Review: The Horse and His Boy, by C.S. Lewis

[Russ Allbery]

The Horse and His Boy
by C.S. Lewis

Illustrator: Pauline Baynes
Series:      Chronicles of Narnia #5
Publisher:   Collier Books
Copyright:   1954
Printing:    1978
ISBN:        0-02-044200-9
Format:      Mass market
Pages:       217

The Horse and His Boy was the fifth published book in the Chronicles of
Narnia, but it takes place during the last chapter of The Lion, the
Witch and the Wardrobe, in the midst of the golden age of Narnia. It's
the only true side story of the series and it doesn't matter much where
in sequence you read it, as long as it's after The Lion, the Witch and
the Wardrobe and before The Last Battle (which would spoil its ending
somewhat).

MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW.

The Horse and His Boy is also the only book of the series that is not a
portal fantasy. The Pevensie kids make an appearance, but as the ruling
kings and queens of Narnia, and only as side characters. The
protagonists are a boy named Shasta, a girl named Aravis, and horses
named Bree and Hwin. Aravis is a Calormene, a native of the desert (and
extremely Orientalist, but more on that later) kingdom to the south of
Narnia and Archenland. Shasta starts the book as the theoretically
adopted son but mostly slave of a Calormene fisherman. The Horse and
His Boy is the story of their journey from Calormen north to Archenland
and Narnia, just in time to defend Narnia and Archenland from an
invasion.

This story starts with a great hook. Shasta's owner is hosting a
passing Tarkaan, a Calormene lord, and overhears a negotiation to sell
Shasta to the Tarkaan as his slave (and, in the process, revealing that
he rescued Shasta as an infant from a rowboat next to a dead man).
Shasta starts talking to the Tarkaan's horse and is caught by surprise
when the horse talks back. He is a Talking Horse from Narnia, kidnapped
as a colt, and eager to return to Narnia and the North. He convinces
Shasta to attempt to escape with him.

This has so much promise. For once, we're offered a story where one of
the talking animals of Narnia is at least a co-protagonist and has some
agency in the story. Bree takes charge of Shasta, teaches him to ride
(or, mostly, how to fall off a horse), and makes most of the early
plans. Finally, a story that recognizes that Narnia stories don't have
to revolve around the humans!

Unfortunately, Bree is an obnoxious, arrogant character. I wanted to
like him, but he makes it very hard. This gets even worse when Shasta
is thrown together with Aravis, a noble Calormene girl who is escaping
an arranged marriage on her own talking mare, Hwin. Bree is a warhorse,
Hwin is a lady's riding mare, and Lewis apparently knows absolutely
nothing about horses, because every part of Bree's sexist posturing and
Hwin's passive meekness is awful and cringe-worthy. I am not a horse
person, so will link to [1] Judith Tarr's much more knowledgeable
critique at Tor.com, but suffice it to say that mares are not meekly
deferential or awed by stallions. If Bree had behaved that way with a
real mare, he would have gotten the crap beaten out of him (which might
have improved his attitude considerably). As is, we have to put up with
rather a lot of Bree's posturing and Hwin (who I liked much better)
barely gets a line and acts disturbingly like she was horribly abused.

This makes me sad, because I like Bree's character arc. He's spent his
whole life being special and different from those around him, and while
he wants to escape this country and return home, he's also gotten used
to being special. In Narnia, he will just be a normal talking horse. To
get everything else he wants, he also has to let go of the idea that
he's someone special. If Lewis had done more with this and made Bree a
more sympathetic character, this could have been very effective. As
written, it only gets a few passing mentions (mostly via Bree being
weirdly obsessed with whether talking horses roll) and is therefore
overshadowed by Shasta's chosen one story and Bree's own arrogant
behavior.

The horses aside, this is a passable adventure story with some
well-done moments. The two kids and their horses end up in Tashbaan,
the huge Calormene capital, where they stumble across the Narnians and
Shasta is mistaken for one of their party. Radagast, the prince of
Calormen, is proposing marriage to Susan, and the Narnians are in the
process of realizing he doesn't plan to take no for an answer. Aravis,
meanwhile, has to sneak out of the city via the Tisroc's gardens, which
results in her hiding behind a couch as she hears Radagast's plans to
invade Archenland and Narnia to take Susan as his bride by force. Once
reunited, Shasta, Aravis, and the horses flee across the desert to
bring warning to Archenland and then Narnia.

Of all the Narnia books, The Horse and His Boy leans the hardest into
the personal savior angle of Christianity. Parts of it, such as
Shasta's ride over the pass into Narnia, have a strong [2] "Footprints"
feel to them. Most of the events of the book are arranged by Aslan,
starting with Shasta's early life. Readers of the series will know this
when a lion shows up early to herd the horses where they need to go, or
when a keeps Shasta company in the desert and frightens away jackals.
Shasta only understands near the end.

I remember this being compelling stuff as a young Christian reader.
This personal attention and life shaping from God is pure Christian
wish fulfillment of the "God has a plan for your life" variety, even
more so than Shasta turning out to be a lost prince. As an adult
re-reader, I can see that Lewis is palming the theodicy card rather
egregiously. It's great that Aslan was making everything turn out well
in the end, but why did he have to scare the kids and horses half to
death in the process? They were already eager to do what he wanted, but
it's somehow inconceivable that Aslan would simply tell them what to do
rather than manipulate them. There's no obvious in-story justification
why he couldn't have made the experience much less terrifying. Or, for
that matter, prevented Shasta from being kidnapped as an infant in the
first place and solved the problem of Radagast in a more direct way.
This sort of theology takes as an unexamined assumption that a deity
must refuse to use his words and instead do everything in weirdly
roundabout and mysterious ways, which makes even less sense in Narnia
than in our world given how directly and straightforwardly Aslan has
acted in previous books.

It was also obvious to me on re-read how unfair Lewis's strict gender
roles are to Aravis. She's an excellent rider from the start of the
book and has practiced many of the things Shasta struggles to do, but
Shasta is the boy and Aravis is the girl, so Aravis has to have girl
adventures involving tittering princesses, luxurious baths, and
eavesdropping behind couches, whereas Shasta has boy adventures like
riding to warn the king or bringing word to Narnia. There's nothing
very objectionable about Shasta as a character (unlike Bree), but he
has such a generic character arc. The Horse and Her Girl with Aravis
and Hwin as protagonists would have been a more interesting story, and
would have helpfully complicated the whole Narnia and the North story
motive.

As for that storyline, wow the racism is strong in this one, starting
with the degree that The Horse and His Boy is deeply concerned with
people's skin color. Shasta is white, you see, clearly marking him as
from the North because all the Calormenes are dark-skinned. (This makes
even less sense in this fantasy world than in our world because it's
strongly implied in The Magician's Nephew that all the humans in
Calormen came from Narnia originally.) The Calormenes all talk like
characters from bad translations of the Arabian Nights and are shown as
cruel, corrupt slavers with a culture that's a Orientalist mishmash of
Arab, Persian, and Chinese stereotypes. Everyone is required to say
"may he live forever" after referencing the Tisroc, which is an obvious
and crude parody of Islam. This stereotype fest culminates the
incredibly bizarre scene that Aravis overhears, in which the grand
vizier literally grovels on the floor while Radagast kicks him and the
Tisroc, Radagast's father, talks about how Narnia's freedom offends him
and the barbarian kingdom would be more profitable and orderly when
conquered.

The one point to Lewis's credit is that Aravis is also Calormene, tells
stories in the same style, and is still a protagonist and just as
acceptable to Aslan as Shasta is. It's not enough to overcome the
numerous problems with Lewis's lazy world-building, but it makes me
wish even more that Aravis had gotten her own book and more meaningful
scenes with Aslan.

I had forgotten that Susan appears in this book, although that
appearance doesn't add much to the general problem of Susan in Narnia
except perhaps to hint at Lewis's later awful choices. She is shown
considering marriage to the clearly villainous Radagast, and then only
mentioned later with a weird note that she doesn't ride to war despite
being the best archer of the four. I will say again that it's truly
weird to see the Pevensie kids as (young) adults discussing marriage
proposals, international politics, and border wars while remembering
they all get dumped back into their previous lives as British
schoolkids. This had to have had dramatic effects on their lives that
Lewis never showed. (I know, the real answer is that Lewis is writing
these books according to childhood imaginary adventure logic, where
adventures don't have long-term consequences of that type.)

I will also grumble once more at how weirdly ineffectual Narnians are
until some human comes to tell them what to do. Calormen is obviously a
threat; Susan just escaped from an attempted forced marriage.
Archenland is both their southern line of defense and is an ally
separated by a mountain pass in a country full of talking eagles, among
other obvious messengers. And yet, it falls to Shasta to ride to give
warning because he's the human protagonist of the story. Everyone else
seems to be too busy with quirky domesticity or endless faux-medieval
chivalric parties.

The Horse and His Boy was one of my favorites when I was a kid, but
reading as an adult I found it much harder to tolerate Bree or read
past the blatant racial and cultural stereotyping. The bits with Aslan
also felt less magical to me than they did as a kid because I was
asking more questions about why Aslan had to do everything in such an
opaque and perilous way. It's still not a bad adventure; Aravis is a
great character, the bits in Tashbaan are at least memorable, and I
still love the Hermit of the Southern March and want to know more about
him. But I would rank it below the top tier of Narnia books, alongside
[14]Prince Caspian as a book with some great moments and some serious
flaws.

Followed in original publication order by The Magician's Nephew.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-05-31

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-02-044200-9.html

References

  1. https://www.tor.com/2017/04/17/when-gender-bias-extends-to-the-animal-kingdom-c-s-lewis-the-horse-and-his-boy/
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footprints_(poem)

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