"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."
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So begins this story, in which Edmund and Lucy - the two youngest of the Pevensies, the only two still young enough to be allowed to enter Narnia - have had the bad luck to be sent for the summer to stay with Eustace's parents, and put up with Eustace's teasing about their "imaginary" country. Eustace's position at the beginning of this book is something like Edmund's at the beginning of THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE - he's bad company and untrustworthy, though his specific flaws are different from Edmund's.
Naturally, he is the fly in the ointment when Edmund and Lucy are drawn back into the Narnian world - he comes along too. As he's been raised reading all the wrong books and has a sad lack of imagination, he makes quite a fool of himself at first. Fortunately for us, he doesn't take center stage much until he comes into his first great adventure about a third of the way through the book, which more than makes up for things. The book is otherwise largely told from Lucy's point of view.
From the Pevensies' point of view, it's been a year since they were last in Narnia - and in fact, even once they are in the Narnian world, they aren't in Narnia itself this time. Caspian (for whom three years have passed) is fulfilling an oath he took at his coronation to sail for a year and a day eastward to find and if need be rescue the seven lords who were disposed of by his usurping uncle Miraz years ago by being sent to explore the unknown eastern seas beyond the Lone Islands - a Narnian possession that we've previously heard of but never seen. When the Pevensies and Eustace join the ship, the Dawn Treader is nearing the Lone Islands, where the ship's company meets one of a series of adventures, this being their last landfall before striking out into uncharted seas eastward. And one of the ship's company - Reepicheep the Talking Mouse, most valiant of the knights of Narnia - has an even greater ambition than to rescue the seven lords; he hopes to find Aslan's own country, that mysterious place to the east from which Aslan has always come into Narnia.
THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER, in fact, is a long ocean voyage in a world where "here be dragons" on a map may not be an idle warning, and even the Pevensies encounter magics and strange truths about the Narnian world that they had never guessed at. As well as more mundane dangers - great storms, supplies running short between islands - the ship's company encounters many of the legendary dangers attributed to the unknown in our world in the days of chivalry, both in and on the sea itself and on the various islands they discover. Their dragon, when he comes along, turns out to be an unexpected kind of problem. In the tradition of one of Lewis' own favourite fantasy writers, George MacDonald, the dragon is Eustace himself, who finally stumbles into a bit of magic that transforms him into a shape that more accurately reflects the state of his heart than does his human shape, giving him the much-needed shock of his life. The problem, of course, is how to transform him - and how to bring him along with the ship if they can't. For me, "The Adventures of Eustace" are where the book moves into high gear.
This book is where I particularly notice the difference between Lewis' original UK editions of the series - which are now those in print in the US and used for the audio editions - and his later text, which was used for the US editions that I first read, for which Lewis rewrote (and improved) the ending of the episode of "The Dark Island". Apart from that detail, the unabridged recording by Derek Jacobi is very well done. Of the narrators of the three books in which Reepicheep appears, Jacobi is the best at interpreting his character, giving him a strong, high-pitched voice that doesn't in the least sound fragile. Jacobi can also give a good reading of Aslan's deep growl.
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