I’ve just re-immersed myself in the radiant beauty of the Dawn Treader’s voyage through the Silver Sea. Goodness knows how many times I’ve read it, with unfailing awe and joy, as a boy, as a privately reading adult and as a parent and grandparent reading to children. It’s vivid proof of Lewis’s point that for someone who enjoys rereading books, knowing what’s to come doesn’t diminish the pleasure of narrative surprise but sharpens it: you feel the future turn actively swelling within the present moment rather than merely succeeding it. As Lewis says, “children understand this well when they ask for the same story over and over again, and in the same words”.

Rereading the book and reaching the paragraph describing sunrise on Ramandu’s island I feel an explosion of delight and almost painful longing:

Once or twice before, the Narnians had wondered whether the sun at its rising did not look bigger in these seas than it had looked at home. This time they were certain. There was no mistaking it. And the brightness of its ray on the dew and on the table was far beyond any morning brightness they had ever seen. And as Edmund said afterwards, ‘Though lots of things happened on that trip which sound more exciting, that moment was really the most exciting.’ For now they knew that they had truly come to the beginning of the End of the World.

The deep, penetrating thrill this gives is pure anticipation of something that lies some way ahead. Lewis skilfully diverts our imaginations down a series of other paths so that those who are already yearning for the wonder of the Silver Sea are torn between delight in the present and impatience for the future. A series of deft changes of motif and tone give the rest of the chapter an economical, shimmering richness. There’s the fairytale romance of Caspian’s love for Ramandu’s daughter. There’s tart humour  in the presentation of Pittencream’s slacking (so much better than the laboured  satire at the beginning of the novel). As Malcolm Guite has pointed out, there’s profundity in Ramandu’s rebuke to Eustace’s assertion that in our world a star is a ball of flaming gas:

‘Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.’

There’s the almost violently moving description of the granting of sleep to Rhoop – perhaps a transfigured memory of the ministrations of doctors and nurses in the trenches, where Lewis fought:

     ‘And now for the Lord Rhoop,’ said Caspian.
But turning to the head of the table he saw that Rhoop was already there. He had arrived, silent and unnoticed, while the discussion was going on, and was seated beside the Lord Argoz. The daughter of Ramandu stood beside him as if she had just helped him into his chair; Ramandu stood behind him and laid both his hands on Rhoop’s grey head. Even in daylight a faint silver light came from the hands of the star. There was a smile on Rhoop’s haggard face. He held out one of his hands to Lucy and the other to Caspian. For a moment it looked as if he were going to say something. Then his smile brightened as if he were feeling some delicious sensation, a long sigh of contentment came from his lips, his head fell forward, and he slept.

Delays like this and, in the next chapter, Lucy’s sight of the sea people, are, in my experience, simultaneously delightful and sometimes moving in themselves and a frustration of the deeper longing to reach the light that readers familiar with the book know to be coming. They heighten both the tension of anticipation and the joy of release when fulfilment comes. Quotation can only partially illustrate the power of the effect when it does arrive, because unlike the power of intense moments in an earlier book like That Hideous Strength, it doesn’t depend on passages that are richly laden and densely concentrated in themselves, it grows out of the skilful interweaving of strands that are each lightly touched in themselves. In That Hideous Strength we have paragraphs like this sumptuous evocation of the effect of Venus’ descent:

Through the bare branches, across the ground which was once more stiffening with frost, a summer breeze was blowing into the room, but the breeze of such a summer as England never has. Laden like heavy barges that glide nearly gunwale under, laden so heavily you would have thought it could not move, laden with ponderous fragrance of night-scented flowers, sticky gums, groves that drop odours, and with cool savour of midnight fruit, it stirred the curtains, it lifted a letter that lay on the table, it lifted the hair which had a moment before been plastered on Merlin’s forehead. The room was rocking. They were afloat. A soft tingling and shivering as of foam and breaking bubbles ran over their flesh. Tears ran down Ransom’s cheeks. He alone knew from what seas and what islands that breeze blew. Merlin did not: but in him also the inconsolable wound with which man is born waked and ached at this touching.

That is magnificent in a style appropriate to the novel it finds itself in. In it, the main characters are sophisticated intellectuals, honestly exploring or dishonestly obfuscating complicated, often involuted issues. However, the writing in the final chapters of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader seems to me to have a more refined power and beauty, whether because of a general maturing of Lewis’s art or because the discipline of writing for the young demanded a finer distillation of meanings. In the final chapters of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, it’s not the rich loading of words that is so effective but the simplicity of the syntax, and the way silences preceding and following each brief statement allow it to shimmer with meaning and be caught in the shimmering of suggestions throughout these last chapters. In the passage from That Hideous Strength I feel I’m a wondering spectator of something outside me, feeling and enjoying the weight of the words and their sensuous evocativeness as they slowly accumulate. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, I’m so transfixed by the dancing of lights beyond the words that I feel I’m being caught up in it myself. One of the key moments comes when Reepicheep has dived into the sea to challenge the sea people and found the water to be sweet (not salt) and a bucket has been drawn to test his impression:

     The King took the bucket in both hands, raised it to his lips, sipped, then drank deeply and raised his head. His face was changed. Not only his eyes but everything about him seemed to be brighter.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is sweet. That’s real water, that. I’m not sure that it isn’t going to kill me. But it is the death I would have chosen – if I’d known about it till now.’

Beauty piles on beauty from now on. I won’t quote individual passages to illustrate this  because my essential sense is that the reason the passage describing the sunrise on Ramandu’s island is so packed with premonitory joy is that for someone who’s read the novel several times everything that happens as the Dawn Treader journeys more deeply into light seems to be foreshadowed in that moment. The last three chapters are so hauntingly and evocatively beautiful that even the heavy-handed symbolism of the lamb offering a meal of fish becomes a momentary and insignificant annoyance.