Review: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C.S. Lewis

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Sun May 2 20:05:08 PDT 2021


The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
by C.S. Lewis

Illustrator: Pauline Baynes
Series:      Chronicles of Narnia #3
Publisher:   Collier Books
Copyright:   1952
Printing:    1978
ISBN:        0-02-044260-2
Format:      Mass market
Pages:       216

  There was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb and he almost deserved
  it.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the third Narnia book in original
publication order (see my review of The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe for more about reading order). You could arguably start
reading here; there are a lot of references to the previous books, but
mostly as background material, and I don't think any of it is vital. If
you wanted to sample a single Narnia book to see if you'd get along
with the series, this is the one I'd recommend.

Since I was a kid, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has held the spot of
my favorite of the series. I'm happy to report that it still holds up.
Apart from one bit that didn't age well (more on that below), this is
the book where the story and the world-building come together, in part
because Lewis picks a plot shape that works with what he wants to write
about.

The younger two Pevensie children, Edmund and Lucy, are spending the
summer with Uncle Harold and Aunt Alberta because their parents are in
America. That means spending the summer with their cousin Eustace. C.S.
Lewis had strong opinions about child-raising that crop up here and
there in his books, and Harold and Alberta are his example of
everything he dislikes: caricatured progressive, "scientific" parents
who don't believe in fiction or mess or vices. Eustace therefore starts
the book as a terror, a whiny bully who has only read boring practical
books and is constantly scoffing at the Pevensies and making fun of
their stories of Narnia. He is therefore entirely unprepared when the
painting of a ship in the guest bedroom turns into a portal to the
Narnia and dumps the three children into the middle of the ocean.

Thankfully, they're in the middle of the ocean near the ship in the
painting. That ship is the Dawn Treader, and onboard is Caspian from
the previous book, now king of Narnia. He has (improbably) sorted
things out in his kingdom and is now on a sea voyage to find seven
honorable Telmarine lords who left Narnia while his uncle was usurping
the throne. They're already days away from land, headed towards the
Lone Islands and, beyond that, into uncharted seas.

MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW.

Obviously, Eustace gets a redemption arc, which is roughly the first
half of this book. It's not a bad arc, but I am always happy when it's
over. Lewis tries so hard to make Eustace insufferable that it becomes
tedious. As an indoor kid who would not consider being dumped on a
primitive sailing ship to be a grand adventure, I wanted to have more
sympathy for him than the book would allow.

The other problem with Eustace's initial character is that Lewis wants
it to stem from "modern" parenting and not reading the right sort of
books, but I don't buy it. I've known kids whose parents didn't believe
in fiction, and they didn't act anything like this (and kids pick up a
lot more via osmosis regardless of parenting than Lewis seems to
realize). What Eustace acts like instead is an entitled, arrogant rich
kid who is used to the world revolving around him, and it's fascinating
to me how Lewis ignores class to focus on educational philosophy.

The best part of Eustace's story is Reepicheep, which is just setup for
Reepicheep becoming the best part of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Reepicheep, the leader of Narnia's talking mice, first appears in
Prince Caspian, but there he's mostly played for laughs: the absurdly
brave and dashing mouse who rushes into every fight he sees. In this
book, he comes into his own as the courage and occasionally the moral
conscience of the party. Caspian wants to explore and to find the lords
of his past, the Pevensie kids want to have a sea adventure, and
Eustace is in this book to have a redemption arc, but Reepicheep is the
driving force at the heart of the voyage. He's going to Aslan's country
beyond the sea, armed with a nursemaid's song about his destiny and a
determination to be his best and most honorable self every step of the
way, and nothing is going to stop him.

Eustace, of course, takes an immediate dislike to a talking rodent.
Reepicheep, in return, is the least interested of anyone on the ship in
tolerating Eustace's obnoxious behavior and would be quite happy to
duel him. But when Eustace is turned into a dragon, Reepicheep is the
one who spends hours with him, telling him stories and ensuring he's
not alone. It's beautifully handled, and my only complaint is that
Lewis doesn't do enough with the Eustace and Reepicheep friendship (or
indeed with Eustace at all) for the rest of the book.

After Eustace's restoration and a few other relatively short incidents
comes the second long section of the book and the part that didn't age
well: the island of the Dufflepuds. It's a shame because the setup is
wonderful: a cultivated island in the middle of nowhere with no one in
sight, mysterious pounding sounds and voices, the fun of trying to
figure out just what these invisible creatures could possibly be, and
of course Lucy's foray into the second floor of a house, braving the
lair of a magician to find and read one of the best books of magic in
fantasy.

Everything about how Lewis sets this scene is so well done. The kids
are coming from an encounter with a sea serpent and a horrifically
dangerous magic island and land on this scene of eerily normal
domesticity. The most dangerous excursion is Lucy going upstairs in a
brightly lit house with soft carpet in the middle of the day. And yet
it's incredibly tense because Lewis knows exactly how to put you in
Lucy's head, right down to having to stand with her back to an open
door to read the book.

And that book! The pages only turn forward, the spells are beautifully
illustrated, and the sense of temptation is palpable. Lucy reading the
eavesdropping spell is one of the more memorable bits in this series,
at least for me, and makes a surprisingly subtle moral point about the
practical reasons why invading other people's privacy is unwise and can
just make you miserable. And then, when Lucy reads the visibility spell
that was her goal, there's this exchange, which is pure C.S. Lewis:

  "Oh Aslan," said she, "it was kind of you to come."

  "I have been here all the time," said he, "but you have just made me
  visible."

  "Aslan!" said Lucy almost a little reproachfully. "Don't make fun of
  me. As if anything I could do would make you visible!"

  "It did," said Aslan. "Did you think I wouldn't obey my own rules?"

I love the subtlety of what's happening here: the way that Lucy is much
more powerful than she thinks she is, but only because Aslan decided to
make the rules that way and chooses to follow his own rules, making
himself vulnerable in a fascinating way. The best part is that Lewis
never belabors points like this; the characters immediately move on to
talk about other things, and no one feels obligated to explain.

But, unfortunately, along with the explanation of the thumping and the
magician, we learn that the Dufflepuds are (remarkably dim-witted)
dwarfs, the magician is their guardian (put there by Aslan, no less!),
he transformed them into rather absurd shapes that they hate, and all
of this is played for laughs. Once you notice that these are sentient
creatures being treated essentially like pets (and physically
transformed against their will), the level of paternalistic colonialism
going on here is very off-putting. It's even worse that the Dufflepuds
are memorably funny (washing dishes before dinner to save time
afterwards!) and are arguably too dim to manage on their own, because
Lewis made the authorial choice to write them that way. The "white
man's burden" feeling is very strong.

And Lewis could have made other choices! Coriakin the magician is a
fascinating and somewhat morally ambiguous character. We learn later in
the book that he's a star and his presence on the island is a
punishment of sorts, leading to one of my other favorite bits of
theology in this book:

  "My son," said Ramandu, "it is not for you, a son of Adam, to know
  what faults a star can commit."

Lewis could have kept most of the setup, kept the delightfully silly
things the Dufflepuds believe, changed who was responsible for their
transformation, and given Coriakin a less authoritarian role, and the
story would have been so much stronger for it.

After this, the story gets stranger and wilder, and it's in the last
part that I think the true magic of this book lies. The entirety of The
Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a progression from a relatively mundane
sea voyage to something more awe-inspiring. The last few chapters are a
tour de force of wonder: rejuvenating stars, sunbirds, the Witch's
stone knife, undersea kingdoms, a sea of lilies, a wall of water, the
cliffs of Aslan's country, and the literal end of the world. Lewis does
it without much conflict, with sparse description in a very few pages,
and with beautifully memorable touches like the quality of the light
and the hush that falls over the ship.

This is the part of Narnia that I point to and wonder why I don't see
more emulation (although I should note that it is arguably an immram).
Tolkien-style fantasy, with dwarfs and elves and magic rings and great
battles, is everywhere, but I can't think of many examples of this
sense of awe and discovery without great battles and detailed
explanations. Or of characters like Reepicheep, who gets one of the
best lines of the series:

  "My own plans are made. While I can, I sail east in the Dawn
  Treader. When she fails me, I paddle east in my coracle. When she
  sinks, I shall swim east with my four paws. And when I can swim no
  longer, if I have not reached Aslan's country, or shot over the edge
  of the world in some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the
  sunrise and Peepiceek shall be the head of the talking mice in
  Narnia."

The last section of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is one of my
favorite endings of any book precisely because it's so different than
the typical ending of a novel. The final return to England is always a
bit disappointing in this series, but it's very short and is preceded
by so much wonder that I don't mind. Aslan does appear to the kids as a
lamb at the very end of the world, making Lewis's intended Christian
context a bit more obvious, but even that isn't belabored, just left
there for those who recognize the symbolism to notice.

I was curious during this re-read to understand why The Voyage of the
Dawn Treader is so much better than the first two books in the series.
I think it's primarily due to two things: pacing, and a story structure
that's better aligned with what Lewis wants to write about.

For pacing, both The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince
Caspian have surprisingly long setups for short books. In The Voyage of
the Dawn Treader, by contrast, it takes only 35 pages to get the kids
in Narnia, introduce all the characters, tour the ship, learn why
Caspian is off on a sea voyage, establish where this book fits in the
Narnian timeline, and have the kids be captured by slavers. None of the
Narnia books are exactly slow, but Dawn Treader is the first book of
the series that feels like it knows exactly where it's going and isn't
wasting time getting there.

The other structural success of this book is that it's a semi-episodic
adventure, which means Lewis can stop trying to write about battles and
political changes whose details he's clearly not interested in and
instead focus wholeheartedly on sense-of-wonder exploration. The
island-hopping structure lets Lewis play with ideas and drop them
before they wear out their welcome. And the lack of major historical
events also means that Aslan doesn't have to come in to resolve
everything and instead can play the role of guardian angel.

I think The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has the most compelling
portrayal of Aslan in the series. He doesn't make decisions for the
kids or tell them directly what to do the way he did in the previous
two books. Instead, he shows up whenever they're about to make a
dreadful mistake and does just enough to get them to make a better
decision. Some readers may find this takes too much of the tension out
of the book, but I have always appreciated it. It lets nervous child
readers enjoy the adventures while knowing that Aslan will keep
anything too bad from happening. He plays the role of a protective but
non-interfering parent in a genre that usually doesn't have parents
because they would intervene to prevent adventures.

I enjoyed this book just as much as I remembered enjoying it during my
childhood re-reads. Still the best book of the series.

This, as with both The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince
Caspian, was originally intended to be the last book of the series.
That, of course, turned out to not be the case, and The Voyage of the
Dawn Treader is followed (in both chronological and original
publication order) by The Silver Chair.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-05-02

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-02-044260-2.html

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


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