The Silver Chair
BBC "Silver Chair" movie trivia:
Camilla Power has actually…done other stuff. Wow. Stuff I’ve even seen or will see soon. And David Thwaites is listed as the producer of some movies I’ve either seen or heard of. I don’t usually find this is true of kids who starred in tv movies when I was little.

Back to book talk.


Crying is all right while it lasts. But sooner or later you have to stop and then you still have to decide what to do.

Appropriate. Since this one’s all about depression and mental illness. Well, obviously I don’t know that for a fact but that’s what it feels like to me. And I wouldn't use the words "all about" after all, there are other themes.

We open on someone we’ve never seen or heard of before, which is a bold move when this is the book that absolutely no Pevensies will appear in. Jill is crying behind the gym because she’s being bullied by her classmates. Oh, no wonder the miserable middle schooler I was when I picked this up, sided with her right away. The Experiment House does sound utterly awful, but my school probably could’ve given it a run for its money*. Although it is an interesting gap of culture, generation and social class that the author calls this a progressive school, and I’d just thought of it as routine, and in my world, maybe even kind of conservative.

Eustace wanders up and finds her, and we learn that he’s also become a victim of the bullies ever since he came back from the holidays. This is because he’s a different person now. He doesn't bully people or try to suck up to the bullies, and now they are planning to make him their next victim. So Jill and Eustace are hiding, and he brings up Narnia as a possible place to escape to.

“Do you mean, do something to make it happen?”

Eustace nodded.

“You mean, we might draw a circle on the ground, and stand inside it, and write in queer letters in it and stand inside and recite charms and spells?”

“Well,” said Eustace after he had thought hard for a bit, “I believe that is the sort of thing I was thinking of, although I never did it. But now that it comes to the point, I’ve an idea that all those circles and things are rather rot. I don’t think he’d like them. It’d look like we were trying to make him do things.”

Slactivist would probably say that this is the biggest difference between C.S Lewis’s God and Tim LaHaye’s. I’m gonna agree, but without the long, complicated elaboration on that I’d originally typed out. It’s not that I don’t believe in magic spells, I do. I just don’t think they work on Him.

I do like the way belief is approached in these books. People don't get converted by others, they find their own way there, usually by accident. Eustace and Jill find their faith by trying to be good people and do what they think Aslan might probably want, not by saying some magic prayer that puts an immunity stamp on them.

Aslan is rather harsh with Jill, but a) she did push Eustace off a cliff and b) at the end of the book you understand why it was so urgent and important that she remember the signs and not waste time getting to Rilian. Caspian is dying of old age, and Prince Rilian of Narnia is missing.

Always found the meeting with the aged Trumpkin hilarious.

“I was only here a minute before you,” Scrubb said. “He must have blown you quicker than me.”

*gigglesnort*

Jill said, “ I bet that serpent and that woman were the same person.”

Oh dear. *heavy sigh* A prime opportunity for some kind of meta but I don’t want to be distracted from the rest of the book. Anyway, later they meet up with the Lady and they don’t realize it’s her but it’s pretty obvious, at the very least it’s obvious that she’s up to no good.

Puddleglum is a Marshwiggle, a kind of creature we've never met before in the series. They are frog type things with a deeply pessimistic attitude and no ability to hold their drink. He's their guide into the North, the children don't realize how good at this he actually is at all.

“All right. Gay’s the word,” said Scrubb. “Now, if we could only get someone to open this door. While we’re fooling about and being gay, we’ve got to find out all we can about this castle.”

*sputters* I know, I know, but- hahahahaa.

I do love Eustace and Jill. If there was one good thing they got out of Experiment House, they have a totally equal relationship. They call each other by their last names, like two boys. She pulls her own weight and he doesn’t treat her as if she can’t. They have been educated in the same subjects at the same level. She can even do some things he can’t, like ride a horse. They bitch at each other constantly but neither pulls rank on the other because there’s no rank to pull. When he tries to be a Typical Idiot Guy, she almost always calls him on it, and she tends to resent it when she's forced to play Typical Girl. I am sure people look hard to find something to be upset about with regards to Eustace/Jill, on the other hand, maybe the author just isn’t as horrible a person as we’re all supposed to think.

Jill wore a vivid green robe, rather too long for her and over that a scarlet mantle fringed with white fur. Scrubb had scarlet stockings , blue tunic and cloak, a gold hilt sword and a feather bonnet.”

Hideous. Hideous! Oh my EYES. At least it’s supposed to be awful though. And interesting that she and the Lady are wearing the same color dress (a shame that in the movie, they are not).

And now we get serious. This is the part where the story gets creepy and makes me nervous. It’s a lot like some other famous Journey to the Underworld stories, and the thing about those is that they always get worse before they get better. It’s getting darker and darker and more oppressive the further they get from the surface. We discover that Jill is claustrophobic. We see certain beings that will “awake at the end of the world.”

“And the worst thing about it was that you began to feel as if you had always lived on that ship, in the darkness, and to wonder whether sun and blue skies and wind and birds had not been only a dream.”

That’s a pretty apt description of the effects of prolonged depression or mental illness. This is why I get freaked out by this part, because I know what it's like. And the reader actually starts to forget that there is an Overworld too.

They are taken to the chambers of a aristocratic young man, who is kind of- a thoroughly obnoxious person. He’s under a curse, which only his Queen can cure. He is obviously not the missing Prince Rilian. I mean, really. Please. He blathers on about how they’re going to break through to the surface and conquer the world. And okay, this next part is another Suspiciously Kinky Relationship incident- the whole relationship between the Queen and this guy has mega shades of femdom. Really dark, creepy, femdom, as bad as Jadis/Edmund even though the male in this case is a grownup. Creepier, in some ways, because Edmund still knew who he was, and where he was and could make informed decisions (also, he wanted her but they didn't actually *do* anything, not in the real text, which is not something we can assume about this other pair-Jill even refers to the Queen as this man's "wife"). I am starting to think C. S Lewis protested too much if you know what I mean and I think you do.

The man claims he's under a spell, and for the time that he's tied to The Silver Chair each day, he will be at his worst. They sneak in to witness his "horrible transformation" and discover that his time in the Chair is actually the only time when he's totally sane. It's the Chair that puts the spell on him. Basically, she tortures him every day and eventually he was tricked into believing that the torture was the only thing that kept him sane. That is effed up.

Surprise surprise, Not At All Rilian is actually Rilian! I know, you're as shocked as I am. The Queen (The Lady of the Green Kirtle) arrives and tries to hypnotize them into not escaping. She tries to convince them that the Overworld doesn't exist, and that they made up Aslan. It's someone trying to break your spirit by making your world as bleak and cold as they think it's "supposed" to be, they don't want you getting Out if *they* can't. If you've ever tried to Believe in something, you know what that's like.

I will leave you with Puddleglum’s speech, which doesn’t need any elaboration from me.

“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up all these things-trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours really is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”