Three Reasons to Be (Tentatively) Excited About The Silver Chair Movie

The Themes

The Silver Chair was my favorite Narnia book as a kid because of the giants and earthmen and a bloody showdown with a wicked serpent. It’s my favorite now because … well, all those reasons, of course, but also because its spiritual themes are so resonant with my own faith it.

As mentioned, Aslan sends Eustace and Jill with a posse of enigmatic instructions—signs to follow. Aslan instructs Jill to remember those signs, and to recite them often so she’ll not forget.

But the signs don’t make a lot of sense. They seem meaningless at times. Soon, Jill forgets to recite them. And one by one, the children flub them. (Or so it would seem.)

And yet Aslan never leaves them, and eventually they come to the culmination of their quest. The three confront an evil witch who, with a little magical assist, tries to tell them that everything they know and everything they love is false. They’ve always lived in this subterranean world, she tells them, throwing sweet-smelling powder into a fire. Everything they’ve “imagined”—trees, sun, stars, even Aslan—is a fairy tale.

The spell works—until Puddleglum comes forward, stomping out the fire and saying this.

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things-trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.

You don’t need to be a Christian to enjoy and even love The Chronicles of Narnia like I do. But it’s also no secret that C.S. Lewis meant the books to reflect bigger truths, Christian truths. The Silver Chair is, in some ways, the most difficult and adult of the lot, dealing as it does with the exasperation of following a sometimes distant God, about doubt and frustration and plain ol’ spiritual laziness. These are all things that sometimes crop up in my own faith journey. I feel very much like Jill sometimes—wishing God would be more obvious, wishing that the journey wasn’t so hard, wondering whether my faith is true or, as Paul said, I am to be pitied above all men. We’re stuck in stone channels in this world: It’s hard to see what they spell out.

But then the Puddleglum in me pipes up. And I want to live like a Narnian again.