Review: Prince Caspian, by C.S. Lewis

[Russ Allbery]

Prince Caspian
by C.S. Lewis

Illustrator: Pauline Baynes
Series:      Chronicles of Narnia #2
Publisher:   Collier Books
Copyright:   1951
Printing:    1979
ISBN:        0-02-044240-8
Format:      Mass market
Pages:       216

Prince Caspian is the second book of the Chronicles of Narnia in the
original publication order (the fourth in the new publication order)
and a direct sequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. As much as
I would like to say you could start here if you wanted less of Lewis's
exploration of secondary-world Christianity and more children's
adventure, I'm not sure it would be a good reading experience. Prince
Caspian rests heavily on the events of The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe.

If you haven't already, you may also want to read my review of that
book for some introductory material about my past relationship with the
series and why I follow the original publication order.

Prince Caspian always feels like the real beginning of a re-read.
Re-reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is okay but a bit of a
chore: it's very random, the business with Edmund drags on, and it's
very concerned with hitting the mandatory theological notes. Prince
Caspian is more similar to the following books and feels like Narnia
proper. That said, I have always found the ending of Prince Caspian
oddly forgettable. This re-read helped me see why: one of the worst
bits of the series is in the middle of this book, and then the dramatic
shape of the ending is very strange.

MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW for both this book and The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe.

Prince Caspian opens with the Pevensie kids heading to school by rail
at the end of the summer holidays. They're saying their goodbyes to
each other at a train station when they are first pulled and then
dumped into the middle of a wood. After a bit of exploration and the
discovery of a seashore, they find an overgrown and partly ruined
castle.

They have, of course, been pulled back into Narnia, and the castle is
Cair Paravel, their great capital when they ruled as kings and queens.
The twist is that it's over a thousand years later, long enough that
Cair Paravel is now on an island and has been abandoned to the forest.
They discover parts of how that happened when they rescue a dwarf named
Trumpkin from two soldiers who are trying to drown him near the
supposedly haunted woods.

Most of the books in this series have good hooks, but Prince Caspian
has one of the best. I adored everything about the start of this book
as a kid: the initial delight at being by the sea when they were on
their way to boarding school, the realization that getting food was not
going to be easy, the abandoned castle, the dawning understanding of
where they are, the treasure room, and the extended story about Prince
Caspian, his discovery of the Old Narnia, and his flight from his
usurper uncle. It becomes clear from Trumpkin's story that the children
were pulled back into Narnia by Susan's horn (the best artifact in
these books), but Caspian's forces were expecting the great kings and
queens of legend from Narnia's Golden Age. Trumpkin is delightfully
nonplussed at four school-age kids who are determined to join up with
Prince Caspian and help.

That's the first half of Prince Caspian, and it's a solid magical
adventure story with lots of potential. The ending, alas, doesn't
entirely work. And between that, we get the business with Aslan and
Lucy in the woods, or as I thought of it even as a kid, the bit where
Aslan is awful to everyone for no reason.

For those who have forgotten, or who don't care about spoilers, the
kids plus Trumpkin are trying to make their way to Aslan's How
(formerly the Stone Table) where Prince Caspian and his forces were
gathered, when they hit an unexpected deep gorge. Lucy sees Aslan and
thinks he's calling for them to go up the gorge, but none of the other
kids or Trumpkin can see him and only Edmund believes her. They go down
instead, which almost gets them killed by archers. Then, that night,
Lucy wakes up and finds Aslan again, who tells her to wake the others
and follow him, but warns she may have to follow him alone if she can't
convince the others to go along. She wakes them up (which does not go
over well), Aslan continues to be invisible to everyone else despite
being right there, Susan is particularly upset at Lucy, and everything
is awful. But this time they do follow her (with lots of grumbling and
over Susan's objections). This, of course, is the right decision: Aslan
leads them to a hidden path that takes them over the river they're
trying to cross, and becomes visible to everyone when they reach the
other side.

This is a mess. It made me angry as a kid, and it still makes me angry
now. No one has ever had trouble seeing Aslan before, so the kids are
rightfully skeptical. By intentionally deceiving them, Aslan puts the
other kids in an awful position: they either have to believe Lucy is
telling the truth and Aslan is being weirdly malicious, or Lucy is
mistaken even though she's certain. It not only leads directly to
conflict among the kids, it makes Lucy (the one who does all the right
things all along) utterly miserable. It's just cruel and mean, for no
purpose.

It seems clear to me that this is C.S. Lewis trying to make a
theological point about faith, and in a way that makes it even worse
because I think he's making a different point than he intended to make.
Why is religious faith necessary; why doesn't God simply make himself
apparent to everyone and remove the doubt? This is one of the major
problems in Christian apologetics, Lewis chooses to raise it here, and
the answer he gives is that God only shows himself to his special
favorites and hides from everyone else as a test. It's clearly not even
a question of intention to have faith; Edmund has way more faith here
than Lucy does (since Lucy doesn't need it) and still doesn't get to
see Aslan properly until everyone else does. Pah.

The worst part of this is that it's effectively the last we see of
Susan.

Prince Caspian is otherwise the book in which Susan comes into her own.
The sibling relationship between the kids is great here in general, but
Susan is particularly good. She is the one who takes bold action to
rescue Trumpkin, risking herself by firing an arrow into the helmet of
one of the soldiers despite being the most cautious of the kids. (And
then gets a little defensive about her shot because she doesn't want
anyone to think she would miss that badly at short range, a detail I
just love.) I identified so much with her not wanting to beat Trumpkin
at an archery contest because she felt bad for him (but then doing it
anyway). She is, in short, awesome.

I was fine with her being the most grumpy and frustrated with the
argument over picking a direction. They're all kids, and sometimes one
gets grumpy and frustrated and awful to the people around you. Once
everyone sees Aslan again, Susan offers a truly excellent apology to
Lucy, so it seemed like Lewis was setting up a redemption arc for her
the way that he did for Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
(although I maintain that nearly all of this mess was Aslan's fault).
But then we never see Susan's conversation with Aslan, Peter later says
he and Susan are now too old to return to Narnia, and that's it for
Susan. Argh.

I'll have more to say about this later (and it's not an original
opinion), but the way Lewis treats Susan is the worst part of this
series, and it adds insult to injury that it happens immediately after
she has a chance to shine.

The rest of the book suffers from the same problem that The Lion, the
Witch and the Wardrobe did, namely that Aslan fixes everything in a
somewhat surreal wild party and it's unclear why the kids needed to be
there. (This is the book where Bacchus and Silenus show up, there is a
staggering quantity of wine for a children's book, and Aslan turns a
bunch of obnoxious school kids into pigs.) The kids do have more of a
role to play this time: Peter and Edmund help save Caspian, and there's
a (somewhat poorly motivated) duel that sends up the ending. But other
than the brief battle in the How, the battle is won by Aslan waking the
trees, and it's not clear why he didn't do that earlier. The ending is,
at best, rushed and not worthy of its excellent setup. I was also
disappointed that the "wait, why are you all kids?" moment was
hand-waved away by Narnia giving the kids magical gravitas.

Lewis never felt in control of either The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe or Prince Caspian. In both cases, he had a great hook and some
ideas of what he wanted to hit along the way, but the endings are more
sense of wonder and random Aslan set pieces than anything that follows
naturally from the setup. This is part of why I'm not commenting too
much on the sour notes, such as the red dwarves being the good and
loyal ones but the black dwarves being suspicious and only out for
themselves. If I thought bits like that were deliberate, I'd complain
more, but instead it feels like Lewis threw random things he liked
about children's books and animal stories into the book and gave it a
good stir, and some of his subconscious prejudices fell into the story
along the way.

That said, resolving your civil war children's book by gathering all
the people who hate talking animals (but who have lived in Narnia for
generations) and exiling them through a magical gateway to a
conveniently uninhabited country is certainly a choice, particularly
when you wrote the book only two years after the Partition of India.
Good lord.

Prince Caspian is a much better book than The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe for the first half, and then it mostly falls apart. The first
half is so good, though. I want to read the book that this could have
become, but I'm not sure anyone else writes quite like Lewis at his
best.

Followed by The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is my absolute
favorite of the series.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-04-03

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-02-044240-8.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>