Voyage of the oh, I don't think so

I am not a curmudgeon. I've loved movies based on beloved books. I've even found movies that improved upon their base material (good riddance, Tom Bombadil).

But when it comes to the latest Chronicles of Narnia movie, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader? No, no, a thousand times no.




The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis is not an action-packed adventure. It's full of incident, but it is a quiet book, a shining string of thoughtful wonders and Christian symbolism (quite mysterious to secular-humanist young me). It's a book that you cannot make work on film without making either a very thoughtful quiet movie, or distorting its very essence.

Take this passage, which I have abridged for length:

The first thing she noticed was a little black object, about the size of a shoe, travelling along at the same speed as the ship. Then the black thing suddenly got very much bigger and flicked back to normal size a moment later. "It's our shadow!-the shadow of the Dawn Treader," said Lucy. "Our shadow running along on the bottom of the sea. That time when it got bigger it went over a hill. But in that case, the water must be clearer than I thought! Good gracious, I must be seeing the bottom of the sea, fathoms and fathoms down."

As soon as she had said this she realised that the great silvery expanse which she had been seeing (without noticing) was really the sand on the sea-bed and that all sorts of darker or brighter patches were not lights and shadows on the surface but real things on the bottom. At present, for instance, they were passing over a mass of soft purply green with a broad, winding strip of pale grey in the middle of it. But now that she knew it was on the bottom she saw it much better. She could see that bits of the dark stuff were much higher than other bits and were waving gently. "Just like trees in a wind," said Lucy. "And I do believe that's what they are. If I were down there, that streak would be just like a road through that wood."

It goes on like this, with Lucy realizing that the sea-bed is another world, where dwell hunters and herders and great lords and ladies, and if you want to know more, you'd better get the book, because I suspect that this beautiful image of surface and depth is not going to make it into the movie.

This is the great problem with all the Narnia films. C.S. Lewis wrote simply but clearly, evoking things that come to life in the mind's eye, but that must inevitably lose all their power when deployed upon the screen. In my imagination, I can conjure a majestic Lion, the highest of all High Kings, both terrifying and compassionate. But show me a CGI lion, whose lips move and Liam Neeson's voice comes out? No.

My relationship with the works of Lewis is uneasy. Sometime in my teens I became aware that the books I had adored contained hitherto-undetected religious content. I had always understood the moral implications of the books; but the idea that Lewis had been preaching to me felt like a betrayal. When I returned to the books as an adult, I was struck by still more problems. The books are laden with unpalatable assumptions about class and race; and let us avert our eyes from the fate of poor Susan. Yet I was again seduced by Lewis' invention, his luminous prose, his power as a storyteller.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is my favorite of the Narnia books. If it's been a long time since you read it (or if, unthinkably, you never have) I urge you to pick it up. In spite of everything, it still shines; it really does.