And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. So, I just lay flat down on my back and let him do it. I was rather afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. This is how Eustace described what happened next:

By now, Eustace is desperate for help, so he accepts the lion’s offer to help undress him. He repeats the exercise twice more, but, each time, with the same result. With difficulty Eustace manages to shed a layer of his dragon skin, but then finds another layer beneath. In Chapter 8, Eustace tells Edmund how Aslan restored him by taking him to a large well in the mountains and telling him to undress. Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself. He had turned into a dragon while he was asleep. The story of how Eustace becomes a dragon but then is restored and changed for the better after an encounter with Aslan is, for me, the best picture anywhere outside of the Bible of repentance and conversion. There is a lot in the book for the reader to enjoy and mull over: One of the party, the talking mouse, Reepicheep, is also longing for something more – for “Aslan’s own country”. Together they sail east looking for seven good lords who had been loyal to Caspian’s father but who were driven away by the wicked King Miraz. The book opens with the memorable line “ There was boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” The book describes the adventures of two of the children we met earlier in the series, Lucy and Edmund, who, along with their initially odious cousin Eustace, are sucked from our world into Narnia to join King Caspian aboard his ship, the Dawn Treader at the start of a great adventure There are penetrating spiritual insights too. And since the story is something of an odyssey as the group travel East aboard ship, the different settings they encounter provide opportunities for C S Lewis to put his prodigious imaginative talents to good use.

It’s a great story and important component of the Chronicles of Narnia.

The voyage of the dawn treader book