After the high of reading The Horse and His Boy, Prince Caspian let me down. One thing I didn’t realise was that The Horse and His Boy was published later than Prince Caspian and even though they were only four years apart, it seems that the former is a more consistent work. Prince Caspian was the second Narnia book published and perhaps Lewis was still trying to find his footing with the world of his own making.
The Pevensie children, a year after getting out of the wardrobe and settling back into their own reality as English schoolchildren were summoned once again by Narnia, hundreds of years after their own kingdom had already dilapidated and the myth of Narnia — of fauns, of talking animals, of Aslan had become exactly that. Prince Caspian was a heir to the current king of Narnia who usurped the throne of Caspian’s father by skilled manipulation. He planned to kill Caspian after the birth of his son who now saw Caspian as an obstacle.
What let me down in Prince Caspian is the few plot points that we are expected to believe in a leap of faith. Yes, we’ve got fricking animals here but Narnia occasionally suffers from inconsistencies. In this book, I find that the Narnians were too quick to believe Caspian as their rightful leader. Only because he believed in the stories of Aslan that they were convinced that he should rule them again because he was the lesser of the evils? Also I couldn’t bridge the gap between how the children spoke at the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as royals in a kingdom back to English schoolchildren again. Sure, it has been a year, and sure Peter still remembered how to write in a kingly tone, but there is a leap of faith that we are forced to make throughout the book that made me question the plot. And I’m not convinced that an evil king who has usurped a throne would take the challenge of a one to one with a stranger at the risk of his losing his own life.
There are other things here that felt out of place. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe old mate Santa Claus really had no business being there. In Prince Caspian I don’t what the shite Bacchus and Silenus are doing here. The whole entire thing just felt weird. Also, I felt like Aslan was a bit of a dick in this book.
Prince Caspian only served as a character to drive a plot in this book and I felt that there was much more that could be extracted from his character. There were few character building moments and what we only knew was that he was valiant enough to go into battle against his uncle. His character felt short for me.
All in all, Prince Caspian is not a terrible read, but compared to the other Narnia books so far, it has been the weakest read. I still have three to go, so I won’t expect much more from this point on.
