Book Review: The Horse and His Boy

[osprey_archer]

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.

Comments

[asakiyume]

As a kid reading this, the descriptions of Calormene society didn't make me despise or look down on it or think of it as a culture to deprecate. On the contrary, I thought it seemed magnificent and intriguing, but with some unappealing aspects. And the characters all felt real and for the most part, more than just stereotypes (Shasta's adoptive father was, yes, pretty awful). I guess that's why I think of the book as more orientalist than racist (exotifying the Other rather than simply hating on it). And while completely agreeing that an outsiders' exotifying take on a culture is not what we should have as a main narrative (and yet it has been, thanks colonialism/imperialism), I wish there could be room, somewhere/somehow, for how stories like these have allowed and continue to allow people to become entranced with the Far Away and Very Different.

[troisoiseaux]

Have you read this essay on "Our Country: C.S. Lewis, Calormen, and How Fans Are Reclaiming the Fictionalized East"?

[sholio]

This was my favorite book in the series when I was a kid, mostly because of the horses and the action (and Aravis). As an adult I definitely, 100% recognize the fantastic racism, but as a kid I just read it as a fantasy land like Narnia, with some pretty aspects and some bad ones.

[sovay]

"Our Country: C.S. Lewis, Calormen, and How Fans Are Reclaiming the Fictionalized East"

I'm cited in that essay!

[kore]

There's been some really good Calormene fics, I think for Yuketide? I'd have to look -- there was an epistolary exchange between Lasaraleen and Aravis that was great.

As a kid, I really liked the non-Narnia stuff -- Aravis storytelling, and the hive tombs, and the food. I'm afraid Shasta still gives me the pip and I wanted to hear a lot more about Aravis! Also, I found the grownup Pevensies disorienting, lol.

[kore]

that's why I think of the book as more orientalist than racist (exotifying the Other rather than simply hating on it).

Oh yes, that's a great point!

[kore]

Aha! It wasn't quite as I remembered it (it's one-sided) but I still really like it.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/19437520

[kore]

Oh, that's great. It's like a mirror of Noles' Earthsea essay

http://www.infinitematrix.net/faq/essays/noles.html

[anna_wing]

That's so sweet. Thank you for sharing it!

[asakiyume]

Not that orientalist is a badge of honor or anything!

[kore]

Certainly not! lolsob

[threeplusfire]

So I'm reading The Scent of Empires, by Karl Schlogel which is super interesting because apparently Chanel no. 5 and Red Moscow were both built on the same scent sample and kind of diverged into these weird parallel lives. So I thought there was interesting stuff to learn about fashion and culture developing alongside in different ways. I'm going along in the book, kind of uneasy at times because I'm not sure how deeply this guy delved into some things. Then I hit the section about WWII France and Coco Chanel's involvement with the Nazis.

"Her collaboration with the Germans is not just a rumor; evidence of it can be found in witness statements by members of the Resistance, the case files of French courts after the liberation of Paris and the documents of the German authorities. What the documents do not tell us is whether her activities ever caused anyone great personal harm."

Um. My guy. My man.

Anyhow I haven't finished. But it is worth noting that the author talks about Auguste Michel, the perfumer who stayed in Russia during the civil war while his compatriot took his work to France. The book simply says no record exists after 1937, who knows what happened. "Maybe he took another name and lived somewhere else." But also noting the journalist who interviewed Michel was executed in a Stalinist show trial a few years later! Like... a little research might have gotten you somewhere but it seems bizarre to have this shrugging like "oh well what could have happened?"

Very, very weird.

[genarti]

I loved this book so much as a kid. As an adult... well, as you say. The good parts are so good! The orientalism is so baked in! And I truly don't know if it's better or worse that he was clearly working to make the characters sympathetic and the culture feel like one its people could love and yet it's still utterly Racist Fantasy Arabia Nonsense in so many ways. (And the geography of the whole world of Narnia is, as ever, 100% based on vibes rather than any logic about how ecosystems work.)

So it's very much a Problematic Fave, but there's so much I love about it. Everything you just listed! The only real view we get of the Pevensies as grown up kings and queens! It's the only one set outside of Narnia, too, and our only real view of Narnia from outside and of Archenland and so on, and I loved it for that too.

[osprey_archer]

I read it as a teenager, when I was old enough to notice the Racist Fantasy Arabia elements and not quite old enough to grasp that other parts of the book might be good nonetheless (although like a sensible person I always loved Aravis; who could help it?), so it was interesting to revisit it with a more adult understanding of, like, complexity.

Hahaha Lewis gives ZERO fucks about how geography works. Or government, for that matter! In LWW you can sort of pretend the Pevensies were fairy-tale monarchs who did nothing but frolic, so maybe their disappearance didn't matter too much, but NO, The Horse and His Boy makes it clear they were having wars and stuff, so their disappearance left a big power vacuum! Lewis is utterly unconcerned.

[osprey_archer]

I feel that with just a trifle more curiosity the author could have cleared up both these mysteries! The perfumer who disappeared in Stalinist Russia in 1937... what could possibly have happened to him... we might not find a record but we could, perhaps, extrapolate from the many other disappearances in the USSR in 1937.

[osprey_archer]

I like Shasta fine but he's never been as interesting to me as Aravis. A generic plucky boy hero, whereas Aravis is a haughty high-spirited tomboy who rejects some of her culture's beliefs (that is, the ones that interfere with her life) while retaining others at full force, even if to us the readers they might seem similarly objectionable.

[threeplusfire]

For real! I know things have changed in the past decade in terms of access to the KGB archival materials and whatnot, but I feel like some work really could have gone into answering this question. Considering the man's pivotal role in the central premise of the book!

[osprey_archer]

The horses are fantastic. True standouts! I love the scene where Bree and Aravis are chatting along about all the acquaintances they have in common, because Bree as a war horse has moved in the same social circles as Aravis the Tarkheena.

[osprey_archer]

The distinction between orientalist/racist is useful - sort of a parallel to the distinction between sexist/misogynist. An author can be sexist and still write magnificent female characters (C. S. Lewis is also a case in point for this one!), or create a compelling fantasy world that nonetheless draws on a lot of orientalist stereotypes, whereas racism and misogyny tend to have a more artistically deadening effect. A failure to see anything valuable or intriguing in the other, perhaps.

Sometimes I think the push for ownvoices verges on an insistence that only the insider view has artistic/moral validity - not just with cultures but for, say, the experience of mental illness.

[ethelmay]

Perhaps Rabadash's fate is what kept the Calormenes out of Narnia when it was at risk, though? But you'd think Corin would have ended up king of Narnia (which would have been one in the eye for his ambition to "always be a prince").

[osprey_archer]

Indeed the possibility of being turned into a donkey might put off any would-be Calormen adventurers! Perhaps Aslan was already looking ahead toward the day the Pevensies left...

Prince Caspian may or may not have some information about who ruled Narnia after the Pevensies went back to England. I'll keep my eyes out for it as I read.

[silverusagi]

I honestly wish there were more Narnia-adjacent books in the series. Either set outside Narnia the country itself, or set in Narnia but with like, lower stakes adventures than kings and queens. I mean, yes, Shasta ends up being a prince, but that's not what made the book fun.

[osprey_archer]

One of the things that makes the Narnia books so much fun is that you truly feel there are SO many other stories that could be told there. The world is so much wider than just our heroes.

[asakiyume]

--a late reply...--

Yes: I agree re: your second paragraph. Ownvoices *definitely* are important, and when a thing has been underrepresented or neglected, it makes sense that it gets care and attention. But what an impoverishing way to treat things if we then decide that, in an effort to address the mistakes of the past, we decide the only stories about anywhere in the world have to originate in those areas. (Not to mention the ever-fractalizing effect of trying to determine who within an own-voice category gets to tell the story...)

[osprey_archer]

There's a not-really-a-joke that I've seen on Twitter and Tumblr that if you write something deeply personal about your own experience of queerness/mental illness/(this probably is true for other identity categories too), someone is sure to pop up and insist that this is terrible representation and the person who wrote it clearly has no personal experience with X thing. No one is ever ownvoices enough that they can't be cast out if their story doesn't fit what people want or expect.