Review: The Silver Chair, by C.S. Lewis

[Russ Allbery]

The Silver Chair
by C.S. Lewis

Illustrator: Pauline Baynes
Series:      Chronicles of Narnia #4
Publisher:   Collier
Copyright:   1953
Printing:    1978
ISBN:        0-02-044250-5
Format:      Mass market
Pages:       217

The Silver Chair is a sequel to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and the
fourth book of the Chronicles of Narnia in original publication order.
(For more about publication order, see the introduction to my review of
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.) Apart from a few references to
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader at the start, it stands sufficiently on
its own that you could read it without reading the other books,
although I have no idea why you'd want to.

We have finally arrived at my least favorite of the Narnia books and
the one that I sometimes skipped during re-reads. (One of my objections
to the new publication order is that it puts The Silver Chair and The
Last Battle back-to-back, and I don't think you should do that to
yourself as a reader.) I was hoping that there would be previously
unnoticed depth to this book that would redeem it as an adult reader.
Sadly, no; with one very notable exception, it's just not very good.

MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW.

The Silver Chair opens on the grounds of the awful school to which
Eustace's parents sent him: Experiment House. That means it opens (and
closes) with a more extended version of Lewis's rant about schools. I
won't get into this in detail since it's mostly a framing device, but
Lewis is remarkably vicious and petty. His snide contempt for putting
girls and boys in the same school did not age well, nor did his
emphasis at the end of the book that the incompetent head of the school
is a woman. I also raised an eyebrow at holding up ordinary British
schools as a model of preventing bullying.

Thankfully, as Lewis says at the start, this is not a school story.
This is prelude to Jill meeting Eustace and the two of them escaping
the bullies via a magical door into Narnia. Unfortunately, that's the
second place The Silver Chair gets off on the wrong foot.

Jill and Eustace end up in what the reader of the series will recognize
as Aslan's country and almost walk off the vast cliff at the end of the
world, last seen from the bottom in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Eustace freaks out, Jill (who has a much better head for heights) goes
intentionally close to the cliff in a momentary impulse of arrogance
before realizing how high it is, Eustace tries to pull her back, and
somehow Eustace falls over the edge.

I do not have a good head for heights, and I wonder how much of it is
due to this memorable scene. I certainly blame Lewis for my belief that
pulling someone else back from the edge of a cliff can result in you
being pushed off, something that on adult reflection makes very little
sense but which is seared into my lizard brain. But worse, this sets
the tone for the rest of the story: everything is constantly going
wrong because Eustace and Jill either have normal human failings that
are disproportionately punished or don't successfully follow esoteric
and unreasonably opaque instructions from Aslan.

Eustace is safe, of course; Aslan blows him to Narnia and then gives
Jill instructions before sending her afterwards. (I suspect the whole
business with the cliff was an authorial cheat to set up Jill's
interaction with Aslan without Eustace there to explain anything.) She
and Eustace have been summoned to Narnia to find the lost Prince, and
she has to memorize four Signs that will lead her on the right path.

Gah, the Signs. If you were the sort of kid that I was, you immediately
went back and re-read the Signs several times to memorize them like
Jill was told to. The rest of this book was then an exercise in anxious
frustration. First, Eustace is an ass to Jill and refuses to even
listen to the first Sign. They kind of follow the second but only with
heavy foreshadowing that Jill isn't memorizing the Signs every day like
she's supposed to. They mostly botch the third and have to backtrack to
follow it. Meanwhile, the narrator is constantly reminding you that the
kids (and Jill in particular) are screwing up their instructions. On
re-reading, it's clear they're not doing that poorly given how obscure
the Signs are, but the ominous foreshadowing is enough to leave a
reader a nervous wreck.

Worse, Eustace and Jill are just miserable to each other through the
whole book. They constantly bicker and snipe, Eustace doesn't want to
listen to her and blames her for everything, and the hard traveling
makes it all worse. Lewis does know how to tell a satisfying redemption
arc; one of the things I have always liked about Edmund's story is that
he learns his lesson and becomes my favorite character in the
subsequent stories. But, sadly, Eustace's redemption arc is another
matter. He's totally different here than he was at the start of The
Voyage of the Dawn Treader (to the degree that if he didn't have the
same name in both books, I wouldn't recognize him as the same person),
but rather than a better person he seems to have become a different
sort of ass. There's no sign here of the humility and appreciation for
friendship that he supposedly learned from his time as a dragon.

On top of that, the story isn't very interesting. Rilian, the lost
Prince, is a damp squib who talks in the irritating archaic accent that
Lewis insists on using for all Narnian royalty. His story feels like
Lewis lifted it from medieval Arthurian literature; most of it could be
dropped into a collection of stories of knights of the Round Table
without seeming out of place. When you have a country full of talking
animals and weirdly fascinating bits of theology, it's disappointing to
get a garden-variety story about an evil enchantress in which everyone
is noble and tragic and extremely stupid.

Thankfully, The Silver Chair has one important redeeming quality:
Puddleglum.

Puddleglum is a Marsh-wiggle, a bipedal amphibious sort who lives alone
in the northern marshes. He's recruited by the owls to help the kids
with their mission when they fail to get King Caspian's help after
blowing the first Sign. Puddleglum is an absolute delight: endlessly
pessimistic, certain the worst possible thing will happen at any
moment, but also weirdly cheerful about it. I love Eeyore characters in
general, but Puddleglum is even better because he gives the kids'
endless bickering exactly the respect that it deserves.

  "But we all need to be very careful about our tempers, seeing all
  the hard times we shall have to go through together. Won't do to
  quarrel, you know. At any rate, don't begin it too soon. I know
  these expeditions usually end that way; knifing one another, I
  shouldn't wonder, before all's done. But the longer we can keep off
  it—"

It's even more obvious on re-reading that Puddleglum is the only
effective member of the party. Jill has only a couple of moments where
she gets the three of them past some obstacle. Eustace is completely
useless; I can't remember a single helpful thing he does in the entire
book. Puddleglum and his pessimistic determination, on the other hand,
is right about nearly everything at each step. And he's the one who
takes decisive action to break the Lady of the Green Kirtle's spell
near the end.

I was expecting a bit of sexism and (mostly in upcoming books) racism
when re-reading these books as an adult given when they were written
and who Lewis was, but what has caught me by surprise is the
colonialism. Lewis is weirdly insistent on importing humans from
England to fill all the important roles in stories, even stories that
are entirely about Narnians. I know this is the inherent weakness of
portal fantasy, but it bothers me how little Lewis believes in Narnians
solving their own problems. The Silver Chair makes this blatantly
obvious: if Aslan had just told Puddleglum the same information he told
Jill and sent a Badger or a Beaver or a Mouse along with him, all the
evidence in the book says the whole affair would have been sorted out
with much less fuss and anxiety. Jill and Eustace are far more of a
hindrance than a help, which makes for frustrating reading when they're
supposedly the protagonists.

The best part of this book is the underground bits, once they finally
get through the first three Signs and stumble into the Lady's kingdom
far below the surface. Rilian is a great disappointment, but the fight
against the Lady's mind-altering magic leads to one of the great quotes
of the series, on par with Reepicheep's speech in The Voyage of the
Dawn Treader.

  "Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things — trees
  and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we
  have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things
  seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this
  black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes
  me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to
  think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right.
  But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks
  your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play
  world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it.
  I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any
  Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two
  gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at
  once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for
  Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but
  that's small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say."

This is Puddleglum, of course. And yes, I know that this is apologetics
and Lewis is talking about Christianity and making the case for faith
without proof, but put that aside for the moment, because this is still
powerful life philosophy. It's a cynic's litany against cynicism. It's
a pessimist's defense of hope.

Suppose we have only dreamed all those things like justice and fairness
and equality, community and consensus and collaboration, universal
basic income and effective environmentalism. The dreary magic of the
realists and the pragmatists say that such things are baby's games,
silly fantasies. But you can still choose to live like you believe in
them. In Alasdair Gray's reworking of a line from Dennis Lee, "work as
if you live in the early days of a better nation."

That's one moment that I'll always remember from this book. The other
is after they kill the Lady of the Green Kirtle and her magic starts to
fade, they have to escape from the underground caverns while surrounded
by the Earthmen who served her and who they believe are hostile. It's a
tense moment that turns into a delightful celebration when they realize
that the Earthmen were just as much prisoners as the Prince was. They
were forced from a far deeper land below, full of living metals and
salamanders who speak from rivers of fire. It's the one moment in this
book that I thought captured the magical strangeness of Narnia, that
sense that there are wonderful things just out of sight that don't
follow the normal patterns of medieval-ish fantasy.

Other than a few great lines from Puddleglum and some moments in
Aslan's country, the first 60% of this book is a loss and remarkably
frustrating to read. That last 40% isn't bad, although I wish Rilian
had any discernible character other than generic Arthurian knight. I
don't know what Eustace is doing in this book at all other than
providing a way for Jill to get into Narnia, and I wish Lewis had
realized Puddleglum could be the protagonist. But as frustrating as The
Silver Chair can be, I am still glad I re-read it. Puddleglum is one of
the truly memorable characters of children's literature, and it's a
shame he's buried in a weak mid-series book.

Followed, in the original publication order, by The Horse and His Boy.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-05-29

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-02-044250-5.html

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