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A review by electric_whelk
The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis
4.0
CS Lewis is very keen for you to know that Experiment House, the school from which Jill and Eustace escape to Narnia, does not segregate children by gender, does not teach children who Adam and Eve were, and has a woman for a headteacher (who he goes out of his way to remind you is a woman moments before depicting her bungle a police case, get fired, cause problems as a school inspector, and live happily ever after in Parliament. Jesucristo.). I'm not complaining, to be clear: Lewis rambling from his otherwise very good fantasy story to vent about co-ed schools is charmingly festive; your one Tory-voting uncle, very good with the kids, has been at the sherry again. Merry Christmas to all.
That accidental comic relief, together with some very very charming supporting characters (a rambling old owl and a garrulously dour amphibian) add some great levity to what's otherwise one of the darkest of the Narnia books. The pacing here isn't great - its climactic sequence arrives too late and ends too early - but the tone is absolutely rock solid. Lewis displays an excellent eye for ghoulish detail: the cloying half-maternal kindness of a cannibal towards their livestock, the perversity of being served the flesh of a talking stag, the pallid image of a swaying lamp in a cave, miles underground, that someone is trying to convince you is the only reason you dream of a big ball of burning gas you swear is called the sun. Yet again, I find myself wrapped up in Lewis's Christianity: who better to tell a story where the utilitarian harm of the antagonists is so much smaller and less vivid than the intrinsic wrongness of the whole thing? And I found myself very moved by the philosophical ace-in-the-hole that vanquishes the wrongdoer: paraphrasing, "even if Aslan doesn't exist, I'd rather spend a life looking for him." It's not what I believe, personally, but what makes for better fiction than a compellingly made argument for something you'd never otherwise believe?
That accidental comic relief, together with some very very charming supporting characters (a rambling old owl and a garrulously dour amphibian) add some great levity to what's otherwise one of the darkest of the Narnia books. The pacing here isn't great - its climactic sequence arrives too late and ends too early - but the tone is absolutely rock solid. Lewis displays an excellent eye for ghoulish detail: the cloying half-maternal kindness of a cannibal towards their livestock, the perversity of being served the flesh of a talking stag, the pallid image of a swaying lamp in a cave, miles underground, that someone is trying to convince you is the only reason you dream of a big ball of burning gas you swear is called the sun. Yet again, I find myself wrapped up in Lewis's Christianity: who better to tell a story where the utilitarian harm of the antagonists is so much smaller and less vivid than the intrinsic wrongness of the whole thing? And I found myself very moved by the philosophical ace-in-the-hole that vanquishes the wrongdoer: paraphrasing, "even if Aslan doesn't exist, I'd rather spend a life looking for him." It's not what I believe, personally, but what makes for better fiction than a compellingly made argument for something you'd never otherwise believe?