Book Review: The Silver Chair

From the Voyage of the Dawn Treader I've moved onto The Silver Chair. This one I thought rather better. The start is perhaps a little slow, and Aslan carefully setting them up to not recognise Caspian was rather unfair; and given the way things turned out it rather seemed like that was the better option anyway.

But the trek to the north is quite well done, the Marsh-Wiggle is good, the underground is well done and carefully avoids detail. In contrast to many a wordier epic, and rather like TLTW&TW, the story is quite compressed, and he does not allow himself the indulgence of excess detail and diversion.

The somewhat-mysterious Witch figure is a little odd: she is poison-green, and so not the White Witch. The characters explain her to themselves as "another of the same sort" but there's no explanation for her presence. Jill and Eustace, as expected, grow during the story. The Marsh-Wiggle doesn't. But then he is of faerie.

You'll complain that in this review I've said very little and it was barely worth writing this down. I agree. I'm only doing it as a record of having re-read it.