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.
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