Spoilers!
Recently I reread The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and concluded it still doesn’t hold up to my love of it as a child, but I did like it more than my initial reread as an adult. So I continued my foray into Narnia with a reread of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which has always been my favorite book in The Chronicles of Narnia. I’m pleased to say that the story is still delightful, as well as thought-provoking!
My primary issue with rereading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is the feeling that not a lot happens in the book (a feeling I did not have as a child), but I didn’t find that a problem in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I suspect this is because this novel is episodic, with the crew of the Dawn Treader hopping from island to island and encountering mysteries and wonders at each. The adventures are not always developed in the way I’d expect them to be in an adult novel, as each island tends to tend one or two chapters dedicated to it before the characters move on, but I have to admit that stuff happens!
Rereading it as an adult, I actually felt more horror than I did as a kid. As a young reader, I probably would have described the book as “interesting” or “exciting” or “magical.” It made me think of things I hadn’t before and showed me adventures I would never have imagined. I suppose now that I have more life experience, I just have a greater sense of how awful having some of the stuff that happens to the people in the book would be — entering into a lake only to find oneself turning to gold, entering a years’-long sleep, being stuck in a nightmare. I also side-eyed the magician who gets stuck watching the Dufflepuds for years, with no one intelligent to talk to, although it’s recognized that IS supposed to be a punishment of some sort. And honestly the magician still is not great if he has given other people only one foot without their permission! The book glosses over that terrible lack of consent, however.
It also weirdly glosses over the slavery aspect that occurs early in the novel. It’s clear on the point that slavery is bad, it’s outlawed in Narnia, Caspian does not approve, etc., but then Caspian puts a lord in charge of the island who had bought a slave himself and acts as if he’s better than the governor he’s replacing! The lord was going to be nice to this slave because he thought the boy reminded him of Caspian (because, you know, it was Caspian), but this man was actively participating in the slave trade himself and was not going to free the slave he had purchased or anything like that. He got lucky that he got to help Caspian overthrow the slave market and look as if he was a good guy himself, but actually he’s not the upstanding man the book portrays him as, and I don’t think I noticed this as a child.
Still, in spite of the places where I took places with the book’s morality, I found this to be a great adventure, fun to read even as an adult. And of course it has an excellent opening line: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
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