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starladyLewis, C.S. The Horse and His Boy. New York: Harper Collins, 1994. [1954]
This book, by contrast, is the most well-thumbed of all my copies of the seven, and I remember quite clearly rereading it many times as a kid. I know why I liked it so much; it's the only book of the seven set entirely in the world of Narnia, and the only book in which we get to see (some of) the Pevensies as adults there, in the Golden Age.
As a kid I liked Aravis a lot too, because I was very Anti-'Girly Things' (I went a good five or six years, in this time frame, without willingly putting on a dress or a skirt), and Aravis is appropriately warlike and also anti-arranged marriage, both of which sentiments I admired and sympathized with. I liked all the characters in this book, in point of fact, and I still do.
What sticks out to me this time though is the very racefail-tastic portrayal of Calormen and the Calormenes. It's not anywhere near as blatant as it could have been, but all of Calormene society is portrayed as negative in every respect, from slave-holding to idol-worship to the position of women. Even Calormene poetry doesn't measure up to that of the North. What makes Aravis so awesome is what makes her not really Calormene at heart, unlike, say, Lasraleen. To be honest, I was reminded nothing so much of the Dominion and the Empire in Michelle West's books, with the Dominion and Calormen being more or less the same in many respects, though West, despite some faults, has way more respect for the non-Northern culture than Lewis does. Of course Tolkien does something similar, though even more blatantly racist, in The Lord of the Rings; the only epic fantasy I know of that subverts this biased trope entirely is Allison Croggon's Books of Pellinor sequence (which, incidentally, I heartily recommend).
This time around I am more annoyed than ever at the portrayal of Susan--I think the only way to make sense of her behaviour and still keep the portrayal of her as a queen who, even if she doesn't ride on campaigns, is perfectly capable of fighting and ruling and defending herself, is to think that Rabadash must have treated her very poorly indeed, up to and including assault. Which may be a bit more scaffolding than most readers want to indulge in; at any rate, I think there's a clear pattern in the books of Lewis quite liking girls, even teenage ones, but not really knowing what to do with adult women. It's not quite true that the only adult woman in the books (so far) is Jadis/the Witch, but it's close, particularly if we disregard Mrs. Kirke, Aunt Letty, and Mrs. Macready. Lucy by the time of HHB is 22 by the official chronology (which, FWIW, I personally take more as guidelines really), but she's notably, well, "girlish" in the way that "tomboyish" women were characterized at the time, and perhaps still are--as Corin says, Lucy is "as good as a man, or at any rate as good as a boy" (196). And it's not just that Susan isn't tomboyish, and that's okay; she isn't tomboyish, she's Queen Susan the Gentle, and Lewis still doesn't like her--so the only way to be a 'good' girl or woman is to be 'unfeminine.' Polly of course is 61 at the time of TLB (I really cannot deal with TLB as-is anymore), and still obviously quite awesome, but one feels that is because she's won through adulthood to a spirited old age, rather like Aunt Letty or Mrs. Macready, actually, and she uses her few scraps of screentime in TLB to criticize Susan's performance of gender. Like all good post-1960s academic critics I am loath to engage in biographical criticism, and in all honesty I don't really care what Lewis' particular issue with women was. But it leaves a marked impression on his books, and in light of various things I'm inclined to place the blame for that issue on the English school system.
In some ways, having talked with you good folks about the previous two books so much already, I wish all the more that I'd read the books in publication order this time around, because HHB is the one book that really cracks the series wide open. It's clear, considering the books in publication order, that for Lewis Narnia was like a dark cave (yeah, maybe even the Platonic cave), and he only ever shone his flashlight around as much as he needed to see to tell the story, if I may be forgiven a rather expansive metaphor--Narnia gets a little wider and broader each time Lewis returns to it, but not by much, and it's only, only in this book that we get a sense of the wider world and of things like, say, oh, an international economy there. Compared with Middle-earth, there's an astonishing lack of worldbuilding to Narnia, which in some ways is almost refreshing, but it's this book that destabilizes all the understandings built up in the first four, because in the first four there's really nothing that doesn't fundamentally contradict the idea of Narnia as an entirely dependent reality, but this book does, though at the same time the construction of Calormen here provides Lewis the tool he needs to set in motion the end of the world in TLB. So, yeah. Fascinating stuff. No matter which way you slice it, some bits of Narnia canon joss other bits of Narnia canon, and that's interesting to me.
This book, by contrast, is the most well-thumbed of all my copies of the seven, and I remember quite clearly rereading it many times as a kid. I know why I liked it so much; it's the only book of the seven set entirely in the world of Narnia, and the only book in which we get to see (some of) the Pevensies as adults there, in the Golden Age.
As a kid I liked Aravis a lot too, because I was very Anti-'Girly Things' (I went a good five or six years, in this time frame, without willingly putting on a dress or a skirt), and Aravis is appropriately warlike and also anti-arranged marriage, both of which sentiments I admired and sympathized with. I liked all the characters in this book, in point of fact, and I still do.
What sticks out to me this time though is the very racefail-tastic portrayal of Calormen and the Calormenes. It's not anywhere near as blatant as it could have been, but all of Calormene society is portrayed as negative in every respect, from slave-holding to idol-worship to the position of women. Even Calormene poetry doesn't measure up to that of the North. What makes Aravis so awesome is what makes her not really Calormene at heart, unlike, say, Lasraleen. To be honest, I was reminded nothing so much of the Dominion and the Empire in Michelle West's books, with the Dominion and Calormen being more or less the same in many respects, though West, despite some faults, has way more respect for the non-Northern culture than Lewis does. Of course Tolkien does something similar, though even more blatantly racist, in The Lord of the Rings; the only epic fantasy I know of that subverts this biased trope entirely is Allison Croggon's Books of Pellinor sequence (which, incidentally, I heartily recommend).
This time around I am more annoyed than ever at the portrayal of Susan--I think the only way to make sense of her behaviour and still keep the portrayal of her as a queen who, even if she doesn't ride on campaigns, is perfectly capable of fighting and ruling and defending herself, is to think that Rabadash must have treated her very poorly indeed, up to and including assault. Which may be a bit more scaffolding than most readers want to indulge in; at any rate, I think there's a clear pattern in the books of Lewis quite liking girls, even teenage ones, but not really knowing what to do with adult women. It's not quite true that the only adult woman in the books (so far) is Jadis/the Witch, but it's close, particularly if we disregard Mrs. Kirke, Aunt Letty, and Mrs. Macready. Lucy by the time of HHB is 22 by the official chronology (which, FWIW, I personally take more as guidelines really), but she's notably, well, "girlish" in the way that "tomboyish" women were characterized at the time, and perhaps still are--as Corin says, Lucy is "as good as a man, or at any rate as good as a boy" (196). And it's not just that Susan isn't tomboyish, and that's okay; she isn't tomboyish, she's Queen Susan the Gentle, and Lewis still doesn't like her--so the only way to be a 'good' girl or woman is to be 'unfeminine.' Polly of course is 61 at the time of TLB (I really cannot deal with TLB as-is anymore), and still obviously quite awesome, but one feels that is because she's won through adulthood to a spirited old age, rather like Aunt Letty or Mrs. Macready, actually, and she uses her few scraps of screentime in TLB to criticize Susan's performance of gender. Like all good post-1960s academic critics I am loath to engage in biographical criticism, and in all honesty I don't really care what Lewis' particular issue with women was. But it leaves a marked impression on his books, and in light of various things I'm inclined to place the blame for that issue on the English school system.
In some ways, having talked with you good folks about the previous two books so much already, I wish all the more that I'd read the books in publication order this time around, because HHB is the one book that really cracks the series wide open. It's clear, considering the books in publication order, that for Lewis Narnia was like a dark cave (yeah, maybe even the Platonic cave), and he only ever shone his flashlight around as much as he needed to see to tell the story, if I may be forgiven a rather expansive metaphor--Narnia gets a little wider and broader each time Lewis returns to it, but not by much, and it's only, only in this book that we get a sense of the wider world and of things like, say, oh, an international economy there. Compared with Middle-earth, there's an astonishing lack of worldbuilding to Narnia, which in some ways is almost refreshing, but it's this book that destabilizes all the understandings built up in the first four, because in the first four there's really nothing that doesn't fundamentally contradict the idea of Narnia as an entirely dependent reality, but this book does, though at the same time the construction of Calormen here provides Lewis the tool he needs to set in motion the end of the world in TLB. So, yeah. Fascinating stuff. No matter which way you slice it, some bits of Narnia canon joss other bits of Narnia canon, and that's interesting to me.