Worlds Beyond: How The Chronicles of Narnia Introduced Us to Other Authors We Love tor.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tor.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
C.S. Lewis failed. He failed to clearly say what he was trying to say. He failed his readers. He failed Susan.
When I read
The Last Battle as a kid, and got to the moment when Susan was “no longer a friend of Narnia” I was shocked. Well, I thought, there are still some pages left to go. I’m sure she’ll be back before the end. But she wasn’t. And all of her siblings and friends, her cousin, even her parents, were romping along through New Narnia without ever mentioning her again.
It felt strange, and dismissive, and horrible. Much of the end of the book is about catching up with old friends, with cameos and reunions with beloved companions from previous books, even those who were dead Reepicheep and Fledge and Puddleglum and Caspian and yet somehow Susan never gets a moment. We don’t even peek in on her back on Earth, and no one thinks to ask, “Is Sue alright?”
The Problem(s) of Susan tor.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tor.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Seven months before
The Last Battle was published, C.S. Lewis had a short story appear in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was called “The Shoddy Lands,” and believe it or not it and another short story are key pieces in understanding what exactly is happening with poor Susan Pevensie in
The Last Battle. Our next article in the C.S. Lewis Reread is going to be about “the problem of Susan” so first, we need to take a little detour and explore these two stories.
In 1953, Lewis received a letter from a man named William Anthony Parker White. He was an author who wrote under the pen name Anthony Boucher, and he was also the editor of
A Short Detour: C S Lewis The Shoddy Lands and Ministering Angels tor.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tor.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.