Book Review: The Horse and His Boy

littlerhymes and I have reached The Horse and His Boy! Heroically, we stuck to our “two chapters a night” schedule, but the pacing is so pulse-pounding that it was a real struggle to stop each night, especially as I had forgotten basically the whole plot of the book. C. S. Lewis knows how to pull you along!

What I did remember is that the book is set in Racist Fantasy Arabia, and, well, it is. This aspect is so deeply baked into the book as to be basically ineradicable, and I do wonder how the movie-makers would have coped if the Narnia series had continued long enough that they needed to adapt this book. (Not to mention the difficulties of adapting The Last Battle!)

This is especially unfortunate, as the good parts of the book are truly excellent. Aravis, the proud Calormene tomboy escaping an arranged marriage, is a prickly delight, as is Bree the Talking Horse who is at long last returning to Narnia, the land of his birth, from which he was kidnapped as a foal… but after years as a Calormene war horse, will he fit in with the Talking Horses? Do Talking Horses even roll in the grass?

Also, as always, simply amazing food descriptions. I’m not sure Lewis intended us to want to eat the Calormene dish with “chicken livers and rice and raisins and almonds,” but I’d like to give it a try, not to mention the gooseberry fool and mulberry fool and everything nice in the way of ices which follow it up.