The Silver Chair

[sawyl]

Having skipped, for now at least, the first two Caspian novels, I find myself at The Silver Chair, always my favourite of the Chronicles. I think there are a few reasons for this. In Jill Pole, Chair has one of the best protagonists of the series — plausible, truthful, and prone to mistakes of weakness rather than malice — and in Puddleglum, one of the best comic Stoics around. It has a sub-Arthurian quest plot involving a missing prince and some interesting, if slightly obvious, Christian allusions. Here, then, are a few random and unconnected thoughts on CS Lewis' The Silver Chair:

The opening section in Aslan's Country is striking, not least because Eustace almost immediately plunges over the cliff that separates the Country from the real work. I'm not sure whether to read this as part of Lewis' allegory — Eustace falling from grace and being expelled from heaven — or as a simple plot device that makes Jill the sole bearer of the signs.

The signs are clearly intended to be taken as analogous with divinely revealed scripture; words that must be learnt by rote and applied literally in order to aid the bearer — as Puddleglum puts it, "You see, Aslan didn't tell Pole what would happen. He only told her what to do." Aslan Himself emphasizes this point when he sends Jill off on her mission, warning her:

Here on the mountain I have spoken to you clearly: I will not often do so in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take care that it does not confuse your mind.

This feels very like an inversion of St Paul's famous phrase in 1 Cor 13:12: "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face" For, once in world below the mountain, the signs mean precisely what they say but don't often say what they mean.

Once Jill and Eustace arrive in Narnia on the breath of Aslan, their reactions to their surroundings are tellingly different. Eustace is immediately enthused by the idea of questing and adventuring, as he feels his old Narnia spirit returning to him. Whereas Jill's enthusiasm is gone by the end of the Owls' Parliament, when she learns that she is not going to return to her comfortable (and unused) bedroom at Cair Paravel but rather to the marshes and the marsh-wiggles. This, I think, foreshadows Jill's (and, to a lesser extent, Eustace's) persistent vice: her weakness for washing water and a warm bed.

During their initial encounter with the Witch, in her guise as the Lady of the Green Kirtle, the children are not won over by her beauty or her trilling voice or her ability to wax lyrical. Rather they are seduced by the promise of material comforts into forgetting the signs and all but abandoning their quest in their desire to get to Harfang. Thus, I suppose, are the pilgrims' best intentions undermined by the weaknesses of the body — for surely the hot baths and feather beds must be a stand-in for the sins of the flesh. This makes even more sense when you consider that the Stoic (and cold-blooded) Puddleglum remains almost completely immune to Witch's blandishments and only agrees to travel to the castle because the children insist.

In the Harfang interlude, the party do indeed enjoy their creature comforts. Jill uses a giant's bath that is so big that she is able to swim in it and dries herself with a giant's towel that is so huge that all she has to do is roll around on it. The food is plentiful — "the roast and the baked and the sweet and the strong will be on the table four times a day", as promised by the Witch — albeit unethically sourced from Narnian talking animals. The spell is only broken when Aslan intervenes with a dream vision and Jill, putting on childish and exaggerated feminine airs, discovers a way out through the scullery.

Once escaped from their gilded cage at Harfang and safely under the ruins of the giant city, Puddleglum and the children find themselves captured by a group of the Witch's earthmen. In the company of the Witch's soldiers, they pass through vast caverns filled with sleeping dragons and giants until the reach the sunless sea. Here they take a boat which carries them for so long that they loose track of time, which strikes me as a clever bit of invention. From Jill's comments about the food and conditions it is clear that the journey to Harfang took a number of weeks to accomplish and yet the party manage to get from the Witch's city to Narnia in a matter of hours, travelling along the proposed invasion route. Thus it seems that by having the party lose track of time on the boat it becomes possible, if not terribly plausible, to claim that there was sufficient time for a swift-moving boat to abolish the distances between the land of the giants and the outskirts of Narnia.

Having arrived in the city and freed Prince Rilian from his enchantment, the children have their second run-in with the Witch who this time makes a more determined attempt to enchant them. After casting her spell, the Witch tries to persuade the party to abandon their belief in the overworld above by inverting some of Plato's allegories from The Republic. When they try to describe the world above, she forces them to fall back on similes — a lamp is like a small sun, a cat is like a little lion — and then denies existence of the true forms that these things represent; in the Witch's version of the cave, the shadows on the wall are all that exists and it is the world outside the cave that is an illusion.

As the person least susceptible to the Witch's magic, Puddleglum argues that the Witch's world is so poor in comparison to their childish dreams of the surface that he would rather believe in something that isn't true than accept her version of reality:

We're just babies making up a game if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.

Which seems to me the central credo of Lewis' whole Narnian allegory. It seems to be saying that even if people claim that God doesn't exist, it is better to adhere to Christian values because, regardless of the truths of the claims about God, it is important to aspire to a better existence even when that existence is in doubt.

With the Witch defeated, the group make a dash for the delvings that have been prepared ready for the invasion of overland, only pausing along the way to make the acquaintance of a gnome who charmingly overuses the word "everybody" and who tells them about the really deep lands that like closer to the world's heart. Thanks, possibly, to the long boat ride, the shallow tunnels come out in Narnia, giving Rillian just enough time to make it back to Cair to see his dying father one last time.

After a brief return to Aslan's country and a heavy dose of Christian allegory — Caspian's body is resurrected and made young again by a single drop of Aslan's blood — the children are sent back to their school, the horribly progressive Experiment House, to administer a firm beating to the school's bullies and to drive the Head "(who was, by the way, a woman)" into a nervous breakdown that drives her, like Sir Joseph Porter before her, to become an MP.

While not perfect, The Silver Chair is a noticeable improvement on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Jill is much better drawn that Lewis' earlier female characters, there is more humour, and the narration is much less intrusive. The plot is clear and straight forward, provided you don't question why the humans are needed at all.

All rather enjoyable.