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paulviebranz 's review for:
The Silver Chair
by C.S. Lewis
The Silver Chair is the fourth published Narnia book, following The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and it is the fifth Narnia book that I've read in my life. As a young kid, I'd read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and then in 2008 when the second Walden Media film was close to release, I read The Magician's Nephew, and then LWW again, followed by Prince Caspian... but then I read and greatly disliked Dawn Treader, so I stopped reading the series altogether. (I DID enjoy the film of Prince Caspian, however, quite a bit.)
Flash forward to last summer, as I'm studying His Dark Materials in grad school: as I'm researching for a paper discussing Pullman's work and Tolkien's, I find nearly all such existing scholarship ALSO talks about C. S. Lewis's Narnia, so I endeavor to finally sit down and read all of those books. Deciding on publication order, I manage to read LWW, Caspian, and Dawn Treader again before beginning the fall semester-- I enjoy them all, LWW best of all, and Dawn Treader least of all, but far and away better than I had the first time I'd read, thirteen years prior.
Now, upon finding all seven Narnia books available for one credit on Audible, I've launched back in, starting with The Silver Chair, about which I had no idea about whatsoever.
I really enjoyed The Silver Chair. At the moment, I would say I liked it more than Dawn Treader, and not very much less than Caspian, but decidedly not so much as LWW.
There are two aspects of the book that I especially liked, and those are the character of Puddleglum, and the realm of the gnomes, plus the gnomes themselves.
Puddleglum is simply a delight. Kind of a superficially pessimistic Hagrid, nearly every one of his lines had me smiling, if not laughing. And his bravery for the children's sake, and Rilian's, was very admirable.
And to find the gnomes in Underland not simple villains for their differences from the "overlanders," but complex individuals with an entirely other way of life ACCEPTED by our child heroes, and the very heir to the Narnian throne himself, was wonderful. While I don't think that Tolkien's work, for example, is any less magnificent, or any more intentionally problematic, for its relatively strict binary color symbolism, or its coding of "Eastern" as "evil," it was a pleasant relief to find the gnomes in The Silver Chair, and their culture, to be an extended and very clear statement about the importance of diversity and cultural acceptance.
The return of Eustace Scrubb from Dawn Treader was handled nicely. Although he'd grown substantially as a person as a result of that adventure, he was still a fairly gruff boy, quite different from the kingly Pevensie boys. That is to say, for children's books, there's an impressively good deal of difference between those three characters who could easily have been incredibly similar to one another.
I also liked Jill Pole a good deal-- she's brave and quite resourceful in her way, but I found her to be somewhat more of a girly caricature than Susan or Lucy Pevensie had ever been. Something that sticks out pretty keenly in my memory is Jill simply sitting around, aghast with horror at the sight of violence, as Eustace and Rilian face off against the witch in her giant snake form. Maybe, JUST maybe, Lucy, at the start of LWW, might have cowered away like that, but by the end of that book, either of them would have helped in the fight some way or other. In that regard, this felt like a bit of a step backwards.
Not that characters can't be better or worse than other characters at fighting, or dealing with violence in general, but overall, Jill didn't seem to adapt to Narnia (or the Underland) in the same way that the Pevensies or Eustace did.
Especially compared to Dawn Treader, I found that The Silver Chair had a clear plot, and a good sense of urgency about moving it along. The children are sent out to rescue Rilian, the long-lost son of (now very old) King Caspian, and they're constantly making strides toward that goal (or at least some other immediate one, in the instances in which they stray a bit). I found the identities of Rilian and the Witch unsurprising, but narratively satisfying-- again, these ARE children's fantasy books.
However, I was VERY surprised at the death of King Caspian. The idea that one might succeed at their goal, but find things still don't work out the way they want, is, I think, a good and healthy one for kids to encounter in fiction.
Now, that does lead us to the morals and the religiosity of the text, by way of Caspian's return from death. The scenes following the return of Caspian's spirit are a bit confusing to me... I suppose Lewis is at once asserting the power of imagination and of faith over institutions, which is fair enough, except the headmistress at the school SHOULD have been shocked to find a caved-in wall and a huge lion! The manner that Lewis delivers this final statement felt awfully clunky and unfair to me, amusing as it was.
But in the text as a whole, we are constantly reminded, via Jill, to stay on task-- specifically, on Aslan's task. Aslan being an analog for God, this mandate might strike some as quite preachy or didactic, but I think remembering that the children learn from the entirety of their adventure, including the bits when they were distracted, might refigure the lesson as not exclusively pertaining to religious faith, but to steadfastness in general. In other words, I think it's just as valid to come away from the book with the lesson that one ought to keep their long-term goals in mind, and work diligently toward them, as for one to come away with a specifically Christian moral. In either case, I do think that the idea that the journey is as important as the destination rings true.
I'm awfully glad that I returned to Narnia via this audiobooks, which are top notch, and I'm looking forward to finishing up the series soon!
Flash forward to last summer, as I'm studying His Dark Materials in grad school: as I'm researching for a paper discussing Pullman's work and Tolkien's, I find nearly all such existing scholarship ALSO talks about C. S. Lewis's Narnia, so I endeavor to finally sit down and read all of those books. Deciding on publication order, I manage to read LWW, Caspian, and Dawn Treader again before beginning the fall semester-- I enjoy them all, LWW best of all, and Dawn Treader least of all, but far and away better than I had the first time I'd read, thirteen years prior.
Now, upon finding all seven Narnia books available for one credit on Audible, I've launched back in, starting with The Silver Chair, about which I had no idea about whatsoever.
I really enjoyed The Silver Chair. At the moment, I would say I liked it more than Dawn Treader, and not very much less than Caspian, but decidedly not so much as LWW.
There are two aspects of the book that I especially liked, and those are the character of Puddleglum, and the realm of the gnomes, plus the gnomes themselves.
Puddleglum is simply a delight. Kind of a superficially pessimistic Hagrid, nearly every one of his lines had me smiling, if not laughing. And his bravery for the children's sake, and Rilian's, was very admirable.
And to find the gnomes in Underland not simple villains for their differences from the "overlanders," but complex individuals with an entirely other way of life ACCEPTED by our child heroes, and the very heir to the Narnian throne himself, was wonderful. While I don't think that Tolkien's work, for example, is any less magnificent, or any more intentionally problematic, for its relatively strict binary color symbolism, or its coding of "Eastern" as "evil," it was a pleasant relief to find the gnomes in The Silver Chair, and their culture, to be an extended and very clear statement about the importance of diversity and cultural acceptance.
The return of Eustace Scrubb from Dawn Treader was handled nicely. Although he'd grown substantially as a person as a result of that adventure, he was still a fairly gruff boy, quite different from the kingly Pevensie boys. That is to say, for children's books, there's an impressively good deal of difference between those three characters who could easily have been incredibly similar to one another.
I also liked Jill Pole a good deal-- she's brave and quite resourceful in her way, but I found her to be somewhat more of a girly caricature than Susan or Lucy Pevensie had ever been. Something that sticks out pretty keenly in my memory is Jill simply sitting around, aghast with horror at the sight of violence, as Eustace and Rilian face off against the witch in her giant snake form. Maybe, JUST maybe, Lucy, at the start of LWW, might have cowered away like that, but by the end of that book, either of them would have helped in the fight some way or other. In that regard, this felt like a bit of a step backwards.
Not that characters can't be better or worse than other characters at fighting, or dealing with violence in general, but overall, Jill didn't seem to adapt to Narnia (or the Underland) in the same way that the Pevensies or Eustace did.
Especially compared to Dawn Treader, I found that The Silver Chair had a clear plot, and a good sense of urgency about moving it along. The children are sent out to rescue Rilian, the long-lost son of (now very old) King Caspian, and they're constantly making strides toward that goal (or at least some other immediate one, in the instances in which they stray a bit). I found the identities of Rilian and the Witch unsurprising, but narratively satisfying-- again, these ARE children's fantasy books.
However, I was VERY surprised at the death of King Caspian. The idea that one might succeed at their goal, but find things still don't work out the way they want, is, I think, a good and healthy one for kids to encounter in fiction.
Now, that does lead us to the morals and the religiosity of the text, by way of Caspian's return from death. The scenes following the return of Caspian's spirit are a bit confusing to me... I suppose Lewis is at once asserting the power of imagination and of faith over institutions, which is fair enough, except the headmistress at the school SHOULD have been shocked to find a caved-in wall and a huge lion! The manner that Lewis delivers this final statement felt awfully clunky and unfair to me, amusing as it was.
But in the text as a whole, we are constantly reminded, via Jill, to stay on task-- specifically, on Aslan's task. Aslan being an analog for God, this mandate might strike some as quite preachy or didactic, but I think remembering that the children learn from the entirety of their adventure, including the bits when they were distracted, might refigure the lesson as not exclusively pertaining to religious faith, but to steadfastness in general. In other words, I think it's just as valid to come away from the book with the lesson that one ought to keep their long-term goals in mind, and work diligently toward them, as for one to come away with a specifically Christian moral. In either case, I do think that the idea that the journey is as important as the destination rings true.
I'm awfully glad that I returned to Narnia via this audiobooks, which are top notch, and I'm looking forward to finishing up the series soon!