Suspendering My Disbelief.

I've been reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader  (C.S. Lewis) for a few days .. well actually I have been reading it for the last few nights. 

Specifically, very late at night.

You know that time of night when, tucked away  in bed, you tend to fall asleep with a book suspended by one stiff arm above your face. Regardless of whether your eyes are open or closed, the book hangs like an executioner's axe, threatening to fall and dent your nose or, at the very least, give you a bloody set of lips, should you release your grip for a moment.

It all goes to prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that it is a dangerous thing to be a reader of books.

I can only thank my lucky stars (read: Bank Manager) that I cannot afford an e-reader - because I fall asleep while reading so often that my nose, already bent like the beak of  the South Australian Yellow Breasted Nosy Noodletwit (genus: eripydies), would have been plastered all over my face by now.

Still, back to the subject at hand, what ever that was... 


..... ah yes, C.S. Lewis. 


The greatest thing about The Voyage of The Dawn Treader is its first paragraph. As a 'hook', as an entre, as a 'warmer-upperer', as a piquant sorbet, this paragraph is without equal. 

For example, the first line is: 

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

Unfortunately C.S. Lewis must have had an apocolypitic attack of epiliopithy after he wrote the first paragraph, because, without so much as a deeply bated breath, the book soon sinks into the depths of of authorial narrative intervention. (eg: Dear reader, you should not worry yourselves about Eustace, our erstwhile hero, because he is nought but a scoundrel who never changes his socks, even on Sundays.) 

Lewis's clumsy interventions are clumsy enough to make us certain that he (Lewis)  is clumsy keen for his  readers not to be hung up by their clumsy suspenders of disbelief.

And the fact that it is written for twelve-year-olds is no excuse for these lapses.

Mind  you, I am older than 12 and I am still reading it, suspenders or not.

So, the cover of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the genesis for this image. 

It's also a bow, not only to the cover of Shaun Tan's book The Arrival, but to the techniques of my wonderful artist friends Janne and Mita.

Oh, I almost forgot: this Illustration is for IF's prompt "Separated", a word that I have only recently learnt to misspell. Thank you for looking. 

One more thing. Do you need a good laugh? Check out Penspaper Studio. :). Elizabeth has a great sense of humour.