Katherine Langrish's Blog, page 16

Alan Garner at Jodrell Bank

A post from the archives: Alan Garner's lecture, "Powsells and Thrums", February 2015

The Lovell Telescope, Jodrell Bank
The lecture ‘Powsells and Thrums’, delivered by Alan Garner at Jodrell Bank on Wednesday night, was the first of a series designed to consider the nature of creativity and its importance to what Garner maintains is an arts/science spectrum – not two cultures, as CP Snow suggested, but a continuity. Powsells and thrums, he explained, are old words for the oddments of thread and scraps of cloth left over from weaving and kept for personal use: metaphors for the scraps of story and oddments of meaning which can be woven and pieced together to create something new.  Which is exactly what he did in his lecture.


I’m not going to try and deliver a comprehensive report of the evening.  Alan Garner spoke with wit, humour and quiet eloquence for a full hour, and I hope and trust the lecture will eventually appear in print. With many omissions, these are merely some of my impressions and memories of it – powsells and thrums, snippets and fragments which you can turn about and reshape for yourselves. 

He began with a story from the introduction to Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems. Thomas tells the story of a shepherd who, asked why he made, from within fairy rings, ritual observances to the moon to protect his flocks, replied: ‘I’d be a damned fool if I didn’t!’ Thomas adds, ‘These poems are written for the love of man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damned fool if they weren’t.’

Mow Cop
How does a story come into being?  In 1956, ‘rummaging in a dustbin’, Garner saved a fragment of newspaper containing the story of two lovers who quarrelled. The boy threw a tape at the girl and stormed off. A week later he killed himself. Then she listened to the tape: it was an apology but also a threat: if she hadn't cared enough to listen to it within a week, he would conclude she didn’t love him… Nine years later, Garner heard a local story – dislocated from history – of Spanish slaves being marched north to build ‘a wall’, who ran away and found refuge on Mow Cop. Could this be a folk memory of the vanished Spanish Legion, the Ninth Hispana? Then there was the chilling history of the Civil War massacre at Barthomley Church, and finally in 1966 some graffiti at Alderley Edge station: two lovers' names and beneath them, written in silver lipstick: ‘Not really now, not any more.'  Powsells and thrums: ‘Why should those words bring together all the other items? They come looking for us, or that’s the feeling.’  And so: ‘Red Shift’.

It’s not mysterious, Garner insisted. Creativity, he said, requires intelligence, which is linear and deals with the here and now – but also intuition, which is not under conscious control. Creativity is not polite: ‘It comes barging in and leaves the intellect to clean up the mess.’ Creativity, he said, is risk, and ‘without risk we can only stay as we are.’ What he proposed to give us would therefore be a collection of oddments, powsells and thrums: ‘stories rather than lecture, but woven to an end.’

‘Art interprets the inexplicable.’ The age of the universe is thirteen and a half thousand million years. How do we understand such numbers?  The intellect cannot help. We must turn to stories, such as this: Far, far away there is a diamond mountain, two miles high, two miles wide and two miles deep. Every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on the top of it, with two little strokes: whet, whet! and flies away.  When by this process the entire mountain has been worn away to the size of a grain of sand – then, the first second of eternity will be at an end.

In 1957 Alan sat in his ancient farmhouse, Toad Hall, looking across the fields at Jodrell Bank’s recently completed Lovell Telescope and turning a ‘black pebble’ in his hand – a 500,000 year-old stone axe. ‘The telescope was moving – alert. It was watching a quasar… I needed to know the telescope.’  He went to see Bernard Lovell, taking with him another axe, three and a half thousand years old, beautifully polished and shaped with a hole bored through it for the haft. (Where did he find these axes? I should love to know.) With the words ‘I have something to show you,’ he dropped the axe on Lovell’s desk. ‘Thisis the telescope.’

Sir Bernard gave him a pass, understanding what he meant.  

The axe is the forerunner of the telescope.

On their own, science and art hold piecemeal truths. The Garner lectures are designed to ‘repudiate the schism’ between CP Snow’s two cultures. They are part, said Garner, of what he and his wife have called ‘Operation Melting Snow.’ And, he said, ‘Sir Bernard was ahead of me. Risk taker, cosmologist, churchgoer, parish organist,’ Lovell was so distressed when the telescope was used for military purposes that he considered becoming a priest – but was dissuaded by a bishop who told him he’d be more use where he was because ‘creativity is prayer.’  And prayer, Garner said, is ‘a dialogue with the numinous. And we must give it form.’  



It is impossible to look at the Lovell telescope as it in its turn looks into the deep past, and not feel a shudder of the numinous.

Science and art, the warp and the weft: both are needed to weave the fabric of human understanding.

Garner suggested we all instinctively know what is meant by a good place: a place of refuge from which we can look out in safety. His home, Toad Hall, is a ‘good place’, which is perhaps why the spot has been continuously occupied for 10,000 years. Lucky are those who have roots in such places. But also there are ‘bad places’: the valley of Glen Coe for instance, a certain church, a house in Cambridge which he enters only with reluctance.  ‘And I defy you to be at ease in a multi-storey carpark.’

‘A businessman from an ancient culture said of California, “Even the light is a Hockney painting.” The land is our life force. Artists magnify the land.’ Wordsworth and Hardy interpreted and magnified the landscapes of the Lake District and Wessex with their intensity of vision. ‘Art makes people feel.’

Human beings need both refuge and prospect. We may have become human on the Pleistocene savannahs, standing up on two legs to find food and to spot danger. We recreate our places of refuge and prospect even in suburban homes and lawns. From our places of refuge we interpret the world with stories: from them we look outward, questioning, questing, looking towards ‘a different sort of pebble, waiting to be chipped.’  


Art complements science, and science, art. ‘Zealots of all kinds block progress.’  

Vishnu sat on a mountain top weeping. Hanuman came by. ‘What are you crying for, and what are those little ants of people down there, rushing about?’ ‘I have dropped the jewel of wisdom, and it has shattered. Everyone down there has grabbed a splinter, and each of them thinks they have the whole.’

And so at last the evening comes to an end. ‘I sit in the house in the wood, and watch the telescope and tell the stories...’ Alan Garner takes a breath. ‘I’d be a damned fool if I didn’t!’

Click here for a link to the Jodrell Bank website and a previously unpublished poem by Alan Garner: 'House by Jodrell'.

The Night She Dreamed of Being a Dental Assistant

I won't even go into what else has been happening in the past week, but two notable things occurred in the world of science. Firstly a Cern physicist, Alessandro Strumia – who really looks young enough to know better – was suspended for making the deliberately provocative claim that "physics was invented and built by men”, that "men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people" and that there is "a difference even in children before any social influence" can take place. The lofty heights of physics, he implies, are not for women.  

Secondly, in one of those serendipitous coincidences, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to a woman for the first time in 55 years. Canadian physicist Donna Strickland is only the third woman winner of the award, along with Marie Curie, who won in 1903 and of whom presumably even Professor Strumia may have heard – and Maria Goeppert-Mayer, a theoretical physicist who was awarded the prize in 1963 for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus.
Let me show you something.



I’ve been saving this horror up for some time. It’s an educational ‘Wonder Book’ for children, published in the USA in 1959 with the laudable intention of reducing the childhood terror of going to the dentist. It’s full of cosy, colourful pictures and there is a total lack of any drama. As a nine-year old kid who once leaped out of a car to avoid a visit to the dentist, hid from my parents in bushes in a park and subsequently caught the bus home on my own, I can appreciate this aim… but let us follow Kathy and Clifford on their adventure.


On page one, Clifford – who looks about six – loses a front tooth. ‘Everyone, including Clifford, laughed.’ This is only a baby tooth, but it prompts Daddy to tell Clifford he should put the tooth under his pillow, ‘and maybe there will be a present there in the morning’. (There will be a shiny new dime, though no mention of anything frivolous like tooth fairies). And Mommy remembers, ‘It’s time we saw Dr Moyers to have Clifford’s teeth checked. It would be a good idea to have Kathy’s teeth checked too.’ Notice how Kathy is an afterthought and everyone is looking at Clifford. Everyone looks at Clifford on the cover illustration too. And below, Kathy looks on as Clifford discovers his dime...


A week later, the children and Mommy arrive at the dentist’s. “Who is this pretty little girl?’ asks dental assistant Miss Turner. “This is my daughter Kathy,” says Mommy. “She is three years old and Dr Moyers is going to examine her teeth too.” Even though Kathy is for once the subject, in the picture Clifford is still the focus of attention. His hand is out, and since he is speaking to Miss Turner, it appears very much as though she is looking at him while Kathy stares up, dumb.


Miss Turner wears no glasses to greet the children, but she has to put them on for work, no matter whether close-up or distant – because wearing glasses makes a woman look serious. Here she is in one of only three pictures in the book in which Kathy is the focus. Even then it's not entirely clear whether she's looking at Kathy, or her notes. 




Clifford is the first to go in. He sees ‘a bright sparkling room with all kinds of wonderful machines.’ American hero Dr Moyers smiles and shakes hands with Clifford in a man-to-man fashion. ‘Sit down in the chair,’ he says, ‘and I’ll give you a ride.’ Clifford climbs into the chair with a giggle, ‘pretending that he was about to blast off in a space ship.’ 



In the next few pages, Dr Moyers carefully explains to Clifford everything he is doing. He finds a small cavity.  Then he asks Miss Turner to take an X-ray or six, finds a second cavity and decides to remove two more baby teeth to allow Clifford’s adult teeth to grow straight. He gives Clifford advice on dental hygiene. Miss Turner mixes the dental cement. In the left-hand picture, below, the 'space' references are clear. The X-ray pictures look like an antenna while Clifford is the astronaut in his chair.




Pretty soon Clifford has two more teeth in his chubby little hand. He looks thrilled. Two more shiny dimes!


Now it’s Kathy’s turn. Although she’s only three, Dr Moyers still takes X-rays of her teeth, but they are perfect (at three years old you’d hope so), so all he needs to do is polish them. 



Kathy doesn’t fantasise about space ships or notice shiny machinery, but she does wish she had a ‘toothbrush with a motor’ at home. Dr Moyers provides more good advice on daily dental hygiene (‘Brush your teeth in the morning, then right after meals and before you go to sleep’) and the children trot off, happy to have been given new toothbrushes and medals ‘for being good patients.’ Notice how the artist makes Clifford look straight at the reader with a cheerful gappy grin. Kathy admires her good conduct badge with sweet expression and lowered eyes.


Though this book does a good job of carefully explaining dental procedures to children, it is very much of its time. The thing that really gets me, though - and the reason I feel this book is pernicious - comes on the last page where we see the children snuggled up in bed after their adventurous day,  Clifford in the foreground, of course. “That night,” the story continues:
That night, Kathy dreamed she was a dental assistant. She helped with the X-rays and developed the pictures. She mixed cement and silver for the fillings. She got the instruments ready for the Doctor.


"She got the instruments ready for the Doctor." This is a book in which the little boy is older, the little girl younger. The boy sees exciting shiny machinery and imagines himself a spaceman. The little girl imagines herself a dental assistant. The boy has to be brave, have teeth drilled and extracted, is rewarded with dimes. The little girl follows in her brother’s footsteps and nothing particular interesting happens to her. The insidious, subliminal message would have sunk into the perceptions of children of both sexes, manipulating, and in the case of girls limiting, their expectations.

  The book is nearly sixty years old. I feel sure the people who put it together felt fine about suggesting ‘dental assistant’ instead of ‘dentist’ as a possible career for a girl, even though women had been getting medical degrees in the States for 110 years already, ever since Elizabeth Blackwell's in 1849. They didn't see that. It wasn't relevant. Even on the cover, the male Doctor is in the foreground, his attractive female assistant remains in the background, smiling and supportive. This was the kind of myopic cultural fog in which most women over the age of fifty grew up and its effects are quite clearly still with us. The events of this week along with many another - just yesterday I heard a Conservative Party donor, Lord Ashcroft, speak unthinkingly of  'the voter and his family' - show how far we still have to travel. For it's certain that Lord Ashcroft is not alone in thinking of a voter as a man. A man and his vote, a man and his family. 
  

Fairy- and folk-tales at the BBC Proms

I promised I would be writing more on this blog this summer, instead of which I'm in the middle of writing another book. And there have been other very pleasant interruptions, such as being asked to speak at one of the Proms Extra talks - this was in conjunction with a performance of some of Ravel's most gorgeous fairy-tale inspired music: Contes de ma mère l'Oye, Scheherezade, and L'Enfant et les Sortileges, under the baton of Simon Rattle. In the photo above, there's myself on the right and the composer Kerry Andrew in the middle, doing sound checks with presenter Rana Mitter before the talk in Imperial College Student Union Hall, close to the Albert Hall. Kerry's debut novel 'Swansong' is based on a Scottish fairy ballad, and here she is performing outdoors, live, a wonderful version of the folksong 'The Cutty Wren'.




It was lovely to meet her, and once we got started up there on the platform we could probably have gone on talking all night... If you'd like to hear us, click the BBC iplayer link, here: 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/play/p06j2938

I will posting more regularly again, now autumn's here.

Re-reading Narnia: 'The Horse and His Boy'

I've been down with an 'orrible cough for the past month (so unfair in summer!) and once again the blog has been neglected. Now I'm back, I realise I forgot to repost my essay on 'The Horse and His Boy' - and as I haven't yet got around to finishing the one about 'The Last Battle' - I'll get there, I promise - here's this to be going on with.

This, the fifth Narnia book in order of publication, is the one I’ve thought about least since childhood.  And it was never one of my particular favourites, which seems odd considering that next to Narnia, ponies were my passion. A book which combined Narnia and horses ought to have been a big hit.

I enjoyed the book, but I didn’t love it the way I loved The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair. This may be because it’s the least complex, least layered of the Seven Chronicles. It’s a simple adventure story offering straightforward pleasures: appealing characters, obnoxious villains, touches of humour, an arduous journey and a nick-of-time rescue. What it doesn't offer – alone among the Narnia books – is anything much in the way of strong emotion, wonder or awe. Certainly nothing to match the moment when the Stone Table cracks in two, or when Reepicheep’s coracle vanishes over the crest of the wave at the end of the world, or the brilliant birds fluttering in the trees at the top of Aslan’s holy mountain, or the poignant death of old King Caspian. To use Lewis’s own words, I can find no ‘stab of joy’ in The Horse and His Boy. On this re-reading I was entertained and amused by the book, but seldom moved.





Told throughout from within – from the point of view of characters who were born in Narnia rather than in our world – The Horse and His Boy is set during the ‘golden age’ when the four thrones of Cair Paravel are filled by the four children of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. The hero of the book, the boy Shasta, has grown up to the age of perhaps twelve believing himself the son of Arsheesh, a poor fisherman in the southern land of Calormen, a country which will remind most readers of the Persia of the Arabian Nights. And we run into an immediate difficulty. The dark-skinned Calormens are depicted in a way that strikes me now as at best naively Orientalist, at worst upsettingly racist.

In an essay called ‘The Revolution in Children’s Literature’ (The Thorny Paradise, Writers on Writing for Children, ed. Edward Blishen, Kestrel 1975) the children's writer Geoffrey Trease recalled the sexism and racism prevalent in children’s books during the first half of the 20thcentury and rather bravely illustrated it with a toe-curlingly inappropriate extract from a story written by himself as a schoolboy in 1923:  

‘The white dog!’ hissed the Arab leader, and his scimitar grated against my cutlass… I saw the dark triumphant face of my antagonist, the curved beam of reflected light raised to strike, and like a flash I ducked, and striking upwards with my left hand, administered a thoroughly British uppercut. And, because an Oriental can never understand such a blow, he reeled back, a look of almost comical surprise on his face. Ere he could recover, I lunged out with my cutlass and stretched him dead upon the ground.

While you’re recovering: I have a theory that classic children's books have a half-life of about fifty years of being read by actual children (after a century, most are relegated at best to academic study). They last this long mainly because adults give or read to children the books they themselves remember, and because books are durable physical objects that may sit for decades on dusty shelves to be pulled out by voracious young readers. This is how I gobbled down the jingoistic and now practically unreadable works of GA Henty, written in the last third of the nineteenth century. What modern ten year-old could tolerate ‘Under Drake's Flag, A Tale of the Spanish Main'  (1883) or 'By Sheer Pluck: A Tale of the Ashanti War' (1884)? They were eighty years old by the time I was reading them in the 1960s and surely I must have been in the last generation of children who could possibly have enjoyed them. But the sixty year-old Narnia stories are very much with us, kept alive like the Velveteen Rabbit by the love of real children. Henty's prejudices may no longer matter, but those of CS Lewis are still of concern. And I can't help feeling he should have known better. As an adult, Geoffrey Trease set out to combat the prejudice he’d parroted as a boy. His historical novels for children, like ‘The Red Towers of Granada’ (1966), are deliberately respectful of ‘other’ cultures like those of Judaism or Islamic Spain. In spite of his efforts, the range of literature available to me growing up in the sixties was still crammed with dodgy foreigners, cunning, or comic, or cowardly, or cruel. I noticed, without realising it was unfair. So long as an author spins a good story, children are accepting readers.

Lewis first introduces the Calormen in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader:  

Two merchants of Calormen … approached. The Calormen have dark faces and long beards. They wear flowing robes and orange-coloured turbans, and they are a wise, wealthy, courteous, cruel and ancient people.

‘Wise, wealthy, courteous and ancient’ are all very well until we reach that word ‘cruel’: in its company all other virtues are contaminated. Lewis continues:  

They bowed most politely to Caspian and paid him long compliments, all about the fountains of prosperity irrigating the gardens of prudence and virtue – and things like that – but of course what they wanted was the money they had paid.

The Calormen’s flowery language is critiqued in THHB as the language of insincerity, especially compared to the white-skinned Narnians’ free, frank speech. (Note that interesting word ‘frank’, with its derivation from the founders of western culture.) From the outset Lewis leaves no doubt that Calormen culture and society is morally inferior. One has only to look at the relationship between Shasta and his foster father Arsheesh to see how Lewis puts his hand in the scales. The fairytale motif of ‘noble baby set adrift’ is found world-wide, from Moses, to Perseus, to Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, and in most of these stories the foster parent, whether humble fisherman or noble princess, rescues and raises the child with unselfish tenderness. Lewis inverts this tradition. Arsheesh self-servingly explains to the Tarkaan who wishes to buy Shasta:

‘“Doubtless,” said I, “these unfortunates have escaped from the wreck of a great ship, but by the admirable designs of the gods, the elder has starved himself to keep the child alive, and has perished in sight of land.” Accordingly, remembering how the gods never fail to reward those who befriend the destitute, and being moved by compassion (for your servant is a man of tender heart) – ’

‘Leave out all these idle words in your own praise,’ interrupted the Tarkaan. ‘It is enough to know that you took the child – and have had ten times the worth of his daily bread out of him in labour, as anyone can see…’




There’s no love or tenderness between Arsheesh and Shasta: the latter is simply relieved to learn that he’s not the fisherman’s own flesh and blood. He even dreams of possible advancement (‘the lordly stranger on the great horse might be kinder to him than Arsheesh’). Lewis soon dispels this dream, and leaves an adult reader in some discomfort as to why this Tarkaan has suddenly taken a fancy to buy Shasta.

‘This boy is manifestly no son of yours. For your cheek is as dark as mine but the boy is fair and white like the accursed but beautiful barbarians who inhabit the remote north.’

Admiration for despised beauty is never a good sign. What is Bree the Talking Horse implying, when he warns Shasta in the strongest terms that the Tarkaan is bad – ‘Better be lying dead tonight than go to be a human slave in his house tomorrow’? Aged ten I simply assumed ‘hard work and beatings’. Now I wonder whether this might truly be a 'fate worse than death'.

Orientalism is a term employed by Edward Said to critically examine patronising Western perceptions of the East: it marks a subset of racism which views Eastern cultures as despotic, fanatic, mysterious, 'inscrutable' and inferior. Lewis’s characterisation of the dark-skinned Calormen, quoted above, as ‘wise, wealthy, courteous, cruel and ancient’ could be a textbook example. If Trease overcame his early conditioning, why couldn’t Lewis? Yes, there is Aravis, yes there is the gentle and courteous knight Emeth in The Last Battle. They remain exceptions.





But there is more going on.  Narnia is a paradise of happy magical creatures and talking animals. By contrast, Calormen is a grown-up country of farms and roads, a religion and a class structure, a bureaucracy, a literature, slaves and soldiers and cities. Despite its supposed Arabian Nights exoticism, from a child’s perspective Calormen is a dull place.

How come? Where are all those flying carpets*, magical rings, terrifying jinni, sorcerers and enchantresses with which Scheherezade filled the Thousand and One Nights? Lewis ditched them all.  He borrowed the trappings of the Arabian Nights but left out all the magic.

Shasta was not at all interested in anything that lay south of his home because he had once or twice been to the village with Arsheesh and he knew that there was nothing very interesting there.  In the village he only met other men who were just like his father – men with long, dirty robes, and wooden shoes turned up at the toe, and turbans on their heads, and beards, talking to one another very slowly about things that sounded dull.

It’s not as though the Narnia books haven’t already carried us to foreign lands. The wilds of Ettinsmoor, the depths of Bism, the numinous islands of the Eastern Sea – these belong, these fit within the Narnian fairy world. But Calormen isn’t a fairytale land. It exists to oppose Narnia’s every quality. If Lewis had wanted, he could have incorporated peris and griffins, flying carpets and sphinxes into his story, but he didn’t want. Not even the ghouls of the Tombs are ‘real’.

In a fantasy series which happily blends classical and Norse mythologies, medieval legends and talking animals, why did Lewis instinctively (I doubt he thought about it) strip all the magic from the Arabian Nights? Where else in the Narnian world does this failure of enchantment occur? Answer: on the unmagical Lone Islands, in the least interesting episode of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where the Calormen trade for slaves – and in King Miraz’s Narnia, where the only town, Beruna, is demolished by Aslan and the personified powers of nature, a destruction significantly presented as a restoration. Narnia at its most Narnian is a place of joyful and magical disorder, a place in which there is no need for rules because no one wants to do anything bad.  It owns no villages like Shasta’s, no cities, no roads. Cair Paravel is a stand-alone fairytale castle. King Lune’s castle of Anvard in Archenland is similarly isolated.

Unlike the threat posed by the magical White Witch and Green Lady, the threat to Narnia from Calormen (and the Telmarine rule of Miraz) is a divorce from magic. The Calormen are enemies of the imagination, enemies of fairyland itself. Their rule would destroy Narnia's magic, substituting an order of economics, progress, trade, politics, scepticism: necessary but unromantic things which Lewis didn’t like and didn’t want in his fairy paradise. The be-turbaned, Arabian Nights-style Calormen represent these values however, only because Lewis chose they should. Historically it was the West which imposed its industrial and political values upon the rest of the world.

In some conservative Christian circles CS Lewis is the logic-chopping wielder of the Sword of Truth. But he could and did allow prejudice to blind him. No doubt at the back of his mind was the medieval clash between Islam and Europe: the Matter of France, the Song of Roland, the Battle of Lepanto. Compared with the magic of the pagan Greek myths (so important a component in western education as, paradoxically, to have become a part of Christian European identity) I suspect Lewis felt deep in his bones that the magic of the Arabian Nights was foreign,inimical, incompatible with Aslan’s. So he left it out, but his depiction of the Calormen people creates all sorts of problems. They are undoubtedly human, so where have they come from? Are they, like Peter and Edmund, Susan and Lucy, ‘sons of Adam and daughters of Eve’ - originally from our world? When Aslan sang Narnia into existence in The Magician’s Nephew, did he create the Calormen too? He made their land: Polly and Digory glimpse the desert sands from Fledge's back. And what about their gods, Zardeenah, Azaroth and Tash?  There'll be more to say about these questions when we come to The Last Battle.

  For now, though, on with the story!





One of the things I truly loved about this book was the relationship between Shasta and Bree, the Narnian Talking Horse who, like Shasta, was kidnapped as a little foal.

“My mother warned me not to range the southern slopes, in Archenland and beyond, but I wouldn’t heed her. And by the Lion’s Mane I have paid for my folly. All these years I have been a slave to humans, hiding my true nature and pretending to be dumb and witless like their horses.”

A pony-mad little girl, I found the story of Shasta being taught to ride by his horse enchanting (“No one can teach riding so well as a horse”). Bree, or to give him his full name, Breehy-hinny-brinny-hoohy-hah – is a superb character. I loved and still love his good-humoured disdain for Shasta and for humans in general (“What absurd legs humans have!”) and his bracing lack of sympathy for Shasta’s aches and pains (“It can’t be the falls. You didn’t have more than a dozen or so.”). An experienced war-horse, Bree takes initial charge of the escape, but as the adventure continues it is the inexperienced Shasta who begins to make the difference, while Bree allows vanity and insecurity (would a true Narnian Talking Horse enjoy a good roll?) to undermine him.

Bree sees that escaping together will improve both their chances: he won’t be chased as a stray, and on his back Shasta can ‘outdistance any other horse in this country.’ With a final bit of riding advice from the Horse to his Boy, off they go:

“Grip with your knees and keep your eyes straight ahead between my ears. Don’t look at the ground.  If you think you’re going to fall just grip harder and sit up straighter. Ready? Now: for Narnia and the North.”

One night after ‘weeks and weeks’ of journeying, Bree and Shasta hear another horse and rider accompanying them northwards between the forest and the sea.

“Ssh!” said Bree, craning his neck around and twitching his ears... “…That’s not a farmer’s riding. Not a farmer’s horse either. Can’t you tell by the sound? …I tell you what it is, Shasta. There’s a Tarkaan under the edge of that wood. Not on his war horse – it’s too light for that. On a fine blood mare, I should say.”

 'Craning his neck around and twitching his ears': Lewis never forgets that Bree is a horse.

 




The strange ‘horseman’ seems as eager to avoid them as they are to avoid him, but lions attack. The two horses are driven together in a mad gallop across the sands, and the young rider – described as a ‘small, slender person, mail-clad … and riding magnificently’ is revealed as a girl, Aravis, with ‘her’ Talking Horse, Hwin. It’s a dramatic entrance, and Aravis takes no prisoners from the start.

“Broo-hoo-hah!” [Bree] snorted. “Steady there! I heard you, I did. There’s no good pretending, Ma’am. …You’re a Talking Horse, a Narnian horse, just like me.”            “What’s it got to do with you if she is?” said the strange rider fiercely, laying hand on sword-hilt. But the voice in which the words were spoken had already told Shasta something.             “Why, it’s only a girl!” he exclaimed.            “And what business is it of yours if I am onlya girl?” snapped the stranger.  “You’re only a boy: a rude, common little boy – a slave probably, who’s stolen his master’s horse.”

When the book was written fifty years ago, this ‘only a girl’ thing was everywhere, a universal pollutant we all breathed. In Little Women, in What Katy Did – in Enid Blyton’s books about the Famous Five, even in Geoffrey Trease – my friends and I encountered heroines who wished they were boys, and we didn’t always understand that this wasn’t because boys were naturally superior, but because society privileged them with better choices and opportunities. So it was great to meet competent, confident Aravis who rode a horse the way I wished I could, and wore a sword too. And when Shasta comes out with this classic put-down, ‘only a girl’, Aravis annihilates him. Later in the book, when Hwin quietly suggests it would be wise for them to keep going,  Bree retorts crushingly: 'I think, Ma'am... that I know a little more about campaigns and forced marches and what a horse can stand than you do'. (Stallionsplaining!)  And Hwin shuts up because she is 'a very nervous and gentle person who was easily put down.' But Hwin is right and Bree is wrong, and his decision is a bad one. In my mind, Lewis is certainly an equal-opportunities author.  





This is as I’ve said, an adventure story, and it’s linear: Shasta and his friends must get from A (Calormen) to B (Narnia). It's an escape rather than a quest. We already know what Narnia is like (or we do if we’ve read the other books) so all the surprises, all the plot interest have to come from twists and turns and picaresque interludes along the way. The first is when Aravis relates her escape, and for once Lewis, via Bree, has something good to say about the formal and flowery Calormen narrative style (the sort of thing we expect of  'Eastern' tales but perhaps actually an artefact of Western translations: in her 2013 edition of The Thousand and One Nights, Hanan Al-Shaykh praises the original's 'flat, simple style'). However:

Bree… was thoroughly enjoying the story. “She’s telling it in the grand Calormen manner and no story-teller in a Tisroc’s court could do it better…”

Aravis’ story is effectively another fairytale: cruel stepmother persuades weak father to marry his daughter to a rich old man. In despair, Aravis is about to kill herself when Hwin her mare ‘magically’ begins to talk – the Animal Helper motif of so many fairystories – and to tell her about

The woods and waters of Narnia and the castles and the great ships, till I said, “In the name of Tash and Azaroth and Zardeenah Lady of the Night, I have a great wish to be in that country of Narnia.” “O my mistress,” answered the mare, “if you were in Narnia you would be happy, for in that land no maiden is forced to marry against her will.”

  Aravis hatches a plot.

I put on my gayest clothes and sang and danced before my father and pretended to be delighted with the marriage which he had prepared for me. Also I said to him, “O my father and O the delight of my eyes, give me your licence and permission to go with one of my maidens alone for three days into the woods to do secret sacrifices to Zardeenah, Lady of the Night, as is proper and customary for damsels when they must bid farewell to the service of Zardeenah and prepare themselves for marriage.”

Here Lewis recalls a very dark Old Testament story (Judges 11, 34-39) when the warrior Jephthah, in another ancient fairytale motif, bargains with God for victory over his enemies in exchange for a burnt offering of the first thing that greets him on his return home:

And Jephthah came to Mizpah unto his house, and, behold, his daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances; and she was his only child… And he rent his clothes, and said, Alas, my daughter! thou hast brought me very low… for I have opened my mouth unto the Lord and I cannot go back. And she said unto him, My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth unto the Lord, do to me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth. … And she said unto her father, Let this thing be done for me: let me go alone two months that I may up and down upon the mountain and bewail my virginity, I and my fellows. And he said, Go. And he sent her away for two months: and she went with her companions and bewailed her virginity upon the mountains. And it came to pass at the end of two months that she returned unto her father, who did with her according to his vow which he had vowed.

In this case Lewis redeems the story. Aravis does what we might all wish Jephthah’s unnamed daughter could have done. She tricks her father, obtains three days grace, drugs her maid, dresses in her brother’s armour and races for Narnia on Hwin – covering her tracks further by sending her father a letter as if from her betrothed husband claiming to have married already after a chance meeting in the woods. Aravis displays from the beginning great competence, cool-headedness and fortitude: she is, as Lewis later comments, ‘proud and could be hard enough but… as true as steel’. What she doesn’t have is empathy: it is left to Shasta the underdog to wonder what might have happened to the maid Aravis drugged and left behind.

“Doubtless she was beaten for sleeping late,” said Aravis coolly. “But she was a tool and spy of my stepmother’s. I am very glad that they should beat her.”            “I say, that was hardly fair,” said Shasta.            “I did not do any of these things for the sake of pleasing you,” said Aravis.

When I first read this book I can’t say that the fate of the maid upset me very much, and I appreciated tough, unsympathetic Aravis who does the necessary without wringing her hands. The adventure story is a genre which requires a brisk pace and little consideration of those who fall by the way or get in the way. But of course this isn’t your average adventure story and Lewis has a moral agenda. He wants his child readers to notice the collateral damage. Aslan is watching, and Aslan will repay – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth:

“The scratches on your back, tear for tear, throb for throb, blood for blood, were equal to the stripes laid upon the back of your stepmother’s slave because of the drugged sleep you cast upon her. You needed to know what it felt like.”




“Tear for tear, throb for throb, blood for blood.” Does Aslan punish Aravis because her action got the slave-girl into trouble? No, it's because she wasn’t sorry about it and didn’t care. Aravis’ punishment cannot help the slave-girl, who will never even hear of it. “You needed to know what it felt like”: this is about Aravis herself, to correct a flaw in her character and teach her to empathise. It seemed fair to me as a child. (“Children, who are innocent, love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy,” GK Chesterton said.)  But now? Now I think this is penny-in-the-slot justice. You do something bad: something bad happens to you: end. How neat it would be if, as Jesus said, ‘With what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again’, but it doesn’t work that way in life and even if it did, where is the victim in this? Aslan lays no responsibility on Aravis to consider that slave-girl again, or to try and help her. In fact he discourages her from doing so, saying as he often does that it is ‘not your story’. Again: this is an adventure story and most adventure stories would never raise the issue of ‘what happened to the slave girl?’ in the first place – but having raised it, Lewis doesn’t seem to me to deal with it well. Aravis doesn't have to do anything but accept her lesson and grow in compassion and understanding. Oh, and trust in Aslan to see the slave-girl right... Isn't that just as self-centred? It’s easy but dangerous to relinquish earthly justice to one’s notion of the divine. Where was justice for Jephthah’s daughter? I don’t like Aslan very much, in this book. 





The next interlude is the journey through the city of Tashbaan, during which Shasta is separated from his friends. In an adventure pretty much borrowed wholesale from Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, he is mistaken for his (as it will turn out) long-lost identical twin, young Prince Corin of Archenland who's come on a Narnian state visit to Tashbaan centred on a possible marriage between Susan of Narnia and Prince Rabadash, eldest son of the Tisroc. In comparison to the Calormen lords and ladies lolling on their litters carried by “gigantic slaves”, the Narnians are first seen on foot:

Their tunics were of fine, bright, hardy colours – woodland green, or gay yellow, or fresh blue. Instead of turbans they wore steel or silver caps… The swords at their sides were long and straight, not curved like the Calormen scimitars.  And instead of being grave and mysterious like most Calormenes, they walked with a swing and … chatted and laughed. One was whistling. You could see they were ready to be friends with anyone who was friendly and didn’t give a fig for anyone who wasn’t. Shasta thought he had never seen anything so lovely in his life.





Reading this for the first time I was of course thrilled to back in the company of real Narnians at last, and Lewis makes them sound attractive indeed – a breath of fresh air. Now I can’t help noticing how every word is loaded so that even the Narnians’ dress choices appear ‘better’ than those of the Calormen. Do Calormen people never dress in blue, yellow or green? And why in any case should those colours be preferred to red, purple or gold? Because those are colours associated with luxury, and by further implication with moral degeneracy? It would be even sillier to say out loud that the ‘straight’ Narnian swords suggest directness and honesty while the ‘curved’ Calormen scimitars denote indirectness and treachery – but that’s what this passage manages, on a subconscious level, to imply.  

Snatched from his friends, Shasta is taken away to the Narnians’ guest suite in a great palace, where he is scolded as a truant. In the same way that young Tom Canty in The Prince and the Pauper is mistaken for King Henry VIII’s son Prince Edward and assumed to have lost his memory from ‘too much study’,  Mr Tumnus (hooray!) suggests to Edmund and Susan that the ‘little prince’ must have a touch of sunstroke. ‘Look at him!  He is dazed. He does not know where he is.’ Told to rest on a sofa and given iced sherbert to drink, Shasta overhears all the Narnians’ discussions. Queen Susan no longer wishes to marry Prince Rabadash who is turning out – in Edmund’s words - ‘a most proud, bloody, luxurious, cruel and self-pleasing tyrant’. In the course of their discussions Shasta learns of a secret desert route which he and his friends will take once reunited. But the Narnians intend to escape by sea, and now Shasta hopes to go with them.

He only hoped now that the real Prince Corin would not turn up until it was too late and that he would be taken away to Narnia by ship. I am afraid he did not think at all of what might happen to the real Corin when he was left behind in Tashbaan.  He was a little worried about Aravis and Bree waiting for him at the Tombs. But then he said to himself, “Well how can I help it?”

This is disconcerting selfishness. If it weren’t for Corin’s sudden return (having got into a fight and been arrested by the Watch) Shasta would abandon his friends. His readiness to make excuses for himself and to think badly of Aravis may be realistic but it's not endearing. Lewis dedicated THHB to David and Douglas Gresham, the young sons of the American writer Joy Davidman whom he was to marry in 1956, two years after the book was published, and I wonder if he chose a boy protagonist for their sake? Shasta is the first main male protagonist in the Narnia books (in order of publication), but Lewis doesn’t really love him. Aravis has more flair, Bree more personality, Hwin more compassion...  From the beginning Shasta is starved of depth. In his memoir Surprised By Joy Lewis recalls how uncomfortable he and his brother were when their father engaged them in emotional conversations after their mother's death. Did he think the Gresham boys would find emotion - other than fear - soppy?

You must not imagine that Shasta felt at all as you or I would feel if we had just overheard our parents talking about selling us for slaves. For one thing, his life was already little better than slavery… For another, the story about his own discover in the boat had filled him with excitement and with a sense of relief.  He had often been uneasy because, try as he might, he had never been able to love the fisherman.

Here is no regret, no sense that Shasta might wish Arsheesh could have loved him. Shasta’s life is an emotional void and he doesn’t seem to know or care. Ambition stirs, but no longing:

And now, apparently, he was no relation to Arsheesh at all. That took a great weight off his mind.  “Why, I might be anyone!” he thought. “I might be the son of a Tarkaan myself – or the son of the Tisroc (may he live forever) – or of a god!”

Shasta is inexperienced and naïve, and he wants to be something better. He is awkward with and rude to Aravis not just because she's a girl, but because he is jealous of her status, confidence and manners: and there is some shrewd comedy at his expense:

Aravis produced rather nice things to eat from her saddlebag. But Shasta sulked and said No thanks, and that he wasn’t hungry. And he tried to put on what he thought very grand and stiff manners, but as a fisherman’s hut is not usually a good place for learning grand manners, the result was dreadful. And he half knew it wasn’t a success and then became sulkier and more awkward than ever.

This is not unsympathetic, but it’s likely to make us smile at Shasta rather than love him. His main characteristics are anxiety and self-pity: he has no core strength like Lucy or Jill or Aravis. Perhaps his inarticulacy is touching: a revelation of the fears and inadequacies that boys so often conceal. Still, as the story progresses, Shasta and Aravis learn to judge one another more fairly, and Shasta does take responsibility for the desert march. Though it seems to come out of the blue, he proves himself finally at the moment when he jumps off Bree's back to defy the lion that is attacking Aravis – and when he runs on at the Hermit’s urging to warn King Lune of Rabadash’s approaching force. But even when he finds himself to be Prince Cor, eldest son of King Lune of Archenland, the emotional drought continues. The dam never breaks, the rain never comes, the revelation is all cogs and clockwork.  Still worried about what Aravis will think of him, he continues to express himself in tongue-tied clichés like a prep-school boy:

Father’s an absolute brick. I’d be just as pleased – or very nearly – at finding he’s my father even if he wasn’t a king. Even though Education and all sorts of horrible things are going to happen to me.

Two throwaway moments in THHB show what Lewis could have done with Shasta. One is when Bree presses the question of whether Shasta can eat grass:

 “Ever tried?”“Yes, I have. I can’t get it down at all. You couldn’t either if you were me.”

The other is when Shasta tries dismounting (to spare the horses) on the desert ride:

As his bare foot touched the sand he screamed with pain and got one foot back in the stirrup and the other half over Bree’s back before you could have said knife.

A child who tries to eat grass, a child whose shoeless feet scorch in the hot sand: here is poverty made pitiable and tangible.







Moving on: after the 'real' Prince Corin reappears, Shasta hurries to the Tombs of the Ancient Kings, where he and his friends agreed to meet if they become separated in Tashbaan.  '[A]nd now the sun had really set. Suddenly from somewhere behind him came a terrible sound. Shasta's heart gave a great jump and he had to bite his tongue to keep himself from screaming. Next moment he realised what it was: the horns of Tashbaan blowing for the closing of the gates.'  In one of the most atmospheric chapters in the book Shasta spends the night alone beside the Tombs, which are like 'gigantic beehives ... black and grim', later even more scarily personified as  '... horribly like huge people, draped in grey robes that covered their heads and faces'.



Aravis meanwhile has been having her own adventures: recognised by her girly friend Lasaraleen, she effects a hair-raising escape from the palace at night during which, crushed behind a sofa, she and Lasaraleen overhear Rabadash and the Tisroc plotting treacherously to attack King Lune's castle of Anvard - and witness the cringing, sycophantic behaviour of her affianced husband, Ahoshta the Vizier. With Lasaraleen's help, Aravis and the horses rejoin Shasta at the Tombs where they pool their information. Aravis carries the news of Rabadash's plans; Shasta knows the secret route across the desert. The race is on to reach Archenland ahead of Prince Rabadah, and warn King Lune.


It will turn out that Aslan has been masterminding nearly the whole plot of THHB – as he himself explains, walking unseen in the mist unseen beside Shasta when he is lost.

I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore…

Lewis wants us to find this moving, perhaps even comforting. At ten years old I accepted it but it didn’t move me, and to me now it seems manipulative, reducing the characters to puppets as Aslan reconfigures Shasta’s account of his misfortunes to show that all the ‘bad’ things which have happened to him were in fact for the good. There is something uncomfortably controlling about Aslan’s sequential incursions into the lives of Shasta, Aravis and Bree, even though Bree certainly deserves to be taken down a peg or two. As a child I found the scene irresistibly comic in which Bree confidently asserts that Aslan is not a real lion – while Aslan creeps up behind him.

“No doubt,” continues Bree, “when they speak of him as a Lion they only mean he’s as strong as a lion or (to our enemies of course) as fierce as a lion. …it would be quite absurd to suppose he is a real lion. … Why!” (and here Bree began to laugh) “If he was a lion he would have four paws, and a tail, and Whiskers!... Aie, ooh, hoo-hoo! Help!

For just as he said the word Whiskers one of Aslan’s had actually tickled his ear.

It is still funny. Just not as funny as it was.

The religious message in THHB seems to me painting-by-numbers. A series of events is worked out to illustrate a set of propositions: God ordains all things; God knows and judges all things; God will reward the good and punish the sinner; God is with us always. It reminds me of those ‘footprints in the sand’ posters which can be bought from Christian bookshops with a little parable in which God reassures us that ‘when you thought you were walking alone, that is when I was carrying you.’  Such parables undoubtedly do comfort some people, and heaven knows we all need comfort. However, sincerity is required to make these things work, and in The Horse and His Boy I’m not convinced Lewis is sincere. It’s all a little too clever. There is no sense that anything springs from a deep emotional source and this is evident at the end of Chapter XI when Aslan at last reveals himself to Shasta. Lewis strains unsuccessfully for affect: at least it doesn't work for me.

It was from the Lion that the light came. No-one ever saw anything more terrible or beautiful. … After one glance at the Lion’s face [Shasta] slipped out of the saddle and fell at its feet. He couldn’t say anything but then he didn’t want to say anything, and he knew he needn’t say anything.

The High King above all kings stooped towards him. Its mane, and some strange and solemn perfume that hung about its mane, was all around him. It touched his forehead with its tongue.

This is a stern, remote, High Church Aslan far removed from the flesh and blood Lion who played so joyfully with Lucy and Susan in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – as far removed perhaps as the Jesus of the Gospels seems from the mosaic Christs in Byzantine basilicas. The Aslan who sacrificed himself for Edmund, whose blood and pain restored Caspian to life, youth and strength, has become the Aslan who tears bloody stripes in Aravis's back and even scratches Shasta in retaliation for having once thrown stones at a cat. It's a harsh and retributive transformation.

Still, as a child, I felt the adventure had been wrapped up very satisfactorily. The story ends in slapdash humour. Prince Rabadash makes a fool of himself (“The bolt of Tash falls from above!” – “Does it ever get caught on a hook half-way?”) and is transformed by Aslan (punitive to the last) into a donkey so he can do no more harm. Shasta is reinstated as Prince of Archenland. Bree casts off his anxiety and has a good roll. Cor and Aravis’s eventual marriage, in order to go on quarrelling ‘more conveniently’, seemed to me a reasonable and un-sloppy basis for a relationship; they were clearly good friends. I closed the book and reached for the next.

What has surprised me most on this re-reading isn't so much that I found myself addressing questions of racism; I knew I would have to do that. What really surprised me is how didactic, how prescriptive I've found a book which I've remembered  as perhaps the least 'religious' of the Narnia stories. I suspect that it turned out this this way because Lewis never really put his heart into the story at all... except for the character of Bree, horsiest of horses.  




* Flying carpets though, as Ruth B. Bottigheimer has recently pointed out in an interesting essay in Gramarye, Issue 13, are not in fact native to the Arabian Nights tales.


Picture credits:

All artwork from 'The Horse and His Boy', by the magnificent Pauline Baynes. Visit her website here: http://www.paulinebaynes.com/

Seven Miles of Steel Thistles and GDPR: a note

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Re-reading Narnia: The Silver Chair

It's good to be back! I'm sorry for leaving this blog of mine fallow for so long, but I was writing a book which I've now completed (yay!) and so (now I've recovered) I'll be posting on a more regular basis again. To be going on with, here is my long-ago piece on The Silver Chair, which will be followed in due course by posts on the Alpha and Omega of Narnia - The Magician's Nephew,  and The Last Battle. The Silver Chair was the first Narnia book I ever read. My mother gave it to me one Christmas Day when I was about seven years old, along with about six other books, mainly by Enid Blyton. (Failing a pony, all I ever wanted for Christmas and birthdays was books). But this one? I didn’t like the look of it.

The cover picture, one of Pauline Baynes' marvellous illustrations, showed a gloomy-looking cavern with lots of grotesque little gnomes, which put me right off. I had no idea what this book might be about, I had never heard of Narnia; but it all looked downright sinister to me. The gnomes reminded me of Gollum in The Hobbit, a book which had given me the creeps – and worse still, of  'The Hobyahs', a truly ghastly story from Joseph Jacobs' More English Fairytales which had inexplicably been included in my school reading book.

So I put off reading it. I read all my new Enid Blytons and, I seem to remember, Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse. Then I was stuck with nothing new to read, and as I was the sort of child who read the backs of cereal packets if there was nothing better to be had, I reluctantly opened The Silver Chair and began. And it started quite manageably, after all:

It was a dull autumn day and Jill Pole was crying behind the gym.

It seemed a school story. But almost immediately, the narrator went on to say, ‘This not going to be a school story’ – and then Eustace Scrubb (whoever he was) came along to tell Jill there was a chance of escaping the bullies of Experiment House by getting ‘right outside this world’ – and then, ah then, in almost no time, Jill and Eustace find themselves on a high mountain – at the top of a cliff.

Imagine yourself at the top of the very highest cliff you know.  And imagine yourself looking down to the very bottom.  And then imagine that the precipice goes on below that, as far again, ten times as far, twenty times as far.  And when you’ve looked down all that distance, imagine little white things that might at first glance be mistaken for sheep, but presently you realise they are clouds – not little wreaths of mist but the enormous white,  puffy clouds that are themselves the size of mountains.  And at last, in between those clouds, you get your first glimpse of the real bottom, so far away that you can’t make out whether it’s field or wood, or land or water: further below those clouds than you are above them.




Then Jill shows off, and Eustace falls over the cliff – and a lion appears and blows them both to Narnia ‘blowing out as steadily as a vacuum cleaner sucks in’ – and there I was in this adventure, full of old castles and dying kings, snowy moors and talking owls, and Puddleglum the Marshwiggle, the best pessimist since Eeyore – and the beautiful belle-dame-sans-merci-type Green Witch –with time running out to save Prince Rilian from that terrible, magical engine of sorcery, the Silver Chair itself.  And I was hooked. This colourful, colloquial, exciting, fast-moving fairytale was about the best story I’d ever read.

Each Narnia book has its own flavour. There’s the Snow Queen winter world of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the mystical, light-filled, Celtic voyage-tale of the Dawn Treader, the E. Nesbit style of The Magician’s Nephew, the Arabian Nights feel of The Horse and His Boy. With its quest element, and snowy winter journey over rough northern countryside, I can now see parallels between The Silver Chair  and the medieval English poem Gawain and the Green Knight,while the supernatural Green Lady echoes not only the Green Knight himself, but also the beautiful and dangerous fairy queens of sixteenth century ballads such as Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer. The book is set in a framework of medieval romance. This particular Green Lady’s power to transform herself into a serpent, or worm, recalls the medieval French tale of Melusine, and two Scottish ballads, Alison Gross and The Laily Worm and the Machrel:  in the first, an ugly witch courts a young man and turns him into a worm when he refuses her:

She’s turned her richt and richt about,And thrice she blew on a grass-green horn;And she sware by the moon and the stars aboon That she’s gar me rue the day I was born. 

Then out she’s ta’en a silver wand,And she’s turn’d her three times round and round,She’s mutter’d sic words that my strength it failed,And I fell down senseless on the ground.

She’s turn’d me into an ugly worm,And gar’d me toddle about the tree…

And in the second ballad: 

I was but seven year auldWhen my mither she did dieMy father married the ae warst womanThe warld did ever see.

For she has made me the laily wormThat lies at the fit o’ the treeAn’ my sister Masery she’s madeThe machrel of the sea.

In The Silver Chair, the Green Lady is both the worm which has stung Prince Rilian’s mother to death, and the woman who replaces her as mother-figure, as captor, and as bride-to-be. 



Green is dangerous, the warning colour of the fairy world, and has been considered unlucky right down into modern times. The Green Lady is a very different villain from the White Witch. Where Jadis is harsh, autocratic and frightening, the Green Lady conforms – outwardly at least – to the courtly courtesies of the Middle Ages. Here she is, drawn by Pauline Baynes like a lady out of the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, richly dressed in green velvet with dagged sleeves and riding a ‘scrumptious’ white horse. She employs charm, ultra-femininity, logic-chopping and outright deceit, as well as spells and violence, to get her own way. I loved and still love the delightful, sinister ambiguity of her tempting advice to Scrubb, Jill and Puddleglum that they should visit the gentle giants of Harfang, where ‘the roast and the baked and the sweet and the strong will be on the table four times in a day’:

‘Only tell them,’ answered the Lady, ‘that She of the Green Kirtle salutes them by you, and has sent them two fair Southern children for the Autumn Feast.’            The children thanked her again, with shining eyes…

A great thing about this book is the vivid discomfort of the winter journey. The children and Puddleglum struggle through the harsh snowy landscape like Sir Gawain himself, who ‘nearly slain by the sleet, slept in his armour, more nights than enough on naked rocks, where clattering from the crest the cold burn ran, and hung high overhead in hard icicles’. In Chapter Seven, ‘The Hill of the Strange Trenches’ (in which they ignorantly scramble over one of the very signs they’ve come to find) their misery extends for several pages.

When they reached the foot of the hill they caught a glimpse of what might be rocks on each side – squarish rocks, if you looked at them carefully, but no one did. All were more concerned with the ledge right in front of them which barred their way.  It was about four feet high. The Marsh-wiggle, with his long legs, had no difficulty in jumping up on the top of it, and he then helped the others up. It was a nasty wet business for them… because the snow now lay quite deep on the ledge.

  


Like Gawain, the children and Puddleglum find shelter, comfort and courtesy in a castle in the wilds: and like Gawain, they will discover this apparent refuge to be a perilous deception. But oh, the relief of that hot fireside tub! How I wanted to try one!

If you can swim – as Jill could – a giant bath is a lovely thing. And giant towels, though a bit rough and coarse, are lovely too, because there are acres of them. In fact you don’t need to dry at all, you just roll about on them in front of the fire and enjoy yourself.

But then – ‘at the deadest hour of night’ – Jill has a dream in which a wooden horse, one of the giant toys, comes to life and rolls towards her across the room. In the shape-shifting way of dreams it becomes Aslan himself, who takes her in his jaws and carries her to the window. In a vision that reminds me of Thomas Malory at his numinous best, Jill sees how, outside in the moonlight,

written in great letters across the world or the sky (she did not know which) were the words UNDER ME.

In the morning it’s obvious. The ruined city of the giants which they were supposed to be looking for lies right there beneath the window: the very terrain they struggled across the previous night. On the mountain at the beginning of the book, Jill was given four signs by Aslan. Over the course of the adventure, the travellers ‘muff’ the first three, but the writing is so strong there’s no room for the reader to grow impatient with the characters. As a child I felt that I’d have done the just the same; I could sympathise. I still do. Puddleglum and the children are so horribly wet and tired and cold: and they’ve been wet and tired and cold for days, too: of course they long for a bit of warmth and comfort.

So whose fault is this, that they miss the signs? Is this a sin thing? Is the fault, like Eve’s, Jill’s alone? Is this another strike against Lewis to place beside the problem of Susan and the fact that Narnia’s most spectacular villains (far surpassing tedious Uncle Andrew and Shift the ape) are female? I honestly don’t think so. Hunting out religious parallels for everything that happens in Narnia is a bit like going for a walk in lead boots: it can be done, but it’s not a lot of fun. I could get really heavy and suggest that the signs handed to Jill on the mountain are a reference to God handing the Ten Commandments to Moses: this may even be what Lewis intended, but if so, he has done it with a very light touch. The mistakes the children make are so natural and likely, their transgressions never feel much of a big deal. Rather than being blamed for forgetting the signs, Jill blames herself – an important difference – but the others immediately accept collective responsibility, and they all move on. They’re a team. There’s no finger-pointing. If there’s a punishment, it’s not delivered by Aslan. It comes merely as a consequence of their decisions: at dinner with the giants they find themselves eating a talking animal.

And yet again Lewis chooses a girl as his viewpoint character. We see Narnia through Jill’s eyes, and she has common sense, courage, obstinacy and what is now called ‘attitude’. (Yes, she pushes Eustace off a cliff – but anyone might do that.) Jill and Eustace indulge in similar amounts of bad-tempered bickering, and their relationship – friendship with a touch of rivalry – is more realistic than any in the previous books.  It’s all very even-handed. Jill is afraid of tight spaces, but Eustace is afraid of heights. Jill doesn’t fight the serpent, but she can tack up big, nervous horses and ride them without fear. It’s Jill who fools the giants by putting on a comedy performance of Shirley Temple-style cuteness, and Jill who discovers this important entry in the Harfang cookery book:

MAN: this elegant little biped has long been valued as a delicacy. It forms a traditional part of the Autumn Feast and is served between the fish and the joint. Each Man –

This, after she has noticed two clean pie-dishes set out on the kitchen table, large enough for her to ‘lie down just comfortably in’. The mixture of suspense and black comedy is masterful.





Next comes the frantic escape from Harfang, the capture by the gnomes with their dirge-like chant of ‘many fall down, and few return to the sunlit lands’, and the fabulous underworld journey through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea – through endless caves of flabby trees and lizard-like creatures curled asleep in the moss – past the great sleeping giant Time, who will awake at the end of the world –  down to the dark water,  the pale beaches, and the silent underground city with its wan lamps: ‘as quiet, and nearly as dark, as the inside of an ant-hill’.

And here they meet the Black Knight.

A young man with fair hair rose to meet them. He was handsome, and looked both bold and kind, though there was something about his face that didn’t seem quite right.

No doubt any experienced adult reader will guess at once who he is. When I was seven, I initially thought this could be Prince Rilian, but Lewis did an excellent job of misdirecting me. The Knight is a foolish, shallow, disappointing man. He doesn’t recognise the name ‘Rilian’, he’s never heard of Narnia, and he seems to worship the Green Lady, who by this time I knewto be wicked.  And for an hour each night he turns into a snake?  Maybe the very creature which bit the Queen?

Perhaps I wasn’t quite deceived. But I wasn’t quite sure either: the Knight is so irritating.

They were thoroughly tired of the Knight’s talk before they had finished supper. Puddleglum was thinking, ‘I wonder what game that witch is really playing with this young fool.’  Scrubb was thinking, ‘He’s a great baby, really: tied to that woman’s apron strings; he’s a sap.’ And Jill was thinking, ‘He’s the silliest, most conceited, selfish pig I’ve met for a long time.’

It is this uncertainty which makes the next passage truly gripping. The Knight is bound to his Silver Chair and – here is the dreadful bit – himself begs the children and Puddleglum not to release him. ‘Harden your hearts and stop your ears. For while I am bound, you are safe.’  And they all agree, promising one another that whatever he says or does – ‘whatever he says’ – they’ll stay firm. They won’t let him go.

And for one brief hour, the witch’s enchantment lifts. ‘I am sane now. Every night I am sane. If only I could get out of this enchanted chair, it would last. But every night they bind me, and so my chance is gone. But you are not enemies. I am not your prisoner. Quick!  Cut these cords.’

It takes two and a half agonising pages for the children and Puddleglum to change their minds and cut the cords, while the Knight pleads, begs, threatens, shrieks, and finally adjures them in the name of Aslan – the last of the four signs. They know at once what they have to do. They’ve messed up the first three, and this is the last chance – but what will happen next? ‘That fellow will be the death of us once he’s up, I shouldn’t wonder,’ says gloomy but staunch Puddleglum. ‘But that doesn’t let us off following the sign.’

They all stood looking at once another with bright eyes. It was a sickening moment. ‘All right!’ said Jill suddenly. ‘Let’s get it over. Goodbye, everyone…!’  They all shook hands.  The Knight was screaming by now; there was foam on his cheeks.


 

It’s a wonderful effect: this rescue of the Prince isn’t a moment of triumph, but of suspense and terror. ‘Let’s get it over.’ Reading this as an adult, I find myself remembering that Lewis fought in the trenches. I think of soldiers listening to wounded comrades screaming out in No Man’s Land, nerving themselves to a rescue which may end in their own deaths. Is that too fanciful? Could the Silver Chair itself be a metaphor for the terrible barbed wire in which so many men lay entangled? As a fairytale motif, I know of nothing really like it except perhaps the Siege Perilous in Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, the seat at the Round Table devised by Merlin for Galahad, the knight who will attain the Holy Grail, and fatal for anyone else who sits in it. The Silver Chair is more sinister than that. Of course, this book is a fairytale, I’m not suggesting we should read The Silver Chair as World War I literature. But look again at the passage where the liberated Prince turns on the Chair with his sword:

The silver gave way before its edge like string, and in a few moments a few twisted fragments, shining on the floor, were all that was left. But as the chair broke, there came from it a bright flash, a sound like small thunder, and (for one moment) a loathsome smell.

The Chair turns to wire-like ‘string’, its twisted metal fragments resemble shrapnel – it breaks with a flash, a crash like thunder and a loathsome smell – like gas?  If these images truly arise from Lewis’s war experience, then they come from subconscious memory. This is what writers do: things swim up unsummoned from the depths of all that we are and all that has happened to us. And we use them, often without looking at them too hard. This is what makes them powerful: they’re not planned or worked out, they arise as symbols of an emotional truth: they satisfy, they feel right. It’s not some kind of neat equation, but perhaps Lewis’s experience informs the image of the Silver Chair, lending it darkness and depth.

The rescued Knight is soon revealed as Prince Rilian himself, and as the children explain their purpose in coming to find him, the Witch returns.

The Silver Chair is an exceedingly rich book. It had more to it than any story I’d ever read. It gave me such a lot to think about – or perhaps more accurately to soak up and grow on, like a plant that’s been given a really nourishing fertiliser. It was Lewis, not any scientist, who introduced me, aged seven and up, to the concept of the multiverse, the notion there could be many worlds, many universes besides ours. He also introduced me, little as I realised this at the time, to the Platonic parable of the cave. As much as Christianity, Plato was one of CS Lewis’s touchstones: he even gets a mention in The Last Battle:  “It’s all in Plato – all in Plato,” says the Professor, Diggory.  “Bless me, what do they teach them in these schools?”

In The Republic, Plato suggests that human perception can be compared to that of prisoners chained in a cave, whose only knowledge of anything beyond is gained from the shadows flung on to the cave wall from the real world outside. Only the philosopher sees the truth behind appearances. That is what lies behind this passage, in which the Green Lady, the witch, tries to persuade the children and the Prince that there is no such place as Narnia:

“What is this sun that you speak of? Do you mean anything by the word?”“Yes, we jolly well do,” said Scrubb.“Can you tell me what it’s like?” asked the Witch (thrum, thrum, thrum, went the strings).“Please it your Grace,” said the Prince, very coldly and politely.  “You see that lamp. It is round and yellow and gives light to the whole room; and hangeth moreover from the roof.  Now that thing which we call the sun is like the lamp, only far greater and brighter. It giveth light to the whole Overworld, and hangeth in the sky.”“Hangeth from what, my lord?” asked the Witch, and then, while they were all still thinking how to answer her, she added, with another of her soft, silvery laughs, “You see?  When you try to think out clearly what this sun must be, you cannot tell me. You can only tell me that it is like the lamp. Your sun is a dream; and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp. The lamp is the real thing; the sun is but a tale, a children’s story.”

First and foremost, this is a neat reversal of Plato's parable. Here it’s the Green Lady who inhabits – mentally as well as literally – the underground cave.  She wants to restrict the children’s reality.  She wants to keep them with her, prisoners – just as the dwarfs at the end of The Last Battle are prisoners of their own scepticism, refusing to emerge from the rank stable of their own senses. Fundamentalists of all kinds prefer, in my experience, to stay in the cave. Some – not all – religious people live within the restrictions of a literal understanding of the Bible, refusing to consider metaphorical or historical interpretations. Some practical people feel comfortable only with demonstrable scientific truths and feel that telling fairy-stories about the world leads to confusion, illusion and possibly even child abuse. Some political parties insist – occasionally with force – upon rigid adherence to a particular social model. All fundamentalists feel deep suspicion, sometimes amounting to paranoia, of metaphoric, poetic, creative truth. All instinctively shun the suggestion that there may be other ways than theirs of reading, of explaining, of experiencing or governing the world.

What is reality?Lewis demands of his child readers. Is it only the evidence of our immediate senses – the things we can touch and taste and see?  Then what about the imagination?  What about fiction and poetry and religion and philosophy?  

This moment, when the Green Lady almost convinces the children and Puddleglum that her underground kingdom is all there is, made a deep impression on me as a child: and rightly, since it’s the heart of the book. And I especially loved the moment when practical, common-sensible Puddleglum saves the day not by any subtle argument, but by stamping out the witch’s magical fire with his big, webbed foot, filling the room with ‘the smell of burnt Marshwiggle’ – and follows his brave deed with his, and Lewis’s, passionate credo:

“I’m a chap who’s always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. 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, 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 playing 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 stick with 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.”

‘Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world.’ Again I remember Lewis’s war experience.  He knew the value of the imagination, and this trumpet-call for its power and beauty still makes me want to cheer. Puddleglum’s credo is not Christian, because traditional Christianity hangs upon upon the verity of the New Testament. ‘If Christ was not raised, then our gospel is null and void, and so is your faith’, says Saint Paul, 1 Corinthians, 15:14.  Puddleglum speaks as a Platonist: if in this imperfect world you can imagine the Good, it is because beyond our material ‘reality’ it truly exists as a perfect Form. ‘Be what you wish to seem’: choose the best in yourself and not the worst. It’s not a bad message to come across, when you’re still only seven.

Now you may complain that it’s all sleight-of-hand, that Lewis is using Plato for his own purposes and this is a set-up, a bit of Christian propaganda (and in his adult Christian apologetics, Lewis certainly did rely heavily on dubious Socratic dialectic): because, yes, the child reader knows all the time that Narnia isreal.  Or at least that in the secondary world of the book, Narnia is ‘real’…  Lewis hints at how impoverished the witch’s worldview is by showing us layer upon layer of rich reality: the glimpse of the brilliant land of Bism far down in the depths of the earth:

“Down there,” said Golg, “I could show you real gold, real silver, real diamonds.”  “Bosh,” said Jill rudely.  “As if we didn’t know that we’re below the deepest mines even here.”“Yes,” said Golg.  “I have heard of those little scratches in the crust that you Topdwellers call mines. But that’s where you get dead gold, dead silver, dead gems. Down in Bism we have them alive and growing. There I’ll pick you bunches of rubies that you can eat, and squeeze you a cup full of diamond juice. You won’t care much about fingering the cold dead treasures of your shallow mines after you have tasted the live ones of Bism.

So there are worlds in Narnia that even the Narnians don’t know about! What is real? Our world? Fiction? Narnia? Aslan’s country? All of them…?  

With such questions hanging in the Narnian air, no wonder that I, along with many other children, felt a passionate half-belief that Narnia itself was real. And we longed to go there. The American writer Laura Miller writes of this in The Magician’s Book, A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia (Little, Brown: 2009):

In one of the most vivid memories from my childhood, nothing happens.  On a clear, sunny day, I’m standing near a curb in the quiet suburban California neighbourhood where my family lived, and I’m wishing, with every bit of myself, for two things. First, I want a place I’ve read about in a book to really exist, and second, I want to be able to go there. I want this so much I’m pretty sure the misery of not getting it will kill me. For the rest of my life, I will never want anything quite so much again. The place I longed to visit was Narnia.

When my friend Frances and I were about ten, we confessed to one another our fragile belief that Narnia was real – had to be real. We invented a code name for it – ‘The Garden’ – so that we could talk about it and other people wouldn’t know. As a child, I took what I needed from the Narnia books, and what I needed has stayed with me for life: the colour, richness and beauty, the breadth, depth and glory of the world.





Defeated in argument, the Witch turns to violence. In a hair-raisingly vivid passage owing a great deal to the death of the dragon in Book 1 of The Faerie Queene, she transforms herself into a serpent and is killed. This breaks all her chains of enchantment, and the gnomes turn out to have been enchanted too. Rilian and Eustace reluctantly turn back from the glowing edge of Bism, and the travellers make their way out into the Overworld which – of course – turns out to be the classic heart of Narnia, with fauns and dryads dancing in the snow on a cold moonlit night. Everything is now delightful, and the Narnians welcome their long-lost Prince with shouts of joy. Returning to Cair Paravel on centaur-back, the travellers find King Caspian’s ship coming slowly up the river from the sea. It berths. Then comes a delay. You begin to feel that something is wrong. And finally the old king and his son are reunited: the king lying on a bed, ‘very pale and still’. He blesses his son and falls back, dead.

Caspian! – Caspian dies! Caspian, the brave and handsome boy who was so nice to Lucy (who equalled me). It has all gone wrong, all turned sad.


…all who wore hats, bonnets, helmets or hoods were taking them off – Eustace included. Then she heard a rustling and flapping noise up above the castle; when she looked up she saw that the great banner with the golden Lion on it was being brought down to half-mast. And after that, slowly, mercilessly, with wailing strings and disconsolate blowing of horns, the music began again: this time, a tune to break your heart.

The resurrection scene which follows, as Aslan blows away the ‘the ship and the dead King and the castle and the snow and the winter sky’ and brings the children back to the numinous mountain does not, for me at least, detract from the poignancy of Caspian’s death. As a child I felt keenly for Rilian. He only just got to see his father, after ten years of being enchanted! After his mother had died too! Poor Rilian, left alone to grieve. He doesn’t get to see King Caspian coming back to youth and strength…  

On this re-reading I still find Caspian’s resurrection moving. Yes, the Christian imagery is there, and with deliberate intent. Eustace drives a foot-long thorn into the pad of Aslan's foot to release the drop of blood which restores Caspian. It isn't easy. It's Aslan's love and blood and pain that provides the counterweight to death, and in this context I prefer it to a magic wand. Christian imagery permeates most of Western art and you don’t have to be a believer to appreciate it. If Christianity is a myth, it is a myth that speaks as movingly and strongly as any other. The Silver Chair isn’t propaganda. It is a beautiful fairytale.

Of course from my current, liberal, adult point of view, it’s a little disconcerting that the final action of Jill, Eustace and Caspian in this book is to inflict – with Aslan’s co-operative approval – corporal punishment on the bullies of Experiment House. I have to tell you, though, that as a child I thought this bit was great. I too had been bullied at school, as lots of children have – and it was unthinkable that after all they’d been through, Jill and Eustace would return to square one, cowering miserably in the shrubbery. I would not have been at all satisfied if Lewis had made them simply quell the bullies by force of new-found confidence: ‘Just stand up to them,’ as adults liked to bleat, ‘then they’ll back down.’ Huh! I wouldn’t have believed it. I wanted vicarious revenge and I was delighted to be given it. And here my adult and my childhood selves part company, as the seven year-old me gives her older counterpart a withering and pitying glance.







Picture credits: all artwork by Pauline Baynes

Re-reading Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I have two very different personal memories relating to this book. One, vividly happy, is from childhood. The other comes from a time when I was a young adult working in London. And it still makes me cringe.

The childhood one first: At the age of nine, I woke one night to hear my parents criss-crossing the landing and my eight-year old brother crying in the next bedroom. Calling out, I was told to be good, my brother was poorly, go back to sleep. Next morning I found he’d been rushed to hospital during the night. At a party the previous week, the children had been pulling the spiky wooden cocktail sticks out of the little cocktail sausages, putting them into drinking straws and puffing them across the room, like darts from like blow-pipes. Instead of blowing, however, my little brother inhaled; the cocktail stick flew down his throat and somehow he swallowed it...  He hadn’t wanted to explain this in detail to my mother, as he thought she’d be cross. It went right down inside and perforated his intestine, and since the wooden stick didn’t show up on X-rays, the surgeon had to perform a major operation to find it. I’ve never felt comfortable around cocktail sticks since.

My brother stayed in hospital for some time. In those days, visiting rules were strict. I wasn’t allowed to see him, but I did see that he was (deservedly) being deluged with treats, toys and other goodies from friends and relations. To keep sibling rivalry in balance, my parents bought me the book I’d been longing for, the only Narnia book I hadn’t yet read: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. While they went visiting I curled up in an armchair – I can still feel its bristly upholstery against my knees – and was swept away into an open-air world drenched in light – the light of sunrise over the sea, the quiet sunlit passages of the Magician’s House, sunbeams slanting through the green waters of the undersea world, birds flying out of the rising sun to the table of the Three Sleepers, the almost painful light of the Silver Sea.

...when they returned aft to the cabin and supper, and saw the whole western sky lit up with an immense crimson sunset, and thought of unknown lands on the Eastern rim of the world, Lucy felt that she was almost too happy to speak.


Now for the second memory; I’m in my early twenties, chatting to a colleague, Richard. For some reason we are talking about the Narnia books, which he has never read but on my recommendation is willing to try. Which ones are the best? ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘my favourites are The Silver Chair and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I can even quote the beginning of that one.’ And I do: ‘“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”’  Richard starts to smile and I continue from memory: “He didn’t call his father and mother ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’, but Harold and Alberta. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotallers, and wore a special kind of underclothes.”’ Richard’s smile vanishes. He says stiffly, flushing, ‘I call my parents by their first names, as it happens; and I’m a vegetarian too.’

And thus I learned, not before time, that unthinking admiration for an old favourite can land you in the soup. What an idiot I was! Why hadn’t I noticed that Lewis was so prejudiced? Could he truly have believed that a dislike of tobacco, alcohol and meat makes a person into some kind of prissy, unimaginative bore? I fear he could. Sigh.

TVDT doesn’t become the book I fell in love with until the story – and ship – gets beyond the Lone Islands. There are just too many unexamined value judgements going on before then. I don’t know if I need to pick them all apart, but how about this, on only the second page of the story, where Lewis explains why Edmund and Lucy are staying with Eustace at all. Peter, it seems, is being coached for an exam by the old Professor. The children’s parents are going to America and taking Susan with them.

Grown-ups thought her the pretty one of the family and she was no good at school work (though otherwise very old for her age) and Mother said she “would get far more out of a trip to America than the youngsters”.

‘Pretty’ ‘no good at school work’ and ‘old for her age’ – a euphemism for sexual precocity – this, not The Last Battle, is the book in which Lewis dismisses Susan: and he never gives her another chance. Susan’s trip to America, though sanctioned by her mother, is viewed by Lewis as a dangerous frivolity, a trip to Vanity Fair or worse, and what she will ‘get out of it’ is – to use an old term of religious disapproval –  worldliness. Why a liking for lipstick and nylons should be more worldlythan a taste for tobacco and beer I don’t know, but this is farewell to Susan the archer, Susan the swimmer, Susan the gentle who ‘was so tender-hearted that she almost hated to beat someone who had been beaten already’. It’s all very silly.

Back to Eustace!

‘Still playing your old games?’ said Eustace Clarence, who had been listening outside the door and now came grinning into the room. Last year, when he had been staying with the Pevensies, he had managed to hear them all talking about Narnia and he loved teasing them about it. He thought of course that they were making it all up; and as he was far too stupid to make anything up himself, he did not approve of that.




As the story begins, Eustace is certainly spoiled, irritating, bad-tempered, self-centred and sneaky. This is staple fare for a children’s book: Roald Dahl does far nastier things with some of his characters, and anyway, in the tradition of Kipling’s ‘Captains Courageous’, the voyage will make a man of Eustace. But stupid’? No! Eustace isn’t stupid, just inexperienced and a bad mixer. He doesn’t enjoy fiction (or hasn’t been given much) and is therefore very ill-prepared for the adventure about to befall him. But his wonderful diaries full of self-deception, self-justification and complaints are the comical high point of the book, as funny as Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole – on whom Eustace must surely have been an influence.

6th SeptemberA horrible day. Woke up in the night knowing I was feverish and must have a drink of water. Any doctor would have said so.  Heaven knows I’m the last person to try to get any unfair advantage but I never dreamed this water-rationing would be meant to apply to a sick man. In fact I would have woken the others up and asked for some only I thought it would be selfish to wake them. So I got up and took my cup and tiptoed out of the Black Hole we’ve been sleeping in, taking great care not to disturb Caspian and Edmund, for they’ve been sleeping badly since the heat and the short water began. I always try to consider others whether they are nice to me or not.




Eustace’s own adventure begins when the Dawn Treader drops anchor in a steep-sided valley – drawn here with a hint of Chinese delicacy by Pauline Baynes. Avoiding the work of setting the ship to rights he slips off into the interior and gets lost. Finding himself in a deep, bare, rocky ravine, he hears a noise behind him and turns to see…

The thing that came out of the cave was something he had never even imagined – a long, lead-coloured snout, dull red eyes, no feathers or fur, a long lithe body that trailed on the ground, legs whose elbows went up higher than its back like a spider’s. Bat’s wings that made a rasping noise on the stones, yards of tail.  

…It reached the pool and slid its horrible scaly chin down over the gravel to drink, but before it had drunk there came from it a great croaking or clanging cry, and after a few twitches and convulsions it rolled round on its side and lay perfectly still with one claw in the air.  A little dark blood gushed from its wide-opened mouth. The smoke from its nostrils turned black for a moment and then floated away. No more came.

I said this book was full of light and so it is, but there’s a lot of darkness too. As a description of death, this is about as grotesque and physical as books for young children get. All the dragons I’d ever read about were strong and splendid, requiring a St George at least to quell them. This weary, repulsive creature dies alone of natural causes before it can even get a drink of water– a touch which makes it pitiable, too. A cave full of treasure, and all it wants at the end is a sip of water! Which may become Eustace’s own fate as, gloating over the dragon’s hoard, he falls asleep with a diamond bracelet pushed up over his elbow. 

All children know the panicky moment when a sweater sticks as you pull it over your head, or when a ring won’t come off your finger and your mother tries to ease it over your bruised knuckle with soap.

The bracelet which had fitted very nicely on the upper arm of a boy was far too small for the thick, stumpy foreleg of a dragon. It had sunk deeply into his scaly flesh and there was a throbbing bulge on each side of it. He tore at the place with his dragon’s teeth but could not get it off.

It’s an unforgettable evocation of horror, self-loathing and the sensation of being trapped inside oneself.  Behave like a dragon, and you’ll become one; you are what you do. It’s the obverse of Socrates’ ‘Be what you wish to seem.’ (All in Plato, it’s all in Plato…)  Eustace’s priorities are about to be rearranged, and his first need is to communicate, even with dragon claws and muscles that can barely write:

I WNET TO SLEE …  RGOS AGRONS I MEAN DRANGONS CAVE CAUSE IT WAS DEAD AND AINING SO HAR … WOKE UP AND COU … GET OFFF MI ARM OH BOTHER …

It takes Aslan to strip off the horny layers of dragon hide from which Eustace will emerge reborn, and CS Lewis summarises the pain, difficulty and satisfaction of the healing process in a brilliant metaphor any child can recognise: picking off a scab. ‘It hurts like billy-oh, but it is such fun to see it coming away.’

TVDT isn’t Eustace’s story alone, though. This is made clear in the next chapter, ‘Two narrow escapes’. So much happens in this book, I’d forgotten about the sea-serpent which almost crushes the ship to matchwood and then goes sniffing along its own body looking for wreckage with an expression of ‘idiotic satisfaction’ on its face. A purely physical danger, it’s a good contrast to the spiritual sickness embodied in the dragon. But a far graver peril awaits them at the next island.

The bottom of the pool was made of large greyish-blue stones, and the water was perfectly clear, and on the bottom lay a life-size figure of a man, made apparently of gold. It lay face downwards with its arms stretched above its head. …Lucy thought it was the most beautiful statue she had ever seen.  

But this water turns everything it touches to gold, and what seemed a statue is really a horror: the body of one of the seven lords they have come to seek. Only by chance have the children escaped the same fate. But there’s a worse danger.

‘The King who owned this island,’ said Caspian slowly, and his face flushed as he spoke, ‘would soon be the richest of all the Kings of the world. I claim this land forever as a Narnian possession. It shall be called Goldwater Island. And I bind all of you to secrecy. No one must know of this. Not even Drinian – on pain of death, do you hear?’

‘On pain of death’?  It’s clear that Eustace is not the only one vulnerable to greed. Caspian is a King, and what do Kings do but acquire lands and power? In this passage he reveals a high-handed, bullying side to his character which suggests he could go either way – a just ruler or a cruel despot. When Caspian threatens his friends for the sake of wealth and power, we see the story focussing on intangible, internal adventures more than on physical ones.  Yes, there’s always plenty of action and excitement, but as with Frodo Baggins and the Ring, the real dangers are moral and spiritual. There may be squabbles and disagreements in other books, but this is the only one of the seven Narnia stories in which Lewis allows for the real possibility of ‘good’ characters changing for the worse. True, Aslan or his image steps in each time to avert real disaster, but the danger exists. Each of the main characters (save Edmund whose trial came in the first book) is put to the test. Like the knights on the Grail Quest, Caspian and even Lucy falter along the way, and only Reepicheep, Narnia’s Galahad, will succeed. For now, though, as Caspian and Edmund begin to quarrel and Lucy to scold, Aslan passes warningly along the hillside and recalls them to their senses.

When I was a child, the island-hopping voyage of Caspian and his friends to the End of the World seemed to me completely original, but I know now that C.S. Lewis was borrowing from the very old Irish voyage tales known as immrama, in each of which a hero or saint – Bran, Maelduin, Brendan – sets out for some kind of Otherworld, stopping at a number of fantastic or miraculous islands along the way.  Written in the Christian era, they hark back to older pre-Christian Celtic voyage tales, and were probably themselves influenced by the classical tales of the Odyssey and Argonautika.  Saint Brendan, for example, puts out into the Atlantic Ocean in a hide boat – a curragh – with twelve companions. In search of Paradise, the Land of the Blessed, he spends years wandering the ocean from island to island: the island of the ‘Comely Hound’ which leads them to a hall with a table spread with food; the Island of Sheep, ‘every sheep the size of an ox’; ‘The Paradise of Birds’, on which some of the angels who fell with Lucifer live as small birds all rejoicing and singing the matins and the verses of the psalms.  

The islands in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – the dragon island, the Dark Island where dreams come true, the Island of the Dufflepuds, the island of The Three Sleepers – these are deliberate echoes of Brendan’s islands or those visited by the Irish hero Maeldune: thirty or so marvellous islands and other wonders, including this: 

            The Very Clear SeaThey went on after that till they came to a sea that was like glass, and so clear it was that the gravel and the sand of the sea could be seen through it, and they saw no beasts or monsters at all among the rocks, but only the clean gravel and the grey sand.  And through a great part of the day they were going over that sea, and it is very grand it was and beautiful.

Saint Brendan too encounters a clear sea, while saying mass:

So clear that they could see to the bottom, and it was all as covered with a great heap of fishes.  …And the fishes awoke and started up and came all around the ship in a heap, that they could hardly see the water for fishes.  But when the mass was ended each one of them turned himself and swam away, and they saw them no more.

The clear water is repeated in C.S. Lewis’s ‘Silver Sea’:  'How beautifully clear the water is' said Lucy to herself as she leaned over the port side early in the afternoon...'I must be seeing the bottom of the sea; fathoms and fathoms down.'

  

Like the immrama, TVDT is the story of a spiritual quest. ‘Do you think,’ says Lucy, ‘Aslan’s country would be that sort of country – I mean, the sort you could ever sail to?’  The answer of the immrama is a qualified yes. Brendan and his companions reach the edges of their Blessed Land:

…clear and lightsome, and the trees full of fruit on every bough… and the air neither hot nor cold but always one way, and the delight that they found there could never be told. Then they came to a river that they could not cross but they could see beyond it the country that had no bounds to its beauty.  Then there came to them a young man… and took [Brendan] by the hand and said to him…

‘Here is the country you have been in search of, but it is our Lord’s will you should go back again and make no delay… And this river you see here is the mering,’ he said, ‘that divides the worlds, for no man may come to the other side of it while he is in life; [and when he dies] it is then there will be leave to see this country towards the world’s end.’

Praising God and laden with fruit of the country and precious stones, Brendan returns to Ireland and dies, his whole mind set on the heaven he has already seen. In the same spirit, Reepicheep sails over the edge of the world in his coracle, ‘and since that moment no one can truly claim to have seen Reepicheep the Mouse.  But my belief is that he came safe to Aslan’s country and is alive there to this day.’No wonder Lewis wrote The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Reading these old tales, the writer in me longs to snatch up a pen and begin making one of my own.  When, over the crest of the great wave at the world's edge, the children catch a glimpse of Narnia’s own Land of the Blessed, Aslan’s country,  Lewis recounts it in the same flat yet awed manner of the immrama – the voice of one simply reporting or recording genuine wonders.

Eastwards – beyond the sun – was a range of mountains.  It was so high that either they never saw the top or they forgot it.  None of them remembers seeing any sky in that direction.  And the mountains must really have been outside the world.  For any mountains even a quarter or a twentieth of that height ought to have had ice and snow on them.  But these were warm and green and full of forests and waterfalls however high you looked.  And suddenly there came a breeze from the east, tossing the top of the wave into foamy shapes and ruffling the smooth water all round them.  …It brought a smell and a sound, a musical sound.  Edmund and Eustace would never talk about it afterwards.  Lucy could only say, ‘It would break your heart.’ ‘Why,’ said I, ‘was it so sad?’  ‘Sad!! No,’ said Lucy.  

But I’m getting ahead of myself. After the adventure of Goldwater/Deathwater Island, the next landfall for the ship is the Island of the Voices – comic, if slightly sinister relief after the strain of the past few adventures. The invisible, thumping creatures whose voices (‘the isle is full of noises’) alarm Caspian and his friends turn out to be servants of a powerful and equally invisible magician, whose spell only ‘a little girl’ can undo. Alone, Lucy sets off upstairs into the quiet sunlit interior of the Magician’s House...

… perhaps a bit too quiet. It would have been nicer if there had not been strange signs painted in scarlet on the doors – twisty, complicated things which obviously had a meaning and it mightn’t be a very nice meaning either.  

  I’ve always loved this bit, rich and cosy and creepy – the silence, the masks, the strange Bearded Glass, and the Magician’s Book which you could only read if you turned your back on an open door. I loved the spells, too. Of course Lucy wants to try one – who wouldn’t?  And Pauline Baynes’ gorgeous illustration makes it all the more tempting.



An infallible spell to make beautiful her that uttereth it beyond the lot of mortals. Like Galadriel tempted by the Ring (‘All shall love me, and despair’) Lucy is tempted to speak the words which will transform her into another Helen, a cause of wars to lay Narnia and its neighbour countries waste.  There’s also a strong dash of sibling rivalry: the magical book shows her Susan, ‘only plainer and with a nasty expression… jealous of the dazzling beauty of Lucy, but that didn’t matter a bit because no one cared anything about Susan now’. We knew Edmund was jealous of Peter, but Lewis has never told us before that Lucy is jealous of Susan, and oddly the effect here is to humanise Lucy and demonise Susan - even though we know it’s all Lucy’s fantasy.

‘I will say the spell,’ said Lucy. ‘I don’t care. I will.’

This book of spells is Lucy’s test, and just like Eustace-the-dragon and Caspian, she fails it. Once again Aslan has to intervene, his painted face appearing on the page ‘growling, and you could see most of his teeth’. Frightened, Lucy turns the page only to gabble another, lesser spell that ‘would let you know what your friends thought about you’, which teaches her the age-old lesson that listeners never hear good of themselves. Next comes a spell ‘for the refreshment of the spirit’, and finally the one she’s looking for, ‘A Spell to make hidden things visible’. On repeating it, Aslan himself appears, in tender but chiding mood – the Magician is revealed to be a sort of benign exiled Prospero, and we meet the Duffers or Monopods.  

Lucy has succumbed to vanity and curiosity, which Lewis seems to consider female faults. Unlike Susan, Lucy is forgiven them: the spell for ‘refreshment of the spirit’ with its Gospel hints of ‘a cup and a sword and a green hill’ seems to cleanse her.

Next comes the terrible Dark Island ‘where dreams – dreams, do you understand – come to life, come real. Not daydreams: dreams.’  More strong meat for my nine-year old self, who like most children knew plenty about the sorts of dreams ‘that make you afraid of going to sleep again’. Reading it as a child, I completely understood that the Dark Island is not a physical place at all; the ship never comes to land.  All this terror and madness and horror is happening inside the minds of the crew.  It’s fabulous writing. (‘Can you hear a noise … like … like a huge pair of scissors opening and shutting… over there?’)  I understood that somehow, the characters have to escape from themselves – out of their own heads. The tension as they try to row out of the darkness… will they ever get out?  Will anyone in the blackness of despair ever make it?  

The stranger, who had been lying in a huddled heap on the deck, sat up and burst into a horrible screaming laugh. ‘Never get out!’ he yelled. ‘That’s it. Of course. We shall never get out. What a fool I was to have thought they would let me go as easily as that. No no, we shall never get out.’


But by Aslan’s help, they do. Is that too easy?  I think not, because the emotion is true. The albatross which circles the ship crying in a ‘strong, sweet voice’ and which leads them back to the light may be Aslan, or Christ, or hope, or what you will, but Lewis knows help of some kind is necessary: there are few who can drag themselves out of depression unaided. The relief and joy of finding the sunlight once again is almost palpable.

More light follows this darkness at the ship’s next landfall, the Island of the Sleepers. Here the last three lost Narnian lords lie in an enchanted stupor, having touched the Stone Knife that lies on Aslan’s Table. Caspian and his company wait uneasily around the Table till dawn at the behest of Reepicheep the Mouse (‘no danger seems to me so great as that of knowing when I get back to Narnia that I left a mystery behind me though fear’) while strange constellations burn in the eastern sky.  Here they meet Ramandu and his daughter, and see the birds flocking to the Table from the rising sun. From this point on, the story is all wonder and enchantment and Ramandu, the old star, hints they are on the edge of spiritual awakening or rebirth.

‘Every morning a bird brings me a fire-berry from the valleys in the Sun, and each fire-berry takes away a little of my age. And when I have become as young as the child that was born yesterday, then I shall take my rising again (for we are at earth’s eastern rim) and once more tread the great dance.’

I haven’t yet said much about Reepicheep. He is truly Narnia’s Galahad, not its Lancelot. Lancelot is the Round Table’s best earthly knight, but he is fallible, he has passions and faults which make us love and admire him the more because we can see ourselves in him. Galahad is inhumanly virtuous, courteous and brave. TH White had some fun with him in The Once and Future King: looked at one way he’s a prig, it’s difficult to like him.  Reepicheep is as virtuous, courteous and brave as Galahad, but he’s lovable simply because he isn’t human, but a gallant Talking Mouse about two feet high, with dark, almost black fur: ‘A thin band of gold passed around its head under one ear and over the other, and in this was stuck a long crimson feather.’  Reepicheep sets a high – almost too high – example to Caspian and his company. On Ramandu’s Island, Caspian’s crew begins to mutiny, longing for home like Alexander’s soldiers who refused to cross the Ganges.

‘Aren’t you going to say anything, Reep?’ whispered Lucy.‘No.  Why should your Majesty expect it?’ answered Reepicheep in a voice that most people heard. ‘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 will be head of the talking mice in Narnia.’



Perfection is inhuman. This is made clear when only Reepicheep is unmoved by the terror of the Dark Island. ‘There are some things no man can face,’ Caspian exclaims as he orders the retreat.

‘It is, then, my good fortune not to be a man,’ replied Reepicheep with a very stiff bow.

We can tolerate Reepicheep’s disapproval because he’s an animal. He doesn’t understand or share our fears. Nothing stands between him and the best. He is both less than us, and greater. When finally, ‘quivering with happiness’, he hurls his sword into the Silver Sea (like Arthur at the brink of Avalon) and sets off alone in the coracle, swooping up the green glassy breast of the wave to vanish forever over the crest, it still brings tears to my eyes.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is at an end. It is time for Caspian to turn back, even though he longs to go on. His last tantrum over, he accepts his duty and destiny to return to rule well and wisely over Narnia. For Edmund and Lucy, it is their last time here. Though they have come close, so close, to the fringes of Aslan’s country, like Caspian they must turn their faces towards their own world.But we shall meet Eustace – and Caspian – again, in the next book.

Picture credits: All illustrations are - of course - by the wonderful Pauline Baynes. 

Re-reading Narnia: 'Prince Caspian'

Continuing to re-post my series from 2014 on Narnia. 
Much as I adored the Narnia books as a child, Prince Caspian was never my favourite among the Seven Chronicles, and the reason is as clear to me now as it was then, only then I put it differently. I found the long fifty page back-story which tells the history of Caspian and Miraz – not dull, exactly, but certainly a distraction from where I really wanted to be, which was with Lucy and Peter and Susan and Edmund in the ruins of Cair Paravel. I still read it multiple times, of course - I'd have read the Narnian telephone directory, if such a thing had existed - but I felt it wasn't as good as some of the other books.

My eight or nine-year old self was correct. Prince Caspian is clumsily constructed. The first part is the best, in which the children are called back to Narnia and gradually realise that hundreds of Narnian years have passed since they were last there. Often in writing, everything begins with an image and an emotion – a couple of things that come together like flint and iron, and strike the spark which kindles the book. I’ve got the feeling that in this book the spark of inspiration lasted Lewis through to about page 40, by which time he’d said everything he actually wanted to say. A book, however, has to be longer than that: so he had to work out a plot and people it with characters, and the story of Caspian’s childhood is reasonably entertaining, but it stops the narrative dead in its tracks for the whole middle part of the book. Then follows the children’s cross-country journey to Caspian’s aid; an unconvincing stratagem for a single combat between Peter and Miraz; a couple of treacherous Ruritanian-type lords thrown in for good measure - and Aslan at his worst: unfair, demanding and capricious. If Prince Caspian had been the only sequel to TLTW&TW, one would have to conclude that Lewis had lost his touch.

And yet it all begins so simply and so well, with the four children sitting despondently at the station waiting for the two trains which will separate them and send them away to school (‘Lucy was going to boarding school for the first time’) when –

Lucy gave a sharp little cry, like someone who has been stung by a wasp.            ‘What’s up, Lu?’ said Edmund – and then suddenly broke off and made a noise like ‘Ow!’            ‘What on earth –’ began Peter, and then he too suddenly changed what he had been going to say. Instead he said, ‘Susan let go! What are you doing?  Where are you dragging me to?’            ‘I’m not touching you,’ said Susan. ‘Someone is pulling me.  Oh – oh – oh – stop it!’            Everyone noticed that all the others’ faces had gone very white.             ‘I felt just the same,’ said Edmund in a breathless voice. ‘As if I were being dragged along. A most frightful pulling – ugh! it’s beginning again.’

So different is this magic summons from the easy transition through the wardrobe in the first book, I’m tempted to consider it a metaphor for the difficulty of writing a sequel. At any rate, it’s a brilliantly imagined and startling opening as the children are jerked out of England and – holding hands – find themselves ‘standing in a woody place – such a woody place that branches were sticking into them and there was hardly room to move.’

What the children (and the reader) don’t yet realise is that they’ve been called into Narnia by Caspian blowing on Queen Susan’s magic horn.  How Lewis resisted the temptation to have the children actually hearthe note of a far-away faerie horn – ‘with dim cri and blowing’, as in the medieval romance Sir Orfeo - I just don’t know: but he was right. He fixes instead on the unpleasant physical sensations of being tugged, jerked, dragged out of one world into another, and unceremoniously deposited in a highly inconvenient place. From Roland's to Boromir's, there are many wondrous horns in fantasy literature, but it seems to me that Susan’s horn is a version of the horn of Oberon in the late medieval romance ‘Huon of Bordeaux’, which Lewis knew well. In that tale (translated from the French by the Lord Berners who was Henry VIII’s Governor of Calais), the knight Huon, journeying to Jerusalem, meets the fairy king, Oberon, in a magic wood:  …the dwarf of the fairies, King Oberon, came riding by, wearing a gown so rich that it were marvel to recount… and garnished with precious stones whose clearness shone like the sun. He had a goodly bow in his hand, and his arrows after the same sort, and these had such a property that they could hit any beast in the world.  Moreover, he had about his neck a rich horn, hung by two laces of gold… and whosoever heard it, if he were a hundred days journey thereof, should come at the pleasure of him that blew it.  Perhaps Susan's bow and arrows come from the same source. Characteristically inventive, Lewis shows us, not how it feels to blow such a horn, but what it’s like to be summoned by one ‘at the pleasure of him that blew it’. As the children remark, when a magician in the Arabian Nights calls up a Jinn, the Jinn has to come.

‘And now we know what it feels like for the Jinn,’ said Edmund with a chuckle.  ‘Golly!  It’s a bit uncomfortable to know that we can be whistled for like that.’

‘We’: original italics. Does Edmund mean ‘we public-school English children’, or ‘we kings and queens of Narnia’?  In either case, the word speaks of privilege… these children have a strong sense of their own position in the world.  But I like the way Lewis borrows the conventions of fairytales and medieval fantasy while turning around to look at them from the other side, so to speak: there's more of this to come.

Within a few minutes the children struggle out of the trees and find themselves

…at the edge of a wood, looking down on a sandy beach.  A few yards away a very calm sea was falling on the sand with such tiny ripples that it made hardly any sound. There was no land in sight and no clouds in the sky. The sun was about where it ought to be at ten o’ clock in the morning, and the sea was a dazzling blue. They stood sniffing in the sea-smell.            ‘By Jove!’ said Peter. ‘This is good enough.’  Of course: this is Narnia.
To begin with they behave like the children they are, paddling and enjoying the unexpected treat – ‘better than being in a stuffy train on the way back to Latin and French and Algebra!’ – but soon become hot, thirsty and hungry. Then they discover they are on an island, and the narrative swerves briefly into ‘shipwrecked sailor’ mode, Lewis poking a little light fun at ‘Boys’ Own’ type adventures:

Lucy wanted to go back to the sea and catch shrimps, until someone pointed out that they had no nets. Edmund said they must gather gulls’ eggs from the rocks, but when they came to think of it they couldn’t remember having seen any gulls’ eggs and wouldn’t be able to cook them if they found any. …Susan said it was a pity they had eaten the sandwiches so soon. One or two tempers very nearly got lost at this stage. Finally Edmund said, ‘Look here.  There’s only one thing to be done. We must explore the wood.  Hermits and knight-errants and people like that always manage to live somehow if they’re in a forest.  They find roots and berries and things.’ ‘What sort of roots?’ asked Susan.‘I always thought it meant roots of trees,’ said Lucy.

At this point the children's responses are very much derived from the books they've read, but the reference to hermits and knight-errants heralds a change of tone and the discovery of the ruined castle, along with memories of the chivalric past in which the children themselves once lived. At the end of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Lewis compressed a couple of decades of the children’s adult Narnian lives into a couple of faux-heroic pages:

Then said King Peter (for they talked in quite a different style now, having been Kings and Queens for so long), ‘Fair Consorts, let us now alight from our horses and follow this beast into the thicket, for in all my days I never hunted a nobler quarry.’            ‘Sir,’ said the others, ‘even so let us do.’

In this passage it was Queen Susan who didn’t want to follow the White Stag beyond the lamp-post – ‘By my counsel we shall lightly return to our horses and follow this White Stag no further’.  When I was a child I had a good deal of sympathy for her point of view: if they’d done as she suggested, they’d all have stayed in Narnia, so she was right, wasn’t she? Looking at that passage now, I see the beginning of a characterisation of Susan which continues into this book too: Susan is gallant enough, and a skilled archer, but she is also cautious, and consistently reluctant to face challenges. This isn’t about ‘being a girl’: Lucy, and in later books Jill and Polly and Aravis are evidence for Lewis’s equal treatment of the sexes.  It’s just the way Susan is, and also something to do with the dynamic of keeping four main characters ‘alive’ and distinguishable from one another. In fact Peter is the most boring of the lot: he never deviates an inch from decent, fair-minded, head-boy, big-brotherhood. If Susan is practical and sharp – unfair sometimes, sometimes a bit of a nag – at least she breathes.

And now the children find themselves here: in an ancient apple orchard, looking at an old stone wall, and it is Susan’s turn to make discoveries.  ‘This wasn’t a garden,’ she says. ‘It was a castle and this must have been its courtyard.’ And,

‘It gives me a queer feeling,’ said Lucy.

As well it might. This quiet ruin is the emotional heart of the book, and the discovery the children are about to make is – I believe – the point of the entire story; the rest is just window-dressing. It’s beautifully done.  The ‘yellowish-golden’ apples on the ancient trees come with memories of the Hesperides, the secret garden, Eden – anywhere long-loved and lost. Because when the children do finally realise where they are the realisation is laden with melancholy: this is Cair Paravel, but not as it was: their Cair Paravel is gone for ever.

Still unaware, the children make camp. Susan goes to the well for a drink, and returns with something in her hand:

‘Look,’ she said in a rather choking kind of voice. ‘I found it by the well.’ She handed it to Peter and sat down. The others thought she looked and sounded as though she might be going to cry. … ‘Well I’m – I’m jiggered,’ said Peter, and his voice also sounded queer. Then he handed it to the others.  All now saw what it was – a little chess-knight, ordinary in size but extraordinarily heavy because it was made of pure gold; and the eyes in the horse’s head were two tiny little rubies – or rather one was, for the other had been knocked out. ‘Why,’ said Lucy, ‘it’s exactly like one of the golden chessmen we used to play with when we were Kings and Queens at Cair Paravel.’

In the Icelandic poem ‘The Deluding of Gylfi’, the tale is told of the end of the Norse Gods, the Aesir, at the day of Ragnarok: after which a new earth will rise out of the sea, fresh and green. Baldur will return from death, and the sons of the gods ‘will all sit down together and converse, calling to mind their hidden lore and talking about things that happened in the past… Then they will find there in the grass the golden chessmen the Aesir used to play with…’ 


Susan is crying because of the memories the little chess piece has brought back. ‘I can’t help it.  It brought back – oh, such lovely times.  And I remembered playing chess with fauns and good giants, and the mer-people singing in the sea, and my beautiful horse, and – and –’

And now Peter ‘uses his brains’ and declares that, impossible as it may seem, ‘We are in the ruins of Cair Paravel itself.’ Hundred of years must have passed in Narnia, and the four children are in the position of long-lost heroes who return to find only traces of themselves in a world which has almost forgotten them. The revelation is confirmed when they uncover the old treasury of Cair Paravel.
There are many folktales and legends in which people step into fairy rings, or disappear into a fairy kingdom for what seems a few hours, and return to find that a hundred or more years have passed, and no one now remembers them. Lewis would have been familiar with the 12th century story of King Herla, invited to a wedding by a goat-footed pygmy king who ruled underground halls of unutterable splendour.  After the celebrations, the fairy king escorted Herla out of his kingdom -


…and then presented the king with a small blood-hound to carry, strictly enjoining him that on no account must any of his train dismount until that dog leapt from the arms of his bearer… Within a short space Herla arrived once more at the light of the sun and at his kingdom, where he accosted an old shepherd and asked for news of his Queen, naming her. The shepherd gazed at him in astonishment and said: ‘Sir, I can hardly understand your speech, for you are a Briton and I a Saxon, but they say… that long ago, there was a Queen of that name over the very ancient Britons, who was the wife of King Herla; and he, the story says, disappeared in company with a pigmy at this very cliff, and was never seen on earth again…’

In Prince Caspian Lewis has reversed the tradition, so that while in England only a year has passed, in Narnia hundreds or maybe a thousand years have sped by. It’s as if England is a fairyland less real than Narnia. I’m sure Lewis was thinking of the story of Herla, because once the children realise what’s happened, Peter exclaims, ‘…And now we’re coming back to Narnia just as if we were Crusaders or Anglo-Saxons or Ancient Britons or someone coming back to modern England!’  ‘How excited they’ll be to see us –’ Lucy begins optimistically – and is interrupted by the sight of a boat rowed by armed men who have come to execute Trumpkin the dwarf by drowning.





The book never again reaches the emotional depth of these passages, in which a children’s magical adventure story unfolds into a poignant consideration of the mysteries of loss and time.  Tell me where all past things are?  Where beth they beforen us weren?  Ou sont les neiges d’antan?  Children do ask profound questions about life, the universe and everything, and adults are frequently stumped. I remember asking my mother, ‘What would there be if there was nothing?’ and she couldn’t give a satisfactory answer.  The Narnia stories were my introduction to a good many metaphysical thought-experiments.  What if time is relative and runs at different speeds in different places?  What if there are multiple universes?  What if something could be larger on the inside than on the outside? It was exhilarating.


CS Lewis throws into the first forty pages of Prince Caspian his own experience of sehnsucht, of longing for something unattainable. Childhood? A mother’s love?  Security?  Peace?    

Into my heart an air that kills 
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills, 
What spires, what farms are those? 

That is the land of lost content, 
I see it shining plain, 
The happy highroads where I went 
And cannot come again. 


For me the rest of the book is an anti-climax. Trumpkin – or Lewis – interrupts the narrative with the history of Prince Caspian, a child version of Hamlet whose throne has been usurped by his wicked uncle Miraz, under whose alien Telmarine rule the magic of Narnia has been suppressed. It’s difficult to feel enthusiastic about Caspian – he doesn’t come alive until the next book. As a child, I tapped my foot through the story and I’m still impatient with it now - with names like Queen Prunaprismia, and academic jokes in dog-Latin aimed above children's heads, such as Caspian's grammar book written by one Pulverentulus Siccus, for goodness sake. With the help of the badger Trufflehunter, the trusty Red Dwarf Trumpkin and the untrustworthy Black Dwarf Nikabrik, Caspian escapes to lead the forces of the native Narnians, but finding his rebellion in trouble, blows on Susan’s horn for aid…





Bad Black Dwarves. I was always rather sorry for Nikabrik, bound for a bad end after trying to enrol a Hag and a Wer-wolf to Caspian’s cause. In fairytales and myths the colour black represents night and death – and by extension, evil. In the real world, I don’t need to say, the ‘white = good, black = bad’ equation has caused a great deal of trouble. Narnia isn’t the real world but a fairytale, so perhaps it’s unfair to vilify Lewis for employing the symbolism of fairytales. I merely note it’s a shame that all Black Dwarfs seem to be dodgy customers – as though hair-and-beard-colour determined your character.


Who are the usurping Telmarines?  They come from a country named Telmar, beyond the Western Mountains, though it never appears on any of the maps drawn by Pauline Baynes. Prior to that they came from our human world – or Caspian would have no legitimate claim to the throne of Narnia, which by Aslan’s command must be ruled by a Son of Adam or a Daughter of Eve. This is of course a reflection of Genesis, in which Adam is given rule over the birds of the air and beasts of the field. So… how has Telmarine rule gone wrong?


‘It is… the country of the Waking Trees and Visible Naiads, of Fauns and Satyrs, of Dwarfs and Giants, of the gods and the Centaurs, of Talking Beasts. It was you Telmarines who silenced the beasts and the trees and the fountains, and who killed and drove away the Dwarfs and the Fauns, and are now trying to cover up even the memory of them,’ (says Doctor Cornelius to Caspian).

For Telmarines, read – who?  What is Lewis trying to say?  Who or what was it in our world which did its best to drive out belief in and cover up the memory of fauns, satyrs, the spirits of trees and fountains? The Church? The Puritans? The Education System? Is this a plea for freedom of imagination? I don’t quite know, but it seems to be a muddled if sincere claim for the vital importance of myths and stories. Or – possibly and more controversially – for belief itself. At any rate, Narnia without its magic is a poor place.  




When Aslan finally does turn up, he reveals himself at first only to Lucy, and there’s a reprise of TLTW&TW in which this time Edmund believes her, and Peter and Susan do not. Aslan is much less loveable, much more manipulative, in this book.  He puts people to the test.  He terrifies Trumpkin by seizing and shaking him – even though the children know that  ‘Aslan liked the Dwarf very much.’ (And this is how to reward him?)  He refuses to heal Reepicheep’s lopped-off tail until the other mice prepare to cut their own tails off in solidarity with their brave leader.  You can see the difference most clearly in the bacchanal, Aslan's Romp with Bacchus and the wild girls, which so closely resembles Aslan's joyful gallop with Lucy and Susan through the springtime Narnian woods in the previous book.  But what in TLTW&TW was sheer delight, culminating in the release of the Witch's stone prisoners, in Prince Caspian becomes vengeful and aggressive. Aslan frightens a group of schoolgirls and their teacher:

Miss Prizzle… clutched at her desk to steady herself and found that the desk was a rosebush. Wild people such as she had never even imagined were crowding round her. Then she saw the Lion, screamed and fled, and with her fled her class, who were mostly dumpy, prim little girls with fat legs. Gwendolen hesitated.

One is led to assume – by disassociation – that in contrast to the fat legged, dumpy girls, Gwendolen is slender and pretty. And therefore good, brave, open-minded? Guilty of fat legs or not, Gwendolen joins in Aslan’s bacchanal. This passage has not stood the test of time very well, and neither has its companion piece a page later, in which Aslan terrifies a classroom of boys who jump out of the window and are turned into pigs: shades of the Gadarene Swine?  We are meant to understand that this is all right because the boys had been persecuting their young teacher whom Aslan welcomes and addresses as ‘Dear Heart’ – but the general air of ‘it serves ‘em all right’ leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Prejudices run rife. No allowances are made.  There is no quarter.


Finally, why have Peter and Susan, Edmund and Lucy been brought to Narnia at all?  What is their narrative function? Not one of them really affects anything. Peter’s challenge to Miraz is ultimately a failure, ending in the very wholesale battle he had hoped to avert. Only Aslan’s intervention with the trees, in a scene reminiscent of the march of the Ents in The Lord of the Rings, saves the day for the native Narnians: and one assumes Aslan could have roused the trees any time he liked. Susan and Lucy literally go along for the ride.  Prince Caspian seems to me to have been hastily and carelessly written, with very little of the love and attention that is evident in the first book.


There are moments. I love the scene in which Lucy almost calls the trees awake as she goes dancing through the moonlit wood. I love the descriptions of the rich loamy earth which the trees eat at the great banquet after the victory. And of course I love the first meeting with one of Narnia’s great characters, the chivalrous and martial mouse, Reepicheep. All in all, however, this is a book to be read for the sake of the first few chapters.


Things look up – a long way up – in the next title, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  But that is a post for next time.

Re-reading 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe'

I beg the indulgence of re-posting this piece about a very Christmassy book indeed. (It first appeared on this blog in 2014.) I am still busy writing my new book, which I'm hoping to finish some time in January (oh, all right then, February) - and that is why this blog has been a little neglected of late. In the meantime, I wish all of you lovely people the happiest of Christmas holidays, and all the other midwinter festivals - and the very best of new years.




Here is my much-worn, much-loved childhood copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

I was given my first Narnia book, The Silver Chair, when I was seven years old – a little girl living in Yorkshire in the 1960s. I went on to read the series out of sequence, ending with The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: it depended on what I could buy with my pocket money or find in the public library.  The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe was published in 1950, The Last Battle in 1956, the year of my birth: so I suppose I was among the first generation of child readers of these tales.
It’s impossible to exaggerate the effect the Narnia stories had on me. I adored them, I was super-possessive about them. I regarded Narnia as my own, private, secret kingdom – so much so that when my mother, who read aloud each night to me and my brother, suggested she might read us The Lion, The Witch & the Wardrobe, I vetoed the suggestion.  Narnia was mine; I wanted to keep it all to myself.  It was horribly selfish, but that was how passionate I felt.  I read and reread them for years.
It’s decades now, though, since I sat down and read all of them through.  Did the charm fade?  I don’t know. The books were so much a part of my childhood that they still feel to be a part of me.  So I’ve decided to begin again, to remind myself of what enchanted me and discover if it still has the power to do so. Over the next few months, I’ll be reading the Seven Chronicles of Narnia and letting you know my thoughts.  Don’t expect academic crispness. These are likely to be long rambling posts with lots of digressions and asides as I follow wherever the fancy takes me.  I hope you’ll tell me your own thoughts along the way.  
So here goes: let’s talk about Narnia.
The first thing that strikes me now about The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is how short it is: 170 pages, many with full, half, or quarter page illustrations by Pauline Baynes.  I’d guess the length is not more than 35,000 words – about right for a book for seven year-olds; but books for seven year-olds written today do not commonly explore such rich emotional depths when dealing – if they deal at all – with subjects such as death, rebirth, police states, loyalty and treachery.
TLTW&TW is described by CS Lewis, in his dedication to his god-daughter Lucy Barfield, as a fairytale. Like a fairytale it deals in images, in strong, simple emotions, in primary colours, in poetic metaphor: and like a fairytale, it demands suspension of disbelief and a willingness to go along with the narrator.
Es war einmal ein König– There was once a King –
There were once four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.
It doesn’t matter where or when a fairytale takes place, so Lewis disposes of the Blitz – the reason the children are sent away from London – in half a sentence. What they leave behind doesn’t matter. What matters is where they arrive: this house ‘in the heart of the country’. Which country?  We aren’t told. It could be Scotland rather than England: the housekeeper has a Scottish name, and the children talk excitedly of mountains, woods, eagles and stags: but it’s the seclusion that matters. This is a secret and special place, and the further in you go, the more secret and more special it gets: inside the house there is a room, inside the room there is a wardrobe, inside the wardrobe there is Narnia…
Old houses and old castles are important places in fairytales, and there is often, too, a special hidden room.  In The Twelve Dancing Princesses, the soldier must follow the princesses through an opening under the bed:
The eldest went to her bed and tapped it; whereupon it immediately sank into the earth, and one after another they descended through the opening…
and down a stair to a fabulous land where the trees have leaves of silver, gold and diamond, and where twelve princes row the princesses across a lake to a beautiful palace, to dance all night till dawn. This land is neither good nor bad (though one senses it is disapproved) but magical: other. Alternatively, as in Bluebeard or in the English folktale Mr Fox, the secret of the hidden room may be horror and death. Narnia will turn out to contain both beauty and terror.
So when Lewis chose a homely wardrobe for his doorway to Narnia (all of us had wardrobes in our bedrooms back then, before the days of fitted cupboards) he was employing a device common in fairytales, where the domestic and ordinary frequently reveal the magical and unexpected.


Here is the wardrobe – ‘the sort with looking-glass in the door’ – standing alone in an empty room. ‘Nothing there’, says Peter.  But Lucy investigates. ‘This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!’ she thinks, pushing her way further in through the fur coats.  And next:
Something cold and soft was falling on her. A moment later she found she was standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air.
A word about Lucy.  Philip Pullman has accused the Narnia books of being – among other bad things – sexist, of delivering the message ‘Boys are better than girls’. People who agree with this tend, I suspect, to be thinking of ‘the problem of Susan.’ But I was a little girl reading the Narnia books, and I was never in any doubt that the main character, the clear heroine of the three titles in which she takes a prominent part, is Lucy. Any child, boys included, reading TLTW&TW will identify with Lucy for the simple reason that it’s so unfair when her siblings don’t believe her about Narnia – and even more unfair when Edmund actually lies about it. It’s as easy to identify with Lucy as it is to identify with Jane Eyre, and for the same reason: children hate injustice.
Lucy’s main-character status has always been so obvious to me, I’m puzzled why Philip Pullman has failed to spot it. Is she too gentle for him? She may not be Lyra, or even Dido Twite, but the Narnia books were written for and about children, not teenagers - and quite young children at that. Judging by the games they play and the way they squabble, Lucy, the youngest of the Pevensies, is probably about seven years old in TLTW&TW – the same age as me when I first read it. This would make Edmund eight or nine, Susan perhaps ten and Peter between eleven and twelve. Seven year olds – of whatever sex – don’t tend to be feisty, kick-ass action heroes. Lucy is sensitive, courageous, honest and steadfast, and Lewis clearly cares for her far more than he does for any of the boys. Peter and Susan are ciphers in the way older children often are in family stories of the era. Like John and Susan in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, their main role seems to be that of surrogate parents to younger, livelier, more irresponsible siblings. Edmund is a very ordinary little boy whose silliness, jealousy and deceit are realistically sketched. Most children have occasionally behaved and felt like Edmund. But Lucy stands out. It is she who discovers Narnia, she who befriends the faun, Mr Tumnus.  (And it’s Lucy and Susan, not the boys, who witness Aslan’s death and return to life: but more on the religious front later.)


Like Snow White, Lucy is quickly befriended by a denizen of the forest. And as in the seven dwarfs’ cottage, the cosy safety of Mr Tumnus’ house is soon compromised by the power of a dangerous queen. More terrifying still, Tumnus confesses himself  to be a deceiver, an informer. ‘I’ve pretended to be your friend and asked you to tea, and all the time I’ve been meaning to wait till you were asleep and then go and tell Her.’ Because, and remember these books were written during the Cold War, Narnia is quite literally a police state.
‘We must go as quietly as we can,’ said Mr Tumnus. ‘The whole wood is full of her spies.  Even some of the trees are on her side.’
Ashamed of himself, Tumnus is not now going to hand Lucy over to the White Witch, though this will put him at serious risk of torture and death –
‘…she’s sure to find out. And she’ll have my tail cut off, and my horns sawn off, and my beard plucked out, and she’ll wave her wand over my beautiful cloven hoofs and turn them into horrid solid hoofs like a wretched horse’s.  And if she is extra and specially angry, she’ll turn me into stone and I shall be only a statue of a Faun in her horrible house until the four thrones at Cair Paravel are filled – and goodness knows when that will happen, or whether it will ever happen at all.’
This is strong stuff for young children – strong stuff for anyone. I think the reason why, in my experience at least, children aren’t very upset by it, is that they feel safe in the hands of the narrator. Lewis never forgets who he is writing for. The potential terror of Lucy’s predicament is modified by Tumnus’ repentance. The danger to her, once recognised, is already over. And for Tumnus himself, well – the danger is real enough, but this is clearly the kind of story in which good characters will, ultimately, be all right.
Children are sensitive to narrative voice, both as readers and auditors. A parent reading aloud to a child can offer reassurance at scary moments. Lewis-as-narrator offers reassurance partly by interposing himself between the child-reader and the text – commenting upon it or explaining it, thus keeping frightening or sad material at a safe distance; as in this passage from the chapter after Aslan’s death:
I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been – if you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you – you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing were ever going to happen again.
Is this condescension?  I don’t think so. As a child, I never felt Lewis talked down to me, I felt he spoke as an equal, that he treated me seriously. He acknowledges the depth of children’s emotional experience, misery as well as happiness. By addressing the child reader directly, he turns Susan and Lucy’s grief into something we can share and understand, and the moment of Aslan’s death is thus softened and becomes more bearable.


The other method by which Lewis gently defuses fear or terror is a deft use of comedy – for example when the children and the Beavers bustle to get away from the White Witch.
‘…The moment that Edmund tells her that we’re all here she'll set out to catch us this very night, and if he’s been gone about half an hour, she’ll be here in about another twenty minutes.’
‘You’re right, Mrs Beaver,’ said her husband, ‘we must all get away from here.  There’s not a moment to lose.’
The tension is both heightened and comically undercut by Mrs Beaver’s insistence on the careful and extensive packing of ham, tea, sugar, bread and handkerchieves –
‘Oh do please come on,’ said Lucy. ‘Well I’m nearly ready now,’ answered Mrs Beaver at last… ‘I suppose the sewing machine’s too heavy to bring?’
Hurry, hurry! –the child reader thinks, yet at the same time is both amused (Mrs Beaver is being funny) and reassured (Mrs Beaver is a mother figure, and if she’s not scared, neither need we be).
If Lewis were not so skilful, this could and would be a deeply unsettling book.  There’s Edmund’s treachery – to his own brother and sisters, no less.  There’s the scene of the Faun’s cosy house in ruins –
The door had been wrenched off its hinges and broken to bits. …Snow had drifted in from the doorway and was mixed with something black, which turned out to be the charred sticks and ashes from the fire. Someone had apparently flung it about the room and then stamped it out. The crockery lay smashed on the floor and the picture of the Faun’s father had been slashed to shreds with a knife.
It’s no small achievement to be this frank, this clear about spite and violence and hate – confirmed by the denunciation on the door signed ‘MAUGRIM, Captain of the Secret Police’ – in a book for small children which most of us remember as full of magic and delight. There’s the threat to Edmund himself from the White Witch, who is ready to murder him. There’s the truly upsetting scene when the Witch turns to stone a happy little party of fauns and animals, for the crime of telling the truth. (This is also the moment at which Edmund feels compassion for the first time.)
‘What is the meaning of all this gluttony, this waste, this self-indulgence?  Where did you get these things?’‘Please, your Majesty,’ said the Fox, ‘we were given them …’‘Who gave them to you?’ said the Witch.‘F-F-F-Father Christmas,’ stammered the Fox.‘What?’ roared the Witch… ‘…How dare you – but no. Say you have been lying and you shall even now be forgiven.’At that moment, one of the young squirrels lost its head completely. ‘He has – he has – he has!’ it squeaked, beating its little spoon on the table.



All this, before we’ve even got to the death of Aslan.
As is well known, JRR Tolkien didn’t get on with Narnia, and one of the things that annoyed him about the series was Lewis’s carefree – or slapdash, depending on your viewpoint – world-building, bundling together everything and anything he’d ever loved in myth, legend and fairytales. Thus Narnia has not only talking animals out of Beatrix Potter or The Wind in the Willows, it also has nymphs, naiads, dryads and river gods from classical mythology, and giants and dwarfs out of the Northern legends. It borrows Green Ladies from medieval romances, and mystical islands from Celtic voyage tales and, in this one first book, it has Father Christmas.
But when a writer has come up with a lovely phrase like ‘Always winter and never Christmas’, well what is he to do? I don’t mind this single meeting with Father Christmas in Narnia, although I do think Lewis was wise not to invite him back. He seems to me to echo the appearance of Grandfather Frost in Russian fairytales – the white-bearded old spirit of the snowy woods who just may, if you address him politely, give you gifts (rather than freezing you to death). Personally I find Father Christmas in Narnia easier to accept than Tolkien’s facetious reference to golf in The Hobbit, when Bilbo’s ancestor Bullroarer Took knocks off the head of the goblin king Golfimbul. ‘It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of golf invented at the same moment.’ Such self-conscious flippancy was one of the things that put me off The Hobbit as a child.
And now for the vexed question of religion.
People talk a lot nowadays about the Narnia stories as religious allegories.  They really aren’t. Lewis wrote a textbook about medieval allegory – ‘The Allegory of Love’ – and knew what it was and what it wasn’t. There is Christian symbolism in the books, but that is not at all the same thing. And it went clean over my head as a child. Aged about ten, I remember saying shyly to my mother that ‘it almost feels as if Narnia is real’.  (What I actually wanted to say was ‘I believe Narnia is real’ – because the alternative, that Narnia had no existence except between the pages of a book – was almost unbearable.) My mother didn’t spoil the book for me by telling me that Aslan is meant to be Christ.  She just replied quietly, ‘I think you’re meant to feel that.’ And so the religious message in the books remained invisible to me – at least until The Last Battle more or less rubbed my face in it. Indeed, talking to some teenage Muslim girls a year or two ago, I got surprised looks when I mentioned the Christian elements in the Narnia stories. They hadn’t noticed, either.  There is a difference, I think, between the ways in which children and adults read. Children are more immersed in a book – more trusting, more literal. They take what they read at face value. They don’t come up for air and think, as adults do, ‘Just what is this author trying to say?’  


Does this make children potentially more vulnerable to prejudice and propaganda? Perhaps. But it’s interesting to look at a much more obvious attempt at Christian fantasy by the Catholic children’s author Meriol Trevor, written a decade after the Narnia books, in 1966. In The King of the Castle (Macmillan), a sick boy, Thomas, finds his way into the world of a picture hanging on his bedroom wall and meets Lucius, a shepherd with a phoenix ring, who believes himself to be the son of the High King. Reviled, disbelieved, eventually hanged, Lucius is restored to life by a Messenger of the High King, and claims his kingdom. The Christian message was obvious to me when I read the story as a child, but it didn’t capture my imagination, and a recent re-reading showed why: Lucius is wooden, the resurrection scene almost perfunctory, and there seems no narrative reason why the viewpoint character Thomas should be in this world at all.  The book has nothing of the verve, the colour, the energy of the Narnia stories.

Philip Pullman speaks for many who consider the Narnia books outrageous propaganda for the pernicious doctrine of an all-powerful God who demands innocent blood to atone for the sins of a supposedly corrupt humanity. From this viewpoint TLTW&TW is dodgy stuff.  For a Christian reader, however, such a view is a travesty of the New Testamant stories and the doctrine that declares Christ to be a facet of a living and loving God who shares in the suffering of the world. No one, least of all myself, is going to be able to reconcile such opposite perceptions.
But remember CS Lewis called his book a fairytale, and in fairytales the world over, good and innocent characters who die, come back to life.  Think of Snow White in her glass coffin! In The Juniper Tree, the murdered boy is transformed into a beautiful, mysterious bird which deals out justice, rewarding the good and destroying the wicked, before turning back into a living child again. In Fitcher’s Bird, the third bride is able to restore her murdered sisters to life and escape the house of the sorcerer. Resurrections occur in fairytales because here, if nowhere else, there is a real chance that justice and goodness may prevail over evil and tragedy. Lewis came to Christianity through stories: he took them seriously: he regarded the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ as a fairytale which really happened.  We don’t have to follow him all the way.  But we can still be moved by the tales.
It is perfectly natural for a child to read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and to see Aslan as no more and no less than the literal account makes him: a wonderful, golden-maned, heroic Animal. I know, because that’s the way I read it, and that is why I loved him. Though the death of Aslan at the hands of the White Witch is the heart of the book, that ‘deep magic from the dawn of time’ works just as well on a non-Christian level. A beautiful, icy queen: a golden lion. ‘When he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again…’ Of course Aslan comes back to life! Who can kill summer?


My childhood copy of the map of Narnia...


Picture credits

All artwork by Pauline Baynes.  The full colour illustration of Lucy and Mr Tumnus is from Brian Sibley's 'The Land of Narnia', Collins Lions, 1989

Seven Miles of Steel Thistles, reviewed by Jacqueline Simpson

Good reviews are always lovely to receive, but sometimes you receive one which means more than most. This, from the almost legendary Jacqueline Simpson, sometime President of the Folklore Society, Visiting Professor of Folklore at the Sussex Centre of Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy at the University of Chichester, collaborator with Terry Pratchett on The Folklore of Discworld and co-author with Jennifer Westwood of The Lore of the Land: a Guide to England's Legends, from Spring-heeled Jack to the Witches of Warboys - is truly special. So here it is, from the latest issue of 'Folklore' and please forgive me for a little trumpet-blowing.



Seven Miles of Steel Thistles: Reflections on Fairy Tales. By Katherine Langrish. Carterton,Oxfordshire: Greystones Press, 2016. 292 pp. £12.99 (pbk). ISBN 978-1-91112-204-3
‘Fairy tales’, writes Katherine Langrish, ‘are emotional amplifiers . . . [They] work as music does,directly on our feelings’ (197). This collection of her essays (plus three poems) illustrates the psychological subtlety and poetic force of her own responses, and will surely guide readers towards similar sensitivity. She can also, on occasion, cast light on relationships of sources and analogues, notably in her discussion of the ballad of ‘The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry’ (158–87), but her main concern is usually with the deeper themes which she perceives as underlying fairy-tale plots—such themes as time, hunger, death, and rebirth. Alongside these, she can provide sudden sharp insights and speculations which even if unprovable will remain memorable and interesting. For example, in an essay on water spirits she wonders whether the fact that a stick plunged into water will appear broken although it is in fact unharmed could have inspired the prehistoric custom of bending or breaking weapons before throwing them into sacred pools (262). She boldly tackles even the apparently distasteful tale of ‘The Juniper Tree’, which ‘acknowledges terrible evil but ends in hope’ and which ‘haunts’ her (145). Of course, one’s own responses may not always match hers; for example, she has never met anyone who likes the tale of ‘Bluebeard’ (198),whereas I enjoyed it as a child—largely, as I recall, for Sister Anne’s recurrent rhyming reply, ‘Je voie l’herbe qui verdoit et la route qui poudroit’ (I see green grass growing, and on the road dust blowing). We are all subjective readers, and I am grateful to Katherine Langrish for showing how fruitful this can be.
Her writing throughout is elegant, vivid, and frequently witty; there is much pleasure, as wellas much information, to be obtained from Seven Miles of Steel Thistles.
Jacqueline Simpson, The Folklore Society, UK© 2017 Jacqueline Simpson