Would anyone whose read the new anthology FLIGHTS: EXTREME VISIONS OF FANTASY be so kind as to spoil Neil Gaiman’s story “The Problem of Susan” for me?
Thanks.
Well, okay. I read it at the library so I don’t have it in front of me, but this is the gist.
I’m going to put it in spoiler tags even though you said spoilers in the title just because I’m paranoid like that.
Susan is an older woman, a widow, a professor (I think of literature). The opening of the story shows her puttering around her house. A student arrives to interview her for a magazine – she has just retired so it’s a tribute sort of article. The student mentions the Narnia books, but doesn’t seem to know that Susan IS Susan although does note that Susan’s childhood is similar to that of the books. Her siblings were killed in a train accident. Susan talks (and I think this is the most insightful point of the story) about how what people don’t think about is how awful it was to have to identify the smashed up bodies of her brothers and sister. I’m trying to figure out how to set this out effectively in a summary – she resents that the Narnia readers always feel sorry for Susan because she is left out of Narnia, but they should really feel sorry for her because she had to go find her brother’s headless body covered with flies. And that’s the point where she gives up on Aslan/God/Narnia because the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. You get the impression that her life has been pretty average and okay, and that losing Narnia wasn’t a huge tragedy for her.
Throughout the story there’s an image of a dead, headless mouse she found on her door mat, presumably left by a cat. If I was in school, I would relate this to both Edmund’s (I think it was Edmund) headless body and the mice at the stone table.
The story ends with a dream Susan has, involving the White Witch and Aslan and a violent sex scene. I don’t know, this seemed like too much shock value for me, the interesting part was more the quiet, intellectual rejection of her “punishment” of being left out of Narnia.
My biggest complaint is that it’s a very short story, seriously, my summary is not that much shorter than the story itself. I finished reading it wishing Gaimen had spent more time with some of the points he raises.
Thanks a lot! I may look at it in a library or a book store, but I’m definitely saving my money for whenever the CSL Estate authorizes THE CENTAUR’S CAVERN (a legendary Narnia sequel which addresses the Susan situation).
RE “the dream”- damn, Neil, why not just pee on a crucifix?!
(Points to anyone who makes a CSL connection to that last sentence!)
If you’d said stamp on a crucifix I’d’ve been right there with “That Hideous Strength”…
Eh, I have repeatedly thought about addressing the Susan problem myself, tho’ there are doubtless any number of more gifted fanwankers who’ve got there first. Incidentally, Gaiman’s viewpoint can be handily rebutted, I think, from Lewis’s other work… and the loss of eternal joy with God is a much greater tragedy than the loss of siblings in a train crash, given that nothing is more certain than that they were going to die some time.
Re “That Hideous Strength”- well, Mark was asked to stamp on the Crucifix mosaic but it was also suggested that he insult it in other ways, by which I think Lewis meant to imply some rather tasteless form of defilement, much as that which was attributed to the Knights Templar.