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.