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.