The Silver Chair

The Silver Chair Review

The Silver Chair is the Narnia book in which Lewis is most explicit about the structure of obedience. Jill Pole is given four Signs by Aslan at the beginning of the quest — four specific things to look for and act upon, given in clear sequence — and instructed to repeat them every morning so she will not forget them. She forgets them almost immediately. The quest then becomes a series of encounters with each Sign in turn, every one of them misread, delayed, or ignored, until the fourth and most important arrives at exactly the moment when ignoring it is most tempting.

This structural conceit is simple and pitiless, and Lewis handles it without condescension. The failures are always comprehensible: the children are tired, or cold, or deceived, or simply do not recognise what they are looking at. The point is not that Jill and Eustace are bad children but that the world is genuinely difficult to navigate according to instructions given when it looked simpler. The Signs become Lewis’s most precise image of religious instruction: clear in the abstract, slippery in the particular.

The book’s great set piece is Puddleglum’s speech to the Lady of the Green Kirtle after she has nearly persuaded all three travellers that there is no Narnia, no Aslan, no surface world — only the underground reality they can see and smell and touch. The Witch’s argument is a version of the materialist case: what you cannot verify is not real, and your memories of another world are merely projections of this one. Puddleglum’s response does not refute the argument philosophically. He stamps on the fire, clears his head, and announces that even if the Witch is right, he prefers the Narnian myth to the Underland reality. He will live as if Narnia is true. Lewis considered this the best response to materialism available, and he makes it persuasive by having it come from the most pessimistic character in the book.

Among the Narnia books, The Silver Chair is the one that demands the most of its reader: it is not as immediately delightful as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or as strange and beautiful as The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but it is the most carefully argued, and the central theological point — about how to hold on to what you were told when the world is actively trying to make you forget it — is one that repays continued thought.

A Quest Underground

Published in 1953, The Silver Chair is the fourth Narnia book Lewis wrote and the only one of the original adventures in which no member of the Pevensie family appears as a protagonist. Edmund and Lucy have, by this point, been judged too old to return to Narnia, and so Eustace Scrubb — transformed from the insufferable boy of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader into a braver and humbler version of himself — carries the story forward, accompanied this time by his schoolmate Jill Pole. The two are pulled out of the grim, bullying world of their progressive boarding school, Experiment House, and given by Aslan a task: to find Prince Rilian, the lost son of the aged King Caspian, who vanished years before while searching for the serpent that killed his mother. The quest will take them north across the giant-haunted moors and then far down beneath the surface of the world into the sunless realm of the Underland.

Puddleglum the Marsh-wiggle

The travellers’ guide is one of Lewis’s finest comic and moral inventions: Puddleglum the Marsh-wiggle, a long-limbed, frog-like dweller of the Narnian marshes whose temperament is relentlessly, almost gloriously, pessimistic. He greets every prospect with a forecast of the worst that could happen, and yet — and this is Lewis’s point — his gloom never tips into despair or cowardice. When the moment of real crisis comes, Puddleglum proves the steadiest and most courageous of the three. Lewis reportedly modelled the character’s voice and outlook on his own gardener, Fred Paxford, and the result is one of the most beloved supporting figures in the whole series: a creature whose dour realism turns out to be a deeper form of faith than easy optimism could ever be.

The Lady of the Green Kirtle

The antagonist is the Lady of the Green Kirtle, a beautiful and sinister enchantress who has captured Prince Rilian and bound him to the silver chair of the title — a seat in which he must sit each night while a brief hour of sanity returns to him, an hour during which she has taught him to believe he is dangerous and must be restrained. By day she keeps him under an enchantment so complete that he serves her willingly and plans to conquer the Overland at her side. She is the ruler of the Underland and intends to use Rilian as her puppet king. Her great weapon is not force but persuasion, and the book’s climactic scene is her attempt to talk the rescuers themselves out of their belief in the sun, in Aslan, in the whole world above — a slow, drugged, reasonable argument that nearly succeeds, and that Puddleglum breaks only by an act of will rather than logic.

The Difficulty and the Reward

Among the Chronicles, The Silver Chair is the most tightly structured and, in its way, the most testing. Its central device — the four Signs that Aslan gives Jill and commands her to memorise and repeat, and which the travellers proceed to misread, delay, or ignore one after another — gives the book a clarity of moral shape unmatched elsewhere in the series. The Signs are clear in the abstract and slippery in the particular, exactly like instructions for living that are easy to receive and hard to keep. The early Experiment House scenes, with their satire of fashionable progressive education, have dated more than the rest, and Rilian is a less compelling figure than Caspian was as a young king. But the Underland sequences possess a genuine eeriness, and Puddleglum’s stand against the Witch remains one of the most quoted passages Lewis ever wrote — a children’s book’s surprisingly durable answer to the argument that nothing beyond the visible is real.