caspian is very much a sequel (something that isn't true of every entry in the Narnia books), and the issue is that it's a sequel that takes away many of the most pleasurable aspects of its predecessor.

My feelings on this book will hopefully become clearer as this post goes on, but for now, probably the best way to begin is to summarize the plot. Prince Caspian begins in much the same way that LWW[1] does, with the four Pevensie children—Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy—traveling away from home. This time, though, they have no jovially condescending Professor Kirk to look forward to; instead, they are all headed off to boarding school. It is one year since they returned from Narnia at the end of LWW, and curiously, the four seem more irritated that they have to go to school than by the fact that just a year prior, they were rulers of a small nation. Anyway, they don't have to be irritated for long, because no sooner do they arrive at the train station than a magical force whisks them away to a castle ruin. It doesn't take them long to figure out that they are back in Narnia and that the ruin is the remains of Cair Paravel, the castle where they ruled as kings and queens. Time works differently in Narnia than it does in their own England, and apparently hundreds of years have passed in the one year they spent grousing about boarding school. In the course of those centuries, Narnia has again fallen under evil rule, this time by the brutish Telmarines, humans who have conquered the land and forced the magical creatures of Old Narnia into hiding. Narnia's sole hope lies in Caspian the Tenth, the rightful heir to the Narnian throne who has fled his murderous, usurping Uncle Miraz to join the Old Narnians and lead a revolt against the Telmarine rule. The Pevensies join Caspian in his fight, and together (along with the help of Aslan, who again shows up at the last minute to save the day) they defeat Miraz and restore Narnia to its rightful king.

That's not an inherently bad plot. In fact, it's a quite interesting plot for reasons that I will get to in a minute. However, even among the interesting stuff, it's clear that Lewis is retreading a lot of the same ground from the previous novel. For starters, we have Narnia again enslaved by a cruel, totalitarian force[2]. We have Aslan long-absent from the land, only to return in the final chapters to set everything right. We have Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy summoned from our world to set things right[3]. We have a climactic battle in which the good guys are saved by Aslan bringing extra troops. We're definitely dealing with some of the same story beats here. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Many a TV show made compelling weekly viewing out of the same essential story structures repeated time after time. Besides, Prince Caspian is a sequel, and none but the most radical of us expects (or wants) a sequel to be completely different from its predecessor.

 To be fair, nothing like this happened in the first book.

But here's the problem with Prince Caspian's repeat elements: in almost every case, they just aren't as interestingly executed as their counterparts in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Take the evil dictator, King Miraz. Conceptually, he's an antagonist with almost Shakespearean gravitas: brutal political schemer, murderer, coward. Lewis had a good idea here. But in execution, Miraz is a bit of a non-presence. We hear about him a lot more than we actually see him in action (in fact, he only appears in two scenes in the entire book, and one of those is a flashback), which makes him a bit ephemeral as a villain, despite his brutality in the abstract. Compare this to the White Witch, who not only is conceptually terrifying (always winter and never Christmas!) but also chews up enough scenery that her personality is unmistakable. We hear about how evil Miraz is; we know how evil the White Witch is. This is true of nearly every borrowed element: they just aren't as memorable or compelling. An eternal winter is cooler (ha) than a generic totalitarian rule. A magic wardrobe is a more evocative passage to Narnia than an invisible force snatching kids from a train station. A castle full of petrified creatures is way more striking than a simple medieval-style estate.

Even the Pevensies are less interesting this time around; Edmund, the crown jewel of the first novel, has largely become a just slightly younger version of Peter, a Star Scout to Peter's Eagle Scout, if you will. There's a brief stint where the book recreates the believer-skeptic relationship between Lucy and the rest of her siblings, but without Edmund acting like a heel, it's got none of the liveliness or pain of the original iteration of this dynamic.

I'm being a bit negative so far, and I stand by that negativity. By my reckoning, Prince Caspian is not a great book. But still, my feelings toward the novel are more complicated than a simple pan, and here's why: while Prince Caspian is an overall less enjoyable experience than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the sum of its parts generates a much more functional novel than LWW, at least as far as novels are supposed to develop consistent thematic and character arcs. As I spent so much time discussing in my review of LWW, that book doesn't do a great job with its characters outside of Edmund and Lucy (and even those two kind of fade out toward the end), and if the novel is trying to develop a central theme or message outside of general Christian apologia, I sure missed it. Prince Caspian, on the other hand, actually does have a central theme and character arcs revolving around that theme. In a way, Prince Caspian is good at all the stuff that LWW isn't good at, which creates a weird yin-yang relationship between the two books.

See, Prince Caspian is a novel about coming to grips with growing up. It's significant that the novel opens with the Pevensies on their way to school. For children, nothing signifies the passage of time more strongly than the unstoppable tick-tock of school term, then vacation, then school again. To be on their way to school means that Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy are getting older—in fact, the narrator tells us that Lucy is "going to boarding school for the first time," making this moment an even greater milestone. The Pevensies are waiting at a train junction, and at the other end of the tracks lies a realm one step closer to adulthood. The kids are "all rather gloomy," not just because they have to go to school but also because they have to get older. It's a short introduction (the novel takes a scant two pages to get the Pevensies back in Narnia), but it's one that provides the thematic groundwork and even an emotional core for the entire book.

The Narnia that the Pevensies find themselves in is essentially a Narnia that has grown up. Hundreds of years in the future, the familiar landmarks of their time in Narnia have warped and crumpled into something unrecognizable, from their old home at Cair Paravel, now in ruins, to the very landscape of the country itself, which Peter repeated calls unfamiliar. The childlike qualities that made Narnia so charming in the first book have been put away: the magic, the talking animals, Aslan. Last post, I made a big deal about how much of a fairy tale LWW is, and what's fascinating is that now Narnia itself regards its past, aka LWW, as either a fairy tale (in one of his two scenes, Miraz tells Caspian that the history of Old Narnia is a myth), or at least a story that is only fit for children (multiple characters—even Old Narnians—scoff at the idea of a magic lion). The absence of the fairy-tale-esque wonder and strangeness of LWW makes for a sometimes dry experience[4] when reading Prince Caspian (sometimes you just want to see a witch wave her wand around), but it also makes for pretty effective thematic work. By fighting for Old Narnia, the Pevensies are fighting for the preservation of childhood.

The ending of the novel, then, is a moving conclusion to that theme. The Telmarines are defeated and given the opportunity to either leave Narnia forever or learn to live at peace in the land, and Caspian, himself a Telmarine, begins his rule as king. In doing so, Lewis makes an admirably complex statement: growing up is the process of making synthesizing adulthood and childhood, not suppressing one in favor of the other. Old and New Narnia must learn to dwell side-by-side. This harkens back to the dedication to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where C. S. Lewis remarks that Lucy Barfield will first grow too old for fairy tales but later grow old enough to embrace them again—maturity as the combination of adult and child. More personally, this theme manifests itself in Peter and Susan learning that they have grown too old for Narnia at the novel's end. They are not children anymore, and as such, they can no longer put off the non-Narnian aspects of themselves. They must instead learn to take what they have learned in Narnia and apply it in their lives in England. That's some heavy stuff for a children's book, and I'll admit that it's subtext that I didn't catch onto until this most recent reading of the book. Still, it's a beautiful, melancholy center that grounds an otherwise dysfunctional book.

Finish him!

And I do mean dysfunctional. For all its thematic elegance, this is one ungainly novel. I've already talked about the problems with the "like LWW but lamer" elements, and that's one issue. Another is the structure itself, which is awkwardly saddled between flashback and forward momentum—Caspian's story is told in a lengthy sequence in the book's middle third, and it completely disrupts the flow of the Pevensies' adventures in the castle ruins. Then there's the pacing, which is all over the place. Sometimes (particularly in the Caspian flashback), the book has the lean drive of a thriller, and it's great, but then you get to a section like the chapter where Caspian goes around and meets all the woodland creatures in hiding and that propulsion sputters to a halt. It's a novel that swings from breakneck adventure to meandering quaintness without much grace. There was an element of this in LWW, but its constant revery in magic and awe made the pacing more of a feature than a bug. In the harder, meaner, less-magical world of Prince Caspian, however, these structural issues become a lot more apparent.

I don't want to rag on Prince Caspian too much, though. As I said, the thematic work and central arc for the Pevensies really is lovely, and undoubtedly, C. S. Lewis had a daunting task in front of him when looking at a sequel. That he went to a darker, more challenging headspace is commendable, too. Even considering all that, though, Prince Caspian remains more of a "problem novel" than anything truly accomplished.

At least, that's my take. Let me know what you guys think! Any Prince Caspian defenders out there? I'd love to hear about it.

Until next time!


1] This is my new acronym for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It's much more agile than the TLtWatW one I was using for most of last post, and I hope you agree that it's a lot easier on the eyes, too. Thanks to the helpful reader who suggested the switch!

2] This is the last time that the series plays this card, unless you count The Last Battle, which I'd say is a different case entirely. Given the more fantastical trajectory of the next few Narnia novels, I get the impression that Lewis himself got a little tired of throwing Narnia into political upheaval each time the humans from our world returned.

3] Though this time it's not quite so clear why they are supposed to be such a big help to Narnia—we're talking about four children here, and yeah, I realize that these children used to be powerful leaders, but when you're fighting battles, four extra people isn't exactly a mass that will turn the tides. Though apparently they do.

4] If I'm remembering the rest of the books correctly, Prince Caspian is the closest the series ever got to literary realism, which is kind of funny considering that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe had trouble finding a publisher because it lacked a commitment to realism. At the very least, I get the sense that in Prince Caspian, Lewis is treating Narnia more as a real place with rules and histories (i.e. traditional high fantasy world-building) rather than the often anarchic fairy tale vibes from LWW. That said, Narnian realism is still a far cry from real-world realism; case in point: the Greek god Bacchus shows up.

Revisiting Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (or, the Unpleasant Realization That C.S. Lewis Apparently Doesn't Believe in the Oxford Comma)

Hi, everybody! This summer, I'm rereading C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and blogging about each book. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

What exactly do we want out of fairy tales?

This is an important question for a number of reasons, but most relevantly to this blog series, it's important because C. S. Lewis himself identifies the Chronicles of Narnia—or at least The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the series' first published entry—as a fairy tale. "You are already too old for fairy tales," he writes to Lucy Barfield, his goddaughter, in the dedication to TLtWatW[1], "but some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it." It's a funny, melancholy, and entirely sweet way to prologue a series that, if memory serves, is itself funny, melancholy, and sweet; moreover, it serves as the most direct statement of purpose for Lewis's ambition contained in the whole seven novels that make up the Chronicles.

So, it stands to reason that any fair assessment of TLtWatW should take into account that Lewis considered the novel first and foremost a fairy tale—not high fantasy, as this series is sometimes mistaken for (sorry, 2005 movie adaptation), or even a psychologically observant character piece, as novels are often expected to be. Nope, this is a fairy tale and a darn good one at that. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

For those who don't know, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe tells the story of four siblings—Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy—who, during World War II, leave their bomb-riddled home in London for the safer countryside manor of Professor Kirk, a elderly friend of their mother's. Lucy, the youngest, discovers a wardrobe in an abandoned corner of the mansion that transports her to Narnia, a magical land ruled by the White Witch, who has (in what seems like a hell specifically crafted for my own torture) plunged the country into a cursed freeze in which it is "always winter and never Christmas." When Lucy returns via the wardrobe, none of her siblings believe her story at first, probably because the wardrobe, in typical furniturial sadism, no longer contains a passage to Narnia when Peter, Susan, and Edmund check. Eventually, however, they all make it into Narnia and, alongside some kindly (and talking) forest creatures, join the forces of Aslan, the lion-king/deity of Narnia, in fighting the White Witch, although Edmund initially aligns himself with the Witch when she gives him some really delicious Turkish Delight (a confection that is disgusting in real life, by the way). Aslan trades himself for Edmund, though, and for this, dies at the hands of the Witch—only to come back to life the next morning to kick butt and take names. He doesn't do much name-taking, actually, and it's not long before he's killed the Witch and placed Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy as kings and queens of Narnia. The end.

So we're definitely in the realm of fantasy—even, yes, fairy tales—here. This novel was published in 1950, and from what I can tell (which, of course, means: "according to Wikipedia"), the vast majority of children's novels of the time tended toward literary realism; in general, the taste-makers of the day considered fantasy to be at best frivolous and at worst harmful. So it was a pretty big deal that C. S. Lewis, who at that time was best known as a theologian and literary critic, wrote a fantasy novel for kids. It may seem counter-intuitive in an era where fantasy seems to be the default genre for most children's literature, but back in the late '40s when Lewis sat down to write this thing, the idea of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was very much against the grain of culture. And that's really cool, not only because it makes Narnia kind of countercultural (a label I assure you will not be applied to this work elsewhere—you heard it here first, folks!) but also because it means that Wardrobe is one of the most influential pieces of children's literature ever.

 C. S. Lewis: author, apologist, punk

All that is well and good. But historical significance and counter-cultural impetus mean little for anyone but history buffs if the associated work isn't any good. So, is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe any good? Well, the short answer is that it depends on what rubric you're using, but in general: oh yes. Now for the long answer.

For starters, the novel is a fantastic display of efficiency. The book barely cracks 200 pages in my edition (the 1994 HarperCollins, if anyone is curious), and that's with a generous font size and frequent illustrations. He doesn't get nearly enough credit for this, but C. S. Lewis is an extraordinary prose stylist, not in the virtuosic, experimental way of his literary contemporaries like Nabokov or Kerouac but more in line with prose traditionalists like E. B. White, where above all, the priority is to be clear, witty, and quick with your sentences and plotting. Lewis manages with dozens of words what it takes many writers hundreds to sort out. I mean, it only takes the book six pages (counting an illustration!) to get Lucy into Narnia. As another example, let's take what is perhaps the most iconic image from the Narnia series, the the lamp-post in the snowy woods as Lucy enters Narnia for the first time. Do you remember that lamp-post? Of course you do; everyone does. But do you also remember that Lewis introduces that lamp-post with just two sentences of prose? Here's all we get when Lucy first sees it: "It was a lamp-post. As she stood looking at it, wondering why there was a lamp-post in the middle of a wood and wondering what to do next, she heard a pitter patter of feet coming toward her." Not just two sentences, but two sentences that have a lot else on their minds than just the lamp-post and still manage to make that image seem lovely.

Lewis does this constantly throughout the book, where he'll drop in this indelible image or concept or plot detail like the Stone Table or Edmund's struggles in school (or even the entire reason the kids are in the country—"because of the air-raids," is all Lewis's narrator says) and then just move on because, man, this book has places to be! Narnia is mysterious, not J. J. Abrams-style mystery where it's teasing out suspense but in a gently awestruck, thoughtful way not unlike Lucy's own reaction to the lamp-post. In the book, magic isn't belabored with too much explanation or even examination; it simply is. What this ends up meaning is that Wardrobe is a novel that is nimble without feeling airy, fun without feeling trivial, beautiful without feeling ponderous.

This is, in many ways, the primary way that TLtWatW works in the fairy tale mode. Like a lot of fairy tales, the book strives to be evocative, not rigorous. Why does Rumpelstiltskin collect first-born children? I dunno, he just does. It certainly evokes feelings about a whole lot of anxieties floating around in humanity's collective unconscious (the loss of a child; kidnapping, greed), but the story itself doesn't comment on it much. Wardrobe does similar things. Why is there a lamp-post in the woods? There just is [2]. And as far as anxieties go, there are definitely ghosts of WWII and fear of fascism in the depiction of the White Witch's totalitarian rule and brutal police enforcement (even more terrifyingly, a brutal wolf police enforcement), but these aren't connections that the story highlights. In fact, you have to dig for them. This evocation-over-explanation technique is what gives so many fairy tales their strange, non-sequitur quality, and that's in no short supply in Narnia either (who invited Santa Claus, anyway? And what on earth are the "people of the toadstools"??). As much as C. S. Lewis gets touted as a theologian and the Narnia books get labeled as theological (more on that in a second), there's a very real way in which a large part of Narnia is simply just Lewis reveling in the pleasure of imaginative fantasy, allegory be damned, and that's on full display in TLtWatW.

Now, of course, it's entirely reasonable to point out that this story is not truly a fairy tale because it is, in fact, a novel, a genre that, unlike fairy tales, does not live through oral folk tradition but must exist on the printed page in a much more precise manor. Another reason I brought up all that stuff about fairy tales at the beginning of this post is because so many of the "flaws" in TLtWatW as a novel can be explained away by approaching it as a fairy tale, a genre with a whole different set of rules and priorities. And here's where we get to what you might call the "gripes" section: this novel, while a ripping fairy tale, is not always a great novel, at least not in the Austenian/Flaubertian tradition.

To be fair, sometimes it is a great novel on those terms. At various points in the novel, Lucy and Edmund both are fantastic characters with complicated psychologies. This is especially true of Edmund. He's a royal snot (or to borrow Peter's colorful language, a "poisonous little beast"), a character type that Lewis proved to be really good at writing over the course of this series. Whenever there's a sulky, mean child in Narnia, you know that he's going to absolutely come alive on the page, and Edmund's no different. His selfish frustration with his older siblings—particularly Peter—is gloriously rendered, and we get just enough of his relationship with his family to both understand the roots of his frustration and realize his own selfishness that drives it on. As such, his psychological journey from entitled "beast" to broken wretch to wizened survivor is quite affecting. Lucy doesn't have quite the dynamism in her arc, but she's similarly given life through precise rendering of personality. I get the idea that these two characters, the awestruck believer and the sullen bully, are the two most autobiographical elements of Lewis's writing in this book, though that's just a hunch from my familiarity with his non-Narnian works.

But the rest of the characterization—the building block of most novels—is wildly inconsistent. I'm just going to be honest: Peter and Susan are terrible bores, and when you're pretending like your novel has four protagonists (as Wardrobe often seems to want to), it's a problem if fifty percent of those protagonists are dull as paste. Susan is the worst, really, alternatingly a nag and the voice of reason (and once a damsel in distress); very early in the book, Edmund accuses Susan of "trying to talk like Mother," and although I don't know Mrs. Pevensie personally, I'm inclined to agree with him. It could be interesting to see her attempt at surrogate motherhood collide up against the distinctly un-parental logic of Narnia, but nothing much ever comes of it. Peter comes off slightly better; he at least has a discernible arc wherein he starts the book bravely and becomes even braver after slaying a wolf, but even then, he's still just one police chief father away from being the third Hardy boy. The rest of the characters in the novel don't fare too well, either, being either archetypes (poor Mrs. Beaver) or weird non-entities (the Witch's dwarf). These characters are often entertaining in their simplicity, and there's something commendable in that. In fact, if we're reading this novel as a fairy tale, these characters don't need to be complex; fairy tales thrive on simplicity, and that's definitely at play here. But if we're talking about the novel's ability to make me care for them, I'm afraid it's just not there.

And here we come to the elephant (er... lion) in the room: Aslan. Look, guys, I just don't think Aslan works as a character in this novel. On a psychological level, he's aloof and opaque and fluctuates wildly in tone, none of which makes for a compelling character. On a narrative level, he doesn't quite add up either. He's king of Narnia, so how do Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy become royalty at the end? He's also clearly powerful enough to stop the Witch's evil rule at any time, so why doesn't he? Why does he wait 100 years to swoop in and save the day? The novel doesn't spend nearly enough time with him before his death either, not enough the justify the emotional stakes of his execution. And while we're on that, the whole "rising from the dead" thing is pretty much a deus ex machina explained away with a cryptic "deeper magic from before the dawn of time" hand wave, a rule we weren't privy to until it became important for justifying impossibilities. This is what we in creative writing workshops call, "Not earning your ending;" also known as: cheating.

Peter, always the ham, shows off his latest dance moves.

Now, just to be clear: I get that Aslan represents Jesus and that his resurrection is borrowing specifically from the biblical accounts and generally from a whole tradition about resurrected deities. The allegoric (or, as Lewis calls it, "supposal") nature of this story is not lost on me, and I realize that, in fact, by questioning the story like I am, I'm raising some theological questions as well. But here's the thing: even divorced from allegory, I think Aslan does work, just not as a character in a novel normally does. Aslan works as a fairy tale presence. He is evocative, not explained. When we hear "Aslan is on the move," it means nothing much specifically but it evokes, in Lewis's masterful efficiency, a feeling about the kind of entity he is. The same goes for the kids' interactions with Aslan; in a novel, his personality would be unconvincing and aloof (as I've described it before) because of the lack of precision, but in a fairy tale, we believe that lack of precision because it evokes an effect that wins us over. Aslan is a tremendously effective presence even if he is not an entirely convincing character, which is why my reaction to his death on this reading was a curious mix of sadness and unsuspended disbelief. I can out-think this novel, but I can't out-feel it.

The fact of the matter is that while I've been pretending this whole time that the fairy tale and novel elements of this book are somehow separable, they really aren't. You can't have one without the other. Without the brilliance of characterization afforded to Edmund and Lucy by the novel format, Aslan (and the story as a whole) might float away on easy-stakes fantasy. But without the fairy tale roots, there's no real impact to the images, plot, and even characters in this book. It's a fascinating and messy undertaking that C. S. Lewis has here, and I'd say that, warts and all, it's quite an accomplishment. To paraphrase one of the more famous passages from the book: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe isn't flawless, but it's good.

And that's it! Let me know what you think! What are your feelings about this book? Also, tune in next time when I take on this book's sequel, Prince Caspian. I know this post was a long one, and I'm not sure how many subsequent posts I can make this long. I guess we'll see.

Until next time!


1] I'm sorry, folks. Horrible as that acronym is, there's no way on God's green earth that I'm going to make it through this review if I have to type the novel's title in its entirety every time.

2] The Magician's Nephew notwithstanding, that is.