The Silver Chair (Book Review)

Full spoilers for the entire book below. Proceed with caution.

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Title: The Silver Chair
Author: C.S. Lewis
Publication Date: 1953 (novel), 2004 (audio)
Publisher: Harper Audio
Narrated By: Jeremy Northam
Recording time: 5 hrs and 25 mins

THE PLOT

via wiki:

Eustace Scrubb, now a reformed character following the events of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, encounters his classmate and new friend Jill Pole at their school, Experiment House, where they are miserable. Jill has been tormented by bullies and is hiding from them. Eustace tells Jill about his Narnian adventures, and how his experiences there led to the changes in his behaviour – which Jill warns is likely to see him targeted by the bullies as well. Eustace suggests asking for Aslan‘s help, and as the bullies converge on them, the two blunder through a gate that leads them to Aslan’s Country.

They encounter a cliff, where Jill shows off by approaching the edge, and Eustace, trying to pull her back, falls over the edge. Aslan appears and saves Eustace by blowing him on a magical wind stream to Narnia. He charges Jill with helping Eustace find King Caspian X‘s son, Prince Rilian of Narnia, who disappeared some years earlier. He gives Jill four Signs to guide them on their quest and then blows Jill into Narnia, where Eustace is already waiting by a great castle. They watch as an elderly and frail man takes ship and sails from the harbour. To Eustace’s dismay, they then learn that the elderly man is actually King Caspian; by failing to greet him they have missed the first Sign. 50 years have passed since Eustace was last in Narnia, even though less than a year has passed in his world. They also learn that Caspian has sailed off to visit again the lands they had sailed to when he and Eustace were young, although many Narnians believe that he has set off to seek Aslan in order to ask who can be the next King of Narnia when he dies. Caspian is obviously deteriorating with old age, and his people fear that he will not live for much longer.

Caspian’s Lord Regent Trumpkin the dwarf, now very elderly and deaf, provides Jill and Eustace with rooms in Cair Paravel, but on the advice of Glimfeather the Owl, they make no mention of their quest. Glimfeather summons them to a Parliament of his fellow talking owls, who explain that Prince Rilian disappeared a decade earlier while searching for a large green serpent that had killed his mother.

Jill and Eustace are flown to the marshes on the northern edge of Narnia where they meet their guide, Puddleglum, a gloomy but stalwart Marsh-wiggle. They journey toward the giant-lands north of Narnia. Hungry and suffering from exposure, they meet the Lady of the Green Kirtle accompanied by a silent knight in black armour. She encourages them to proceed northward to Harfang, the castle of the “Gentle Giants”, who she says would be glad to have them at their Autumn Feast. Jill and Eustace, overcome at the thought of comfort and warmth, are eager to go; only Puddleglum argues against the journey to Harfang. After a long journey in harsh weather, and braving a mysterious chasm in a driving snowstorm, they are welcomed at Harfang.

From the castle the three see that in the snowstorm they had blundered through the ruins of a giant city in the valley below, thereby missing Aslan’s second Sign. They also see the words “Under Me” engraved on the road, which is the third Sign. Discovering from a cookbook in the kitchen that they are the main course for the Autumn Feast, they make a narrow escape from Harfang. Following the Sign, they take shelter in a cave under the ruined city, where they fall down a long dark slope into Underland.

They are found by an army of underground-dwelling earthmen, who take them aboard a boat across the subterranean Sunless Sea to the city ruled by the Lady of the Green Kirtle. She herself is away, but her protégé, a young man, greets the travellers pleasantly. He explains that he suffers from nightly psychotic episodes, and during these episodes he must, by the Lady’s orders, be bound to a silver chair; for if he is released, he will turn into a deadly green serpent and kill everyone in sight. The three travellers determine to witness the youth in his torment, as they sense it could be the key to their quest.

When the young man is tied to his chair, his “ravings” seem instead to indicate desperation to escape an enchanted captivity. After several threats, the youth finally begs the three to release him in the name of Aslan. Recognizing this as the fourth Sign, they hesitantly do so, believing that he could indeed be Prince Rilian. The young man immediately destroys the silver chair. Free from enchantment, he thanks them and declares that he is indeed the vanished Prince Rilian, kept underground by the Lady of the Green Kirtle as part of her plot to conquer Narnia.

The Green Lady returns and tries to bewitch them all into forgetting who they are, but the barefoot Puddleglum stamps out the enchantress’s magical fire and breaks her spell. The enraged Lady transforms herself into a green serpent, and Rilian kills her with the help of Eustace and Puddleglum, realizing that the Green Lady was herself the serpent who killed his mother. Rilian leads the travellers to escape from Underland. The gnomes, who had also been magically enslaved by the Lady, are now freed by her death and joyfully return to their home even deeper in the earth: a land called Bism. One of them shows Rilian’s party a route to the surface, and Rilian returns to Cair Paravel as King Caspian is returning home. Caspian is reunited with his long-lost son but dies just afterwards. Rilian is then declared King of Narnia amid the weeping crowd.

Aslan appears and congratulates Eustace and Jill on achieving their goal, then returns them to the stream in his country where Jill first met him. The body of King Caspian appears in the stream, and Aslan instructs Eustace to drive a thorn into the lion’s paw. Eustace obeys, and Aslan’s blood flows over the dead King, who is revived and returned to youth. Aslan promises Eustace and Jill that, while they have to return to their own world for a while, they will one day return to Aslan’s Country to stay. He then allows Caspian to accompany Eustace and Jill back to their own world for a brief time, where they drive off the bullies before Caspian returns to Aslan’s Country. Experiment House becomes a well-managed school, and Eustace and Jill remain good friends.

Back in Narnia, Rilian buries his father and mourns him. The kingdom goes on to have many happy years, but Puddleglum “often pointed out that bright mornings brought on wet afternoons and that you couldn’t expect good times to last.”

My Review:

The Silver Chair was the fourth book published in Lewis’ Narnia series, though chronologically it is the sixth that takes place. I am doing my reviews based on the order of publication, and thus I hope to eventually cover the “flashback” novels in the order and manner in which they were provided. The Silver Chair picks up where The Voyage of the Dawn Treader ended, so there is as of yet no confusion about any of the plot details. I will admit that this was my least favorite of the series to date, though I did enjoy it. The chapter wherein the witch is defeated is one of the best in the entire series so far. However, a lot of the joy and magic of the previous books seemed to be missing in this one, for me at least. The quest and adventure was well-told, but I never cared as much about the outcome. Perhaps my own previous forays into Narnia gave me too much trust in Aslan to work out the details when the situation got sticky.

This book is notable for being the first published novel in the series not featuring any of the story’s original Pevensie children. Instead, we journey to Narnia this time with Eustace Scrubb – their cousin who went to Narnia with them in the last book, and his school friend Jill Pole. Eustace had a major character transformation in the previous book, and that continued leading into this book. It is his friend Jill, making her first trip into Narnia, who needs to grow and change. Almost the very first thing Jill does in Narnia is to accidentally throw Eustace off a cliff to his apparent death. From there, she is given a task by Aslan, at which she consistently fails. To be fair to her, Eustace – once she finds him alive – also fails on a regular basis, too. Despite their failures, their best efforts prove to be enough.

If the first three books featured improbable bravery and courage, with the Pevensie children, Reepicheep the mouse, and others, then this book was one of relatability. Jill and Eustace were not kings and queens of Narnia, either at the beginning or at the end. They were regular Brits in Narnia, undone by hunger, forgetfulness, and occasional laziness. Yet the power of this book in particular is that doing their best (admittedly less than we might have expected from the Pevensie children) was enough to achieve the goal and to please Aslan. Puddleglum, their Narnian guide, was also relatable. He always saw the negative possibilities in every situation, yet he too tried his best. I see what Lewis was doing in this book, in making it an allegory for the “ordinary” Christian life, but I missed the high nobility of the characters from previous books. Narnia did not quite feel like Narnia without it.

The best part of The Silver Chair is its villain. The green serpent witch was in my opinion the scariest villain we have yet seen in the series, including the White Witch from the first book. We witness her commit a murder and plot more murders, but perhaps worst of all is the nature of her witchcraft – a subtle, hypnotic, well-argued, gaslighting, nearly convincing a room of people that what they know to be true is not true. Lewis writes that moment extremely well. The power of that scene in particular was the ease by which you, as the reader, can imagine the same thing happening to yourself without your knowledge (just in a different context.) How many people are slaves to that type of enchantment in the real world? Lewis would almost certainly argue that it’s an enormous number, though our real world witches operate a bit differently. Perhaps you as the reader have a television that’s your own silver chair, or perhaps toxic relationship.

If you are reading this book with children, or letting them read it alone, I suggest some caution. As mentioned, the green serpent witch commits a murder and her own death by beheading, while in a snake form, is also gruesome. I should also add that “ass” is used several times in the book, in the context of “I’m sorry I was such an ass.” While that is considered bad language in the U.S., such was not the case in the U.K. (where perhaps the term conjures up images of a stubborn and ill-mannered donkey.)

Overall, this was my least-favorite of the books to date, but that is by no means an indictment of the book. I enjoyed it and I definitely recommend it. Lewis expands on his world-building, introducing both no creatures and new locations in his Narnia world. We even spent time in Aslan’s domain. The book ends on a happy but ominous note, with Puddleglum reminding the reader that you can’t expect good times to last. It seems fair to assume that they won’t, and I’m looking forward to how that transpires.

Have you read The Silver Chair? If so, what did you think?