Prince Caspian: Forever My First Love

Continuing with my annual reread of The Chronicles of Narnia, I have just finished up Prince Caspian (PC).  When I first read these as a little girl, I had read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (LWW) many times before I moved on to the rest of the series and it had already become my favorite book. I remember being very excited to read the next book in the series, thinking it would be very similar.  A quick synopsis (Spoilers Ahead)

Our four hero's from the last book LWW have been back in our world for a year now and are getting set to head back to school.  They are all waiting at the train station when they are pulled onto a wooded beach.  

After some exploring the children (Peter, Susan, Lucy and Edmund) end up at the ruins of an ancient castle.  After further examanation the children realize it is their old castle Cair Paravel and that it must have been in ruins for hundreds of years.  The children rescue a dwarf from some human soldiers and learn a bit of the current history of the area.  The king is now a man named Miraz who has along with his ancestors have hunted, harried and scared the "Old Narnia" (ie the talking beasts, dwarves, giants, centaurs, pretty much anything not human or "normal") into hiding.  Miraz has a nephew Caspian who is the rightful heir to the throne, but must run for his life after Miraz has a son.  Caspian is taken in by the Old Narnian's and together they form an army of sorts to try and defeat Miraz and bring back the Old Narnia.  Caspian is in posession of Queen Susan's horn (one of the gifts given the children back in LWW) and blows it and this is what brings the children back to Narnia.  Trumpkin the dwarf is sent to the castle in the hopes that the Kings and Queens of old would appear there.  Trumpkin is doubtful that the four children are really the powerful monarchs of the past, but they prove themselves quit quickly.  The group decides to head to Aslan's How (the mound raised over the Stone Table) where Caspian and his army are holed up.  Along the way they get lost and Lucy see's Aslan the Great Lion who shows her where to go, it takes a couple of tries, but eventually all the children and the dwarf get where they need to be.  The girls and Aslan go through Narnia collecting the Old Narnians and any humans that want to live this new life.  Meanwhile the boys and Trumpkin work with Caspian to challange Miraz to single combat in the hope of winning the war without too much blood shed.  Peter wins against Miraz and the forest awakens and scares the rest of Miraz's army into surrender.  The old order is restored with Caspian as Narnia's rightful ruler and the four children return to England, but not before Peter and Susan are told that they are to old to come back.

As soon as I started reading about Caspian my 8 year old self fell completely in love with him, I write about 

my undying amore for him here.  I'm not sure if this was my first experiance with a book prince or if this was the first time I was old enough to have a crush (I started reading LLW when I was 5) but this Prince who was willing to risk everything for an imaginary country I wanted so badly to go to won me over completely. Other than my crush, I actually find this to be a very meloncholoy book.  Don't get me wrong, I still love it, I just could empathize with the four children, especially Peter and Susan when they are told they can't come back.  Imagine spending a life time in a magical land, ruling happily over these fantastic creatures, essentially living the dream just to be dumped back into your ordinary everyday lives as children.  Then you finally get to come back to this place of happiness and wonderment only to find it in ruins.  All of your happy memories have been left to crumble, your 

beloved country is being ruled by a tyrant, and you are stuck as a kid again.  To top it all off instead of getting to spend another life time here you only get a week or two before you are sent back to school.  I would imagine this would be especially brutal for the two oldest who are told that they are too old for Narnia and must learn to live and find magic in the real world.  It feels like the author is trying to make a comment about being forced to grow up.  C.S. Lewis continues to use beautiful and simple story telling.  I think that is one of the things I love about all of these books is that they are so simple and direct.  This is not to say that the story and characters are not complete, it's just a different style from the EPIC's one is used reading in fantasy.  It is always interesting to compare these stories, because to me they are more stories then books, to Lewis's contemperary J.R.R Tolkien and his EPIC (yes EPIC has to be in all caps) world building.  I love both authors for completly different reasons, but The Chronicles of Narnia will always be some of the most accessible books for any age.  Prince Caspian, while a little sad for the aforementioned reasons really shows you just how big Narnia and the world it belongs to can be, it reminds you that it is not all about the original four children, but about the world itself and the stories it has to tell.

What did you think of Prince Caspian?  Did you like it more or less then the first book?  Who was your first book crush?  How devestated would you be if you knew you could never go back?  

Now There Is A Fine Looking Non-Existent Book Man

When I was growing up we were not allowed to watch a whole lot of television, a fact that I am now very grateful for.  My parents say it was to keep undue influences out of our life, but I think the real reason was even "educational" tv was dangerous in our family. For example after watching a documentary on mountain climbing, my little four year brother thought it would be a good idea to tie a kite string to a lamp and "mountain climb" out of his second story bedroom window.  My Mamma after hearing the thump that was my brother making a miraculous uninjured landing, came running out to see him brushing the dirt of himself and hollering for his younger 2 year old sister to try it next. Her little legs were already over the windowsill as my poor Mamma is screaming for her to get back inside :-)  Needless to say even educational tv was limited at our house.  One of the by-products of a fairly television free house, was lots of time to read.  The other was I didn't have access to all of those tv and movie boys to have crushes on.  Which leads me to my first crush Prince Caspian, oh my first true love, my version of Prince Charming...Hmmmm... He was a perfect non-existent boy, a prince, handsome (at least in my head), brave, and of course dwelt in a the ideal land of Narnia!  One of the few good things about the movie was at least the role was played the very handsome Ben Barnes mmmmm.

Anyways, for the longest time whenever I was playing with friends (did I mention I was about 8 or 9 at the time) and needed a husband/boyfriend/prince regardless of the time period our game was in, I always chose my Prince Caspian.  Over the years I of course had my share of  TV/Movie and real life crushes, but there is something about a book crush that seems more personal.  The funny thing is now that I am married to my own real life Prince Hubbin, I find myself on occasion putting his stunningly handsome face on my current book crushes.  Who was your first book crush? Any current book crushes?  (mine current book crush is Jack and Nemo from the Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica Series) Am I the only crazy person who develops crushes on non-existent people?

Book VS Movie: Narnia

Anybody who has seen a movie made out of a book knows that it is impossible for even the best movie makers out there to 100% translate a book to the big screen.  Knowing this, when I go to a book based movie (especially if I have already read the book)  I try and watch it as a movie separate from the book.  This has worked well and allowed me to enjoy many movies that, lets face it will never live up to our lofty 100% idealistic standard.  Today's book to movie conversions that I will be pontificating (I love that word) on will be the first three books in the Chronicles of Narnia.  Now word of warning C.S. Lewis and his Chronicles of Narnia are (besides my Bible) probably my most sacred and cherished reading memories. 

So when they announced they were going to make a movie out of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (hereafter known as LWW) I was torn between excitement and terror.  My poor Hubbin probably thought I was nuts :-)  On the plus side The Lord of the Rings movies had already come out and proven you could make a great movie out of beloved books.  Also PBS/BBC had done a wonderful miniseries back in the day that stayed wonderfully true to the books, but that took close to three hours to pull off.  On the down side, the books themselves are pretty short I can get through LWW in a couple of hours.  It is also a very simple story without a lot of gratuitous(another good word) history, detail or plot lines which seems to be a staple now days.  Also in general the track record for turning books into good movies isn't all that great.  So it was with a mix of excitement and dread that I went to see the movie. I was THRILLED, I really loved it!  Sure they added stuff to it, but I usually don't mind as long as they don't take anything out, and stay as faithful to the plot as you can in a movie.  I thought this movie did a great job of that, it was almost like watching an expanded version of the book.  The movie itself was just beautiful and looked a lot like what I envisioned it to in my head as I grew up. The music was almost it's own character, in fact I am listening to the sound track as I write this ( a little inspiration).  I thought the cast was well chosen and for once age appropriate (I hate it when they make the characters older then they should be...more on that in a different post!) and seriously Liam Neeson can talk all day as the voice of Aslan and I won't complain.  Over all very very pleased with the movie. 

After such a great experience I was understandably excited when the second movie Prince Caspian (hereafter known as PC) came out. When I first read the book Prince Caspian I fell in love with the title character...aw my first book crush...I might have to write a post on that hmmm.....whoops a little off track there, anyways loved this book so excited to see the movie and then :-(  They changed the plot! And I don't just mean a little filler to round out the movie, or to fill time, they changed the whole story!!!  The weird thing is they kept in a lot of little details that only a person who has read the book would notice, like a peace offering for slaughtering the plot?!? 

Then came The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (VDT) Now this may be my favorite book of ALL time, it has everything I love, ocean voyages, mysteries, pirates,humor, Dufflepods, pools that turn anything to gold, an epic quest and a darn good love story.  Of all the books in this series that could be made into a movie with little to no tweaking THIS IS IT! So with one great movie and one crappy movie I was really hoping this one would be great.  The movie sucked, I mean that's all I can really say about it.  They completely changed the whole plot and didn't even keep in little things to appease the readers like they did in PC.  It's like nobody had actually read the book, just had a notion of a story somebody once told them about the book. It may have been an ok movie (again beautiful cinematography and gorgeous music) if it wasn't based on the book.  All in all very disappointing, especially considering how well they did with LWW.  Oh well I guess that is the joy of reading, is I can always go back and read it again :-)  Let me know what you thought of the books/movies  Did you love them all, hate them with the burning of a thousand suns, or actually have a life and don't have that much energy to put into movie vs books dissections.