Corin, by contrast, is an unadulterated upper-class alpha boy: cocky, insensitive to others, easily riled, and always up for a fight. In Tashbaan, Shasta is mistaken for Corin in the street and winds up spending an afternoon in the Narnians’ quarters while the truant Corin is off getting into a brawl with the locals. Later, in Archenland, Corin disobeys orders by sneaking the two of them into the novel’s climactic battle at the gates of Anvard, even though Shasta has no experience with a sword or any other kind of fighting. Corin consistently plays a pint-sized Hotspur to Shasta’s prepubescent Hal; perhaps Lewis meant him to be a character like the heroes of the school stories he read as a boy, someone he thought his child readers would admire. And perhaps that’s why, for me, Corin contributes to the impression that this novel celebrates what Goldthwaite calls “an elitist clique for Top Boys and Girls.”
It is Corin who explains to Shasta that Lucy is “as good as a man, or at any rate as good as a boy.” For Corin, merit in battle is all that really counts. He is the first to publicly mock Rabadash once the Calormene prince has been mortifyingly defeated and captured in the battle of Anvard. (A hole in Rabadash’s hauberk gets caught on a hook as he is leaping down from a mounting block, and he’s left hanging from the castle’s wall like “a piece of washing.”) Corin’s father, King Lune, does reproach his son for the taunt, but that is merely Lewis’s way of having his cake and eating it, too, of permitting himself to humiliate Rabadash while pretending that his characters are too good to kick a man when he’s down. There’s more than a touch of the bully in Corin, yet the narrator clearly expects us to like him, to shake our heads fondly at his excesses just as the adults around him do, with the conviction that at heart he is all right, and he is all right because he is one of us.
More than the other Chronicles, The Horse and His Boy is preoccupied with social status and inclusion, and the novel’s ambivalence is Lewis’s own. In a lecture he delivered in 1944, he said, “I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.” Wanting to belong to this “inner ring” can be corrupting — it compromises the spineless protagonist of Lewis’s adult science-fiction novel That Hideous Strength, for example — although Lewis hastened to clarify that inner rings aren’t pernicious per se. You can see why he might stress that last point, why he would warn against the craving to be admitted to the in crowd without necessarily condemning in crowds themselves; Lewis belonged to several official and unofficial cliques, from the faculty of Oxford to the Inklings. Yet he also knew how it felt to be shut out.
Lewis’s first taste of the bitterness of exclusion came at age fifteen, when he was sent to Malvern College in Worcestershire. Warnie had spent a couple of years at the school before Jack arrived, and had succeeded socially, if not academically; he loved the place. Jack, however, was bad at sports and had no patience for the exacting rituals of British boarding school life. Surprised by Joy includes an entire chapter, entitled “Bloodery,” devoted to detailing the social structure he found at Malvern, a rigorous hierarchy in which younger boys were obliged to drop everything at a moment’s notice to shine shoes and perform other chores for the older students. At the pinnacle of this order stood the “bloods,” the “adored athletes and prefects” who functioned as the school’s aristocracy.
Every society of children has its pecking order, but at British boarding schools the exalted status of the most popular boys was both highly formalized and endorsed by adult authority. Alumni of this system could be extravagantly sentimental about it and were its fiercest proponents. (Warnie argued with Jack that the practice of “fagging”— forcing younger boys to work as the personal servants of the older ones — provided a necessary lesson in humility.) In Lewis’s father’s generation, many middle- and upper-class men were convinced that boarding school had prepared them to be exemplary Englishmen and champions of the empire. The Duke of Wellington supposedly asserted that the battle of Waterloo was “won on the playing fields of Eton”— although historians have since pointed out that there were no organized sports at the school during his time there and that the great Wellington, like Lewis, was no athlete.
Lewis’s own feelings about the institution were mixed. When Surprised by Joy was first published in 1956, it shocked some readers with its matter-of-fact discussion of “tarts” — smaller boys who served as “catamites” to the bloods at Malvern. But some of Lewis’s more conservative readers found it nearly as provocative that he dared to question the public school power structure — an “oligarchy,” he called it — in general. Still, as much as Lewis hated being forced to play games that bored him and to abandon his studies to dance attendance on some pubescent lout, he could not bring himself to denounce traditional boarding schools entirely.
At Malvern, Lewis encountered an inner ring at its most impenetrable and abusive. On one occasion, an older boy tricked him into “skipping clubs” — that is, into not showing up for the obligatory sporting events that formed the center of student life. For this offense, he was ordered to report to a blood he calls Porridge for a flogging. The messenger who delivered the summons told Lewis, “Who are you? Nobody. Who is Porridge? THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON THERE IS.” It’s not hard to see how this sort of thing might have inspired scenes of Calormene muckety-mucks in litters, barreling through the streets of Tashbaan, knocking the peasantry into the dust. So, too, does the haughty Rabadash feel perfectly free to kick the backside of his father’s groveling vizier whenever the spirit moves him.
None of this is surprising in the Calormenes, who are, of course, the bad guys. Yet what is Corin if not an idealized version of the British public school blood, a natural athlete who blithely shanghais Shasta into a battle he’s utterly unequipped to fight? Like the bookish Lewis, who was compelled to run ineffectually around a cricket field, Shasta soon loses his sword and falls off his horse — sending him into combat is “mere murder,” says the wise old hermit observing the scene — and he barely emerges with his life. While Lewis was at Malvern, he wrote a play based on Norse myth, a tragedy he called Loki Bound, in which the title character lashes out at the injustice of the gods. The gods’ enforcer is Thor, god of thunder, whose “brutal orthodoxy” demands that power be respected simply because it is powerful. “Thor was, in fact, the symbol of the Bloods,” Lewis writes in Surprised by Joy, and so it’s indicative that when Corin grows up to become a famous boxer who pummels a renegade Narnian bear back into line, he earns the nickname Corin Thunder-Fist.
Corin is Thor redeemed, a blood with the thuggishness scrubbed out. Is such a thing really possible, or is the honorable, decent British public school blood a wishful fiction, the sort of fantasy promulgated by books like Tom Brown’s School Days, the “school stories” that Lewis once accused of being far more deceptive than fairy tales? His own boyhood misery would not lead to, say, the insurrection of George Orwell, who, in a famous autobiographical essay, “Such, Such Were the Joys,” described his stint at a preparatory school (a training academy for boys seeking admission to public schools like Eton) as a sojourn in “a world of force and fraud and secrecy.” These schools, Orwell wrote, were infused with “contempt for ‘braininess,’ and worship of games, contempt for foreigners and the working class, an almost neurotic dread of poverty and, above all, the assumption not only that money and privilege are the things that matter, but that it is better to inherit them than to have to work for them…. Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right.”