My family just finished yet another C.S. Lewis tale, and we are a bit bummed that only three remain! The Silver Chair is the fourth installment to The Chronicles of Narnia and we all agree that it’s a bit more dreamy than the previous three—and right from the first entrance into Narnia.

This story begins as always in London, introducing another new human character, Jill, and taking us readers officially away from the original Pevensie family of Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy. Jill and a transformed Eustace Stubbs find themselves crawling through a wall behind their “school” and entering Alsan’s Land so distant from Narnia itself. Eustace falls off a mountain and Aslan blows Jill away to follow him, and this strange (almost psychedelic) scene begins our fourth journey into Narnia.

Aslan has sent the children on a quest to save Narnia in which they must seek to rescue old King Caspian X‘s lost son, Prince Rillian. With the help of a gloomy Marshwiggle (I found I really enjoyed making up and using his voice throughout the book), they set off to the land of the unfriendly giants, meet a wicked witch, and eventually find themselves exploring the under-earth and all its mystical secrets in pursuit of the lost prince. The story gets its name from the magic tool the wicked witch uses to keep the prince (and the entire underworld) under her spell as she builds an army to destroy Narnia.

I call this book “dreamy” because of all of the fantastical elements Lewis uses. In fact, this story more than any other reminds me of his book, Out of the Silent Planet. He has painted no other two stories with so fanciful a brush (though the characters and islands in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader came close).

Lessons in this story were a bit more difficult to come by, especially since Jill had been tasked to remember four simple steps, forgot them almost immediately out of apathy, but still ended up being victorious. I’m not sure if this was Lewis’ intent, but the only spiritual lessons I can draw from that are how we’re all very prone to forget the words of Scripture (if not the principles and teachings of it) and often find in the end that God had been directing us even though we personally had failed. I just don’t think that’s a great promise to bank on, lest it breed the apathy we’re trying to eschew! Romans 6-8 come to mind for such a discussion.

We’re really looking forward to the next book, The Horse and His Boy, and to finding out who the boy is. And I guess who the horse is too!

©2021 E.T.

See More by C.S. Lewis:

• Nonfiction:
  The Screwtape Letters (1942)
  Reflections on the Psalms (1958)
• Space Trilogy:
  Out of the Silent Planet (1938)
  Perelandra (1943)
  That Hideous Strength (1945)
• The Chronicles of Narnia: 
  The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950)
  Prince Caspian (1951)
  The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)
  The Silver Chair (1953)
  The Horse and His Boy (1954)
  The Magician’s Nephew (1955)
  The Last Battle (1956)
• Other:
  Till We Have Faces (1956)