The Horse and His Boy (1954)

At this point, I can’t speak with absolute certainty, as it’s been quite a while since I read The Last Battle, but I’m pretty sure The Horse and His Boy is my least favorite Narnia book.  It’s the one in the series that feels the most out-of-place in a number of ways, and while there’s nothing inherently wrong with doing something different in the midst of a series, I don’t think it pays off here.

Shasta has lived his life in Calormen, but he’s always been fascinated by tales of Narnia, the wild and mysterious land to the north.  One night while in unfortunate straits, he meets Bree, a talking horse who was kidnapped from Narnia as a foal and made to serve men.  The two run away together, and on the way they meet a similar pair:  Tarkaan (nobleman’s) daughter Aravis and Narnian horse Hwin.  In their journey from Calormen to Narnia, they encounter two of Narnia’s four sibling monarchs and, learning of a deadly plot against Narnia by Calormen’s prince, do what they can to defend it.

Obviously, there’s a lot that’s different here.  Even though Shasta and Aravis maintain the usual status quo of child protagonists, they veer from the pattern of kids from our world being transported to Narnia.  These two live in the same world as Narnia, just in a different country – which still makes them newcomers to Narnia, but it’s a departure nonetheless.  What’s more, we spend very little time in Narnia and among Narnians themselves, instead passing much of the book in Calormen and the surrounding desert.

Which doesn’t really work for me, and not just because I enjoy Narnia (and would’ve liked to see more of it as it was when the Pevensies were its kings and queens, since my favorite parts of the book are the glimpses we get of Edmund, Susan, and Lucy.)  Lewis’s portrayal of Calormen leans hard into parallels to the Middle East, with tons of superficial references to turbans, veils, shoes that curl at the toe, scimitars, and the Tisroc, whose name is always followed by “may he live forever,” which has shades of “peace be unto him” to it (the Tisroc is Calormen’s ruler but is also said to be descended from their god, so he has both political and religious significance.)

Now, modeling a fantasy land after a real-world region isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but in Lewis’s hands, these allusions are hard to take.  That’s because Lewis wastes no opportunity to remind you how terrible Calormen is in every way.  There are the big-ticket items like its slave labor, forced marriages, and bloodthirsty prince, but they’re far from the only offenders.  The second Shasta claps eyes on some Narnians (and Edmund and Susan, who aren’t Narnians themselves but have at this point certainly adopted the country as their own,) he starts noticing every way he finds them better than Calormenes:  their clothes, their manners, their swords, their food, their music, their way of speaking.  You name it – if there’s a way to unfavorably compare something about Calormen to Narnia, Lewis will find an excuse to include it, none of which makes for a good time.

Warnings

Scary moments, battle violence, and some really unpleasant racial parallels.