"I am Prince Caspian..."

So, I watched the Disney Prince Caspian movie last night. I had intended to catch it at the cinema, but didn't get around to it in time. I rarely bother to rent DVDs these days, but the planets aligned for a DVD night when I remembered this was a movie I wanted to watch.

Now, I've read the entire Chronicles of Narnia at least twice (okay, not The Last Battle, which I barely managed to get through once - for some reason Lewis decided that he was sick of couching allegories in adventure stories and decided to see if anyone would notice if he just wrote an allegory, and the answer was: yes). Some of the books, like The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair, I've read many times.

Prince Caspian, while never one of my favourite books in the series, is something that I have read on more than one occasion. I have easily read it as often as The Magician's Nephew and The Horse and His Boy - both of which are books I can remember quite clearly. But it turns out I can't remember Prince Caspian at all.

I sat down to watch this film, and suddenly thought: "Wait a minute, who's in this story apart from Caspian and the Pevensies? What do they do?" and at no point did it start coming back to me.

I could remember that the book is set several hundred years after Wardrobe, that the Stone Table is now under a mountain, and that, at the end of it, Peter and Susan are told they're too old to come back to Narnia. That was it. I kid you not. Even as the film was progressing I kept thinking, "I don't remember this at all!" Granted, there were probably some parts that were added to the story so I wouldn't remember them, but I spent most of the film being genuinely surprised by the plot. Even though some of the character names were familiar, I realised it was because they were characters who cross over with Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

It absolutely astounds me that I can have such a poor recollection of a book I've read multiple times. I would have thought I'd remember it at least as well as The Horse and His Boy, but nope. I wonder why? It's not like it's a particularly boring book... but then, what would I know? I can't remember the darn thing.