The Horse and His Boy

The Horse and His Boy is the third book in the Chronicles of Narnia series, intended by the author to be read after The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Confusingly, it was released fifth of the seven Narnia books, and was written fourth... how delightfully higgledy-piggledy! In spite of all this, it's actually a decent story on its own and I don't think it's probably all that neccessary to read any other books in the series if you wanted to just read this one.

The Horse and 'his boy' of the book's title refers to a Talking Narnian Horse named Bree and a young-slave boy named Shasta. Both live lives of extreme hardship in the vast kingdom of Calormen, and through a fortuitous meeting they decide to run away together - to break their yokes of oppression and head north to the free land of Narnia.

Along the way they meet with Aravis, another native runaway who has also teamed up with a Talking Narnian Horse. The quartet have several adventures together and even get tangled up amongst Calormen-Narnian intrigues. Royalty from Narnia and it's neighbouring kingdom, Archenland, are in the Calormen capitol on diplomatic business... business that looks about to turn very sour indeed and could lead to war between the two nations.

This is a very neat and well-written tale. C. S. Lewis makes his customary allusions to both Old and New Testement, but this religous aspect isn't anywhere near as direct as in the previous two books of the series. There's a lot going on and the adventure at large involves some interesting surprises, and Lewis never forgets to keep things interesting - invoking equal doses of humour and emotional engagement to offset the action and intrigue. It's very much a book suitable to be read to children, or by children, but remains involving enough to retain entertainment value for imaginative adults.

My only real criticism of this book, and I think the text shows its age here, is it's depiction of the massive empire of Calormen. The Calormenes are a race of people very much in the Arabic/Islamic mould... and nearly all Calormenes shown in the book seem inherently evil; incapable of redemption, sympathy or even humour. By contrast, the Narnians and Archenlanders are almost without fault and always redeemable. The Calormene culture is presented in the way 1950s Christians saw the barbaric Muslim world... obviously this is where Lewis was coming from, but, well I hoped he would've had more foresight than this and as a result this book sometimes feels very dated and somewhat racist.

It's very one-sided at times... even Calormene poetry is said to be boring and without redeeming features, and when their architecture and cities are praised as being beautiful Lewis is quick to point out that these things are actually quite horrible close up and at no point does he offer anything good to say about the entire culture of these people. I know it can't really be taken at face value - Calormen isn't literally Arabia, but it might as well be, and for all of Lewis' transposing of Christian mythology into his Narnia chronicles, there's very little doubt as to what this empire of cruel, dark-faced people represents.

Anyway, I don't want to sour this book any more than that - if you can take that sort of thing with a grain of salt then The Horse and His Boy remains a cracking good adventure story and an interesting expansion of the world of Narnia and its neighbouring lands.