Storytime
Page 21
I don’t remember much about Peter, Susan, Edward and Lucy, the main child protagonists who become kings and queens of Narnia (Lucy is the youngest and most likeable, I know that much) but I remember quite a bit about Eustace. He is whiny and nasty and sulky and cunning. He’s lying in a cave and he looks down and realises there’s a huge dragon claw to his right. Then he sees there’s another claw to his left. Frantic with fear, he tries to escape – and I realise with a burst of horror that he’s been looking at his own hands, that he has turned into a dragon. Nobody, not even Eustace, deserves that.
Lots of other weird things happen: there’s a river that turns people into gold, an underwater world of cities that can be seen from the surface, and at the very end of the ocean all the waters pour over a giant cliff. The creepily wonderful thing about Lewis is that he pushes his fantasies to the extreme, to the end, to the far reaches and to the depths of the earth, and then beyond. And then there’s the Dark Island.
It seems part of the enchantment of Narnia that every book should contain a lurking horror greater than any other, and for me the Dark Island was the greatest horror of all, beating even the witch in The Silver Chair who turns into a serpent, a scene I read repeatedly, trying in vain to dissipate its gruesome power. The Dark Island is first seen on the horizon as an indistinct hump, a dark mass, and as the Dawn Treader draws closer, it looms larger, but it never gains any form or solidity, it stays a huge shadow. The ship enters the island as if it were a black mist, its oars dipping in the calm water. The darkness is utterly blinding. Terrible moans and wails break out, and the sailors whisper that this is the land where dreams come true. But I was not quite so scared by this ghost-train experience. What frightened me was the idea of this inexorable dark mass on the flat ocean, growing and growing. There is a picture, I remember. It has the same quality as the Wild Wood in The Wind in the Willows, but more so: it frightened me because I didn’t know it, couldn’t grasp it. Think Skull Island in King Kong; think black hole; think nothingness. I’m not sure I want to go there again, even with all my adult armour on. But it attracts me too, the way we are often drawn to what we fear.
“It seems part of the enchantment of Narnia that every book should contain a lurking horror greater than any other”
When I think of them, I remember sitting, curled on the couch, the comfort of my thumb in my mouth, a sunshiny backyard happily ignored. I read the Narnia books more than fifty times. They were the words I learned to glide my eyes over so the story leapt into my mind. No more sounding out letters for me. I don’t think my reading is any faster now than it was aged seven, as Lucy stood barefoot on the deck of the Dawn Treader, seeking the edge of the world.
On about my tenth read of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe I discovered Lewis’s dedication to his goddaughter, a real life Lucy. I remember a thrilling, destabilising sense that the story was crossing over into reality. I wanted to be the fictional Lucy, or the real Lucy, or the creator of a Lucy-like character who could give another me this feeling of having fallen through a picture frame into a wild ocean of imagining. I still want that.
Ailsa Wild
My second-hand re-reading copy is one of seven paperbacks in a boxed set, The Chronicles of Narnia, published by Scholastic in 1995 for the US school market as a tie-in to ‘a major motion picture’. The books are numbered in chronological order, Narnia time (not the same order in which Lewis wrote them), so they begin with The Magician’s Nephew and end with The Last Battle. The Chronicles take in about fifty years of human history and the entire history of the Narnian world, thousands of years, from its creation to its apocalypse: nearly always, it is seen through the eyes of children.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is number five in the series. The colour illustration on the cover, showing a medieval ship, is bland; but inside are the marvellously spiky black-and-white illustrations by Pauline Baynes that I remember so well, and at once they start bringing back the story. Recently an exhibition in Melbourne of the intricate figures and landscapes of Persian paintings created a sense of deju vu for me: they reminded me of Baynes (of course the inspiration must have been the other way round). The reproduction here is smudgy and the box for the set is scuffed at the corners. And here’s a find: a child has inserted a Post-it Note with a command written in fat decorated red Texta. READ!
The opening sentence is a cracker: ‘There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.’ We very soon pick up that Eustace is a ‘record stinker’, just as I’ve remembered him, and it’s all in a few well-chosen details: he likes beetles, ‘especially if they are dead and pinned to a card’. And yet I can’t hate Eustace: the details that reactionary old Lewis slips in throughout the book that are designed to show us he’s been spoiled by a frightfully modern upbringing actually get me on his side. What’s wrong with being a pacifist, or a Republican, or a vegetarian, or going to a school that doesn’t believe in corporal punishment? What’s unreasonable about demanding to see the British consul if you’ve been sold into slavery? How is Eustace to know they don’t have such people in Narnia?
“I can’t hate Eustace: the details that reactionary old Lewis slips in throughout the book that are designed to show us he’s been spoiled by a frightfully modern upbringing actually get me on his side.”
Undertaking the almost-universal task of writers for children who must swiftly get parents and other unnecessary characters out of the way, Lewis establishes that Eustace is the cousin of Peter, Susan, Edward and Lucy Pevensie, and that the two younger children are very reluctantly staying in his parents’ house. Peter is away studying and Susan has gone with her mother to America, so we gather they are not going to be in this adventure. The route into Narnia this time is through a picture on the wall of a medieval ship at sea (what is it doing in Eustace’s house? His parents don’t even like it), which comes to life; interestingly it’s Eustace who unintentionally pulls the three children into the other world, and they are plunged into the cold ocean, until the sailors rescue them.
Hoorah, it’s the Dawn Treader, the flagship of Lucy and Edmund’s old friend Caspian, now King of Narnia, and he’s sailing east, beyond the limits of the known world, to find those missing seven lords. No question the children will go with him and his crew. We see the ship mostly through Lucy’s eyes: it’s a small but lovely lady, with a great purple sail and a golden dragon’s head and tail. Lucy is charmed, as I am, by the solid-sounding nautical details of life on board (here is where I first picked up some sailing-ship vocabulary, and the fact you put the galley in the fore-castle because the smoke blows forwards, not back, as in a steamship). There’s a succinct picture of Lucy’s mood, which the reader shares: ‘when they returned aft to the cabin and supper, and saw the whole western sky lit up with an immense crimson sunset, and felt the quiver of the ship, and tasted the salt on their lips, and thought of unlands [I love that word] on the Eastern rim on the world, Lucy felt that she was almost too happy to speak.’
But what makes this work is the contrast with Eustace, who is in a rotten mood, and with some reason: Lucy is returning to a familiar world as a revered queen, but to him, everything is weird, uncomfortable and frightening. His response is withdrawal, ostentatious misery and hostility. His diary is full of self-pity and scorn for the primitives around him, and nobody except Lucy shows him much patience or kindness, so his paranoia grows until he is convinced his companions are fiends in human form. Horrid as he is, I feel a lurking sympathy: if I was plunged into Narnian waters and condemned to months on a very old-fashioned ship, seasick and disoriented, sailing to God knows where, wouldn’t I too be pissed off?
“Horrid as he is, I feel a lurking sympathy: if I was plunged into Narnian waters and condemned to months on a very old-fashioned ship, seasick and disoriented, sailing to God knows where, wouldn’t I too be pissed off?”
And so the story goes on, told economically and with a quiet humour by a self-effacing narrator who occasionally addresses the reader as
‘you’, and admits there are a few things he doesn’t know himself. It’s essentially episodic and has two disadvantages, I discover, for a Narnia adventure: it has no great central character and no great enemy to defeat. This never bothered me the first time round and it’s not a problem now, as long as you are not looking for a riveting leading man or woman (or boy, or girl), or a witchy temptress. Caspian is suitably kingly, while still an adolescent in some ways, but I don’t find him interesting. The sailors are vaguely drawn. Edmund never takes on a strong role in this story, as he did in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where he was the traitor. I find I am identifying sometimes with Eustace, sometimes with Lucy, as I did the first time. And if there’s no great enemy to confront, there’s the enemy within: most of the main characters have to face temptation.
The narrative hook is simple: what lies ahead? I’m turning the pages with curiosity, even though I half-remember what happens. A new island? What excitement, what charm, what dangers await? On the Lone Islands, the last outpost of Narnian rule, the voyagers are kidnapped by slavers and Caspian must reassert his authority over the bungling bureaucratic governor. The republican in me is perturbed at this easy assumption of the divine right of kings, and I wonder fleetingly why the Lone Islanders can’t enjoy some form of home rule without either slavery or colonial bosses, but I decide I must move on with the voyage and the story. This is a comparatively realistic episode, but as they progress, the adventures get more and more unearthly. One of my favourites is when poor Eustace is turned into a dragon, which is exactly as I’ve remembered, with some extra detail: first he sees another poor old dragon expire and he’s lying asleep in its cave, having stolen some of its treasure, when the transformation takes place. The gold band that fitted so easily on his arm when he was a boy is now tight and painful on the forearm of a dragon, and it’s the perfect way to show how Eustace’s failings become his shackles. And he’s so lonely. No wonder he weeps copious steaming tears.
My heart goes out to Eustace here, and when he turns back into a boy, I’m relieved to find he’s gradually becoming a better person. The trouble is that as he improves, he also becomes much less interesting, and from this point on (about halfway) he seems to fade out of the story, with Lucy replacing him as the main focus. I’m happy enough with Lucy: she’s sweet, kind, eager and spirited, as handy with her bow and arrow as the gents are with their swords.
“My heart goes out to Eustace here, and when he turns back into a boy, I’m relieved to find he’s gradually becoming a better person.”
By far the best Lucy episode is the story of the magic book. This I remember very well, though I had thought it took place in another Narnia chronicle. The adventurers land on an island where they are threatened by a quirky band of invisible beings, who insist they need a little girl to take off the invisibility spell their magician master has put on them. So Lucy goes alone into the magician’s mansion to find his book. There’s a powerful build-up of suspense: a hushed atmosphere, a long upstairs corridor with queer red slogans on the doors, a scary face on the wall that turns out to be a bearded mirror. It is much the most dreamlike scene so far, and Lucy is strongly reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s Alice.
Lucy finds the book: a huge, beautifully illuminated manuscript, but she must read it with her back to the door, which won’t close, and I have a prickling on my neck which I recognise from the first time round: suppose the magician creeps up behind her? We haven’t met him yet and we’re told he’s as soft on his feet as a cat. At first the spells are innocuous (how to cure warts) but then she comes to a page of dazzling images and reads ‘An infallible spell to make beautiful her that uttereth it beyond the lot of mortals.’ Oh yes, I remember this, and how! As Lucy looks at the pictures, they begin to move, and she is the beauty, a powerful and terrible queen. Like Helen of Troy, she provokes all Narnia and its neighbours to go to war to fight for her. Then she goes back to her own world, and her older sister Susan, who has always been the pretty one, is so jealous.
I laugh out loud. When tempted, dear little Lucy can harbour grandiose destructive fantasies and petty sibling rivalry as well as the next girl. And she very nearly speaks the spell, but holds back, with the help of Aslan (more of this later) and all ends happily – the magician turns out to be quite a pussycat, the invisible creatures turn out to be funny dwarfs who each hop about on one huge foot, and the sinister corridor is no longer sinister, because Lucy is no longer afraid. Phew. But I do still love that very scary moment of temptation.
That’s another thing about the dangers in the Dawn Treader story: if you face up to them, they evaporate.
“That’s another thing about the dangers in the Dawn Treader story: if you face up to them, they evaporate.”
The approach to the Dark Island is as vivid as I remember, and Lewis has a wonderfully recognisable image to conjure it up: it’s like looking into a railway tunnel – you can see things clearly for a bit, and then murkily, and then nothing but darkness. I don’t find it so scary this time round – how could I? – but I still feel the cold and see the weak glow of the ship’s lamps and hear the creak of the rowlocks and the splash of the oars as they move into the blackness. And yes, it’s the island where dreams come true, but they only know that because they rescue a terrified man (the missing Lord Rhoop) who tells them so. If he had not told them, would they have been spared that horror? Wisely, Lewis just hints at it, with different people hearing different sounds: huge scissors opening and shutting, things crawling up the side of the ship, ‘There are the gongs beginning – I knew they would.’ I’m left to imagine my own personal nightmare. I don’t know what it was the first time round, and I don’t want to know.
“I’m left to imagine my own personal nightmare. I don’t know what it was the first time round, and I don’t want to know.”
Then they are back on the sunlit sea, and when they turn round, the Dark Island has vanished, as if it had never been. Have they destroyed it? Or was it never real in the first place, no more than a phantom created from their collective deepest fears? Who knows? Either way, it’s still a ghastly experience. But apart from poor Lord Rhoop, who seems to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, as we would say, no-one is too bothered. Heigh-ho, says Caspian; and ‘all afternoon with great joy they sailed southeast with a fair wind.’ (In a later edition, Lewis revised this passage so the Dark Island didn’t disappear, but was gradually left behind, and they are left with a little more dread.)
It takes courage to face even evaporating dangers, and without doubt the most courageous creature aboard the Dawn Treader is Reepicheep. If he were a human knight, he would be insufferable: brave to the point of suicidal foolhardiness, making others’ sensible caution seem like cowardice. But what makes him so appealing is that he’s a mouse (though larger than earthly mice), with the most unmouse-like qualities. The only talking Narnian beast we meet in this story, Reepicheep may seem absurd at first, with his feathered headgear and sharp little sword, but he holds onto his grave dignity, courtesy and self-possession even when naughty Eustace is swinging him around by the tail. He is the younger, smarter cousin of Alice’s White Knight. He is the epitome of chivalry and romance, always at service to Caspian, utterly devoted to Lucy, his queen, and will forgive Eustace because he is ‘of the Queen’s blood’. Lucy longs to hug him but knows he would be offended. When roused, he’s madly determined to fight: even playing chess with Lucy, he forgets the rules because ‘his mind was full of forlorn hopes, death-or-glory charges, and last stands.’
I love Reepicheep still, even though he’s daft, and he’s by far the best character in the story. Whenever there’s a choice of pulling back or going on, he’s always up for adventure. They don’t have to go into the Dark Island, but he won’t let them dodge the chance of danger and honour. ‘Oh bother you, Reepicheep,’ is Caspian’s boyish response. Moreover, Reepicheep is the driving engine behind the whole point of the voyage. So you thought it was about discovering what happened to thos
e seven lords? They do that, but it’s a mere pretext. My last hypothesis was that I needed a tale of vindication, but that’s not such a big theme as you might think in Dawn Treader. It’s a tale of transcendence. What Caspian wants to do is sail to the end of the world.
“I love Reepicheep still, even though he’s daft, and he’s by far the best character in the story.”
And it really is the end. The Narnian world is flat earth, and nobody knows what happens when you get to the edge, which means it is very possibly a fatal voyage, but that doesn’t stop them. Reepicheep is fanatically determined to get there, for no very clear reason except that a dryad once prophesied it would happen. Lewis takes it in stages, through the last three chapters: ‘The Beginning of the End of the World’, ‘The Wonders of the Last Sea’, and ‘The Very End of the World’.
These are my favourite chapters in the whole book, and it’s only now I realise why I wanted so much to read it again. It’s as if everything else is just the groundwork for these final chapters: Lewis had to get a few token adventures out of the way, but now he’s come to the real story. There is something visionary about it that, though the language and scenery are very different, recalls the ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ chapter in The Wind in the Willows, and it all takes place to that same motion: the gentle progress of a boat across calm water. Everything gets stranger and stranger. The rising sun gets larger and larger and glows brighter and brighter, but they can withstand it as no human can. They drink the seawater, which has turned sweet. They stop eating and sleeping and talking. They enter a sea full of white lilies with ‘a fresh, wild lonely smell that seemed to get into your brain and make you feel that you could go up mountains at a run, or wrestle with an elephant.’ I can’t stand much more of this, say Lucy and Caspian; yet I don’t want it to stop.