That’s not what he says in TGD. His spirit-guide explicitly says that what he is seeing is not to be taken literally as a view of the afterlife - also, that for those who quit the Grey Town, it will have been Purgatory to them, but for those who remain, it will have been Hell all along; and, on the gripping hand, the choices he seems to see the Ghosts making before his eyes may very well be only echoes of the choices they made in life.
(Now in Inferno, souls in Hell can indeed come to repentance and redemption, even Mussolini, but that’s another story.)
I like my own fanfic on what happened to Susan, but then I would, wouldn’t I?
Not only that, but Susan personally saw Aslan sacrificed and then his return to life. She knows, about as well as anyone could know, the reality of Aslan and Narnia. Metaphorically, she knows that Christianity is true–she has met Christ–and she just refuses it. And that’s something that some people will do, and that they have to be allowed to do, if our choices are to have any meaning at all. You have to be able to say no to God if that’s what you want to do.
Anyway, all that still doesn’t mean that she’s doomed, because she’s just a silly, shallow young woman at the end of the series. She has chosen the world over heaven–for the moment–but she has time and opportunity to remember what she knows.
I couldn’t agree more with this post. Aravis is an example of a female character who matures and has a sexual relationship and she is considered a good character. Hell, Aravis actually has an interracial sexual relationship and it’s portrayed as a positive relationship. I too am agnostic, and the last shreds of Christianity I have left should probably be credited to Lewis.
My local Christian book store had a whole set of books written about Susan’s life after Narnia. I believe she becomes another professor, so that the cycle can continue. There has to be someone left in our world to tell people about Narnia.
I even wonder if, since time does not directly correspond, if one couldn’t travel to Narnia at a point before it was unmade.
But is Susan truly shallow? She didn’t strike me as shallow throughout the previous books–she was loving and giving, but also smart and courageous with her bow. IMO, Lewis betrayed her character by choosing her. I don’t really see why one “had” to be left behind at all. And why not Peter? Edmund and Lucy I can understand, but why not Peter?
Susan struck me as a normal young woman. I think Lewis struggled with some sexual issues (alluded to in his bio). Perhaps he was afraid or intimidated by adult women (at least prior to his marriage). Just a thought.
I would think not. Although time doesn’t flow at a constantly comparable rate in our world and Narnia, it does always flow forward – there are no instances in the books of an Earth person re-entering Narnia at a later point on his or her own timeline, but earlier in Narnian history than his or her previous visit(s).
What I find fascinating about Susan is that, what she wants after Narnia, she already had. She has literally had the experience of being the most desired and sought-after woman in the world. Every prince hopes to marry her, and every pauper dreams of her. No invitation or lipstick in this world can even come close to what she’s really, actually had. And yet, she still rejects that life she led, to pursue a pitiful echo of it instead.
> My local Christian book store had a whole set of books written about Susan’s
> life after Narnia.
How could such a series of books get published? I don’t think that Lewis’s estate is allowing such a thing. Could you tell me the name of this series?
eleanorigby writes:
> Perhaps he was afraid or intimidated by adult women (at least prior to his
> marriage).
Really? There are a number of people who think that he had a long-lasting affair with Janie Moore, who was 26 years older than him. The claim is that the affair lasted from the time he was 19 till he was about 30. So either he was intimidated by older women or he was attracted to them. This really sounds like making up whatever story that you can fit into his biography as long as it makes him look sexually weird. Look, maybe we just don’t know very much about his personal life, but there’s no reason to make up stories just because it makes us feel good.
Actually, there’s even more to the comparison of Susan to Lewis himself. Lewis was baptized in the Church of Ireland, but 1) fell away from it 2) when an adolescent.
I find this to be exceptionally perceptive, even perhaps the core explanation for why Susan lapsed. Yes, she had known that reality–it had been a tangible thing to her, not just some pipe dream. Had it been just a fantasy, perhaps that life would not have had such a hold on her. But the visceral reality of being that desired queen was more than she could ignore, something she simply had to carry forward into her life in this world. I guess it’s sort of like, you can’t be an alcoholic if you’ve never had a drink. Susan had drunk deeply of her particular addiction. Its hold on her imagination was too great for her not to try to recapture it, even if it was just some pale shadowland version of her former life.
And I too really doubt the old man damned her to Hell. She had ample opportunity to come back to Aslan; I’m sure she eventually took that opportunity.
If I could remember it or find it online. I’m starting to doubt my memory. I could have sworn there were books about each of the children, entitled “Susan and the …” or “Peter and the…”
But, now that I think about it, it really doesn’t make sense. Maybe it was a completely different work, and I just noticed a few that happened to have the same name as the Pevensies. And then I combined that memory with the book already mentioned earlier.
Or maybe I went into a magical world where things are not quite the same as ours.
If there were copyright restrictions against doing a Susan Pevensie novel, surely they would have also applied to Neil Gaiman’s “The Trouble With Susan”? And that definitely exists.
I can’t imagine the Lewis estate approves of it either.
Neil Gaiman’s story didn’t claim to be a continuation of the series, just a humorous comment on it. The estate apparently decided that there wasn’t really a copyright infringement there that was worth suing over. Incidentally, I was at a conference about Lewis (and the other Inklings) where Gaiman was the author guest of honor. Gaiman read that story to us in his talk. We took it in good humor. I presume the estate thought the same. Also, Gaiman has always made it clear that he was very much influenced as a child by Lewis, Tolkien (Lewis’s friend), and Chesterton (a major influence on Lewis). Lewis fans aren’t really that bothered by Gaiman occasionally making a joke about the Narnia series.
I think I know what series you’re talking about, BigT. The estate decided to authorize a series of books for young children that were basically short novels about events in Narnia. Each book was about some happening in Narnia that fit into the Narnia stories without changing the overall story. Each was just a little incident in the history of Narnia and not a major event in the series.
Several people have come to the Lewis estate over the past fifty years with a novel about what happened to Susan after the time of The Last Battle. Each person has been denied permission to have those novels published, although I’ve heard claims that at least one of those novels were actually pretty good. A lot of Lewis fans, including me, were unhappy when they heard that the estate had decided to have that series of short children’s novels about incidents in Narnia published. The estate has allowed a mediocre series of novels set in Narnia to be published, but they won’t allow a good continuation to be published.
They are right, here, and you are wrong. Someone can do a “here is another story about Narnia” without altering the originals. However, you cannot have a continuation without trying to assert it as a “real” part of the ongoing story - something which would be disprespectful and probably incorrect. Leave the stories alone. They ended where they did, for a their own reasons.
In a somewhat similar note, we should probably note that we don’t have Susan’s side of the story. She may have reasons we don’t know for what she does, and we are getting other’s perceptions about her. These are often more perceptive than the ones we have about ourselves, but they are usually biased and often more insiduously biased. Lewis used this very idea in several other works.
I think that they do alter the originals in a sense. They are adding a bunch of mediocre stories to the series, and that will only make people think that the series is mediocre as a whole. On the other hand, they could have added a disclaimer to the continuation novel that it is merely one person’s idea about the series and not a part of the canon.
I think that they do alter the originals in a sense. They are adding a bunch of mediocre stories to the series, and that will only make people think that the series is mediocre as a whole. On the other hand, they could have added a disclaimer to the continuation novel that it is merely one person’s idea about the series and not a part of the canon. (Actually, I wasn’t claiming that it’s a good idea to have a continuation novel published. I was merely saying that it’s certainly no worse than having that mediocre children’s series of Narnia stories published that they did allow.)
Kathryn Lindskoog, who had some interesting theories regarding the supposed forgery of CSL fragments, told of reading a Carmelite’s nun’s sequel which deals with Susan- The Centaur’s Cavern, and regrets that the estate keeps it from publication.
In my world, btw, Susan inherits the Kirke estate, finds Professor Kirke’s correspondence with Dr. Elwin Ransom of St. Anne’s College & eventually joins his circle, perhaps even becomes involved in the conflict with N.I.C.E.
