Dearest Rachel –
Weekends are the ‘slow news days’ of my life; and while we need days like that on a regular basis, it does cut into anything that I might have to tell you about. There is the fact that five out of six of us managed to get together yesterday afternoon at a new place that offers a fusion approach to sushi and other Asian cuisine (and despite the boys and I spotting the group three people by default, five out of six seems the best we can ever get any more). It felt like one of those comfortable situations where we would shoot the breeze together in the evenings at our place once upon a time, but the stories told there belonged to other people; I don’t feel like I have the right to tell them myself. Besides, I’d probably get the details wrong if I tried.
So as to keep the skein going – and you would understand the ‘need’ to keep that sort of thing up, given your habits with Candy Crush and Gardens of Time – I’ve been going through some of the letters I began drafting to you at one point or another and never quite finished, to see if I could clean them up and add to them in order to send them off. The problem is, some of them proved to be time-sensitive; a year or more later, and circumstances have changed, so that what I started to say then is no longer applicable now. But there are a few out there that either aren’t from that long ago or don’t have such time constraints on their subject matter, so I hope you’re bear with me for sending one like that now and again…
***
I’ve no idea what prompted me to look into this – and once again, I wish you were around, so we could actually have a conversation about this, and whether you ever pondered this situation, given your love of the series – but I found myself wondering at some point not too long ago about the fate of Susan Pevensie.
Does the name sound familiar? It should; but for those reading over your shoulder, maybe the full title of Queen Susan the Gentle will ring a bell or two. She was one of the four siblings who sat on the four thrones in Cair Paravel (according to the prophecy that the White Witch Jadis did her utmost to prevent from being fulfilled), but aside from her legendary beauty when they reigned during Narnia’s golden age, she was the least remarkable of the siblings. Her sister Lucy was the one who discovered the country in the wardrobe in the first place, and at first, Susan didn’t believe her younger sister. At the same time, she didn’t turn her back on her and betray the world they eventually found themselves in, the way her younger brother Edmund did. And, of course, it was her older brother that ultimately took the reigns of the country as High King – not that she seemed to begrudge him that. She was the closest of the four to ordinary in the midst of fantasy.
And this very ordinariness is what both saved and doomed her in the end. Because, she eventually chose to focus on the ordinary world, and live an ordinary life, going so far as to all but deny it ever happened (despite the fact that they lived and reigned for a decade and a half during their first foray into the world). As a result, she was considered “no longer a friend of Narnia,” as Peter put it, by the time he and the rest of those that had spent time there got together for the train trip that would ultimately take them to Aslan’s country for good.
But can she be blamed for that? She had already been told by Aslan himself that she (and Peter) would not be allowed to return; what would be the point of seeking out the place when she was well aware that such a pursuit would be pointless and fruitless? It would be best to grow up and get on with her real-world life. In fact, the great lion had instructed them to do as much when he bid them home after seating Caspian on the throne:
“You are too old, children… and you must begin to come close to your own world now.”
To be sure, he also instructed them to seek him by the name He was known in their world, although there’s limited information regarding what their lives in the ‘real’ Britain of Lewis’ chronicles was like. The way the others speak of her, however, don’t offer much hope that she ever figured that much out; although, given that Aslan ‘real-world’ name was never uttered by any of the other characters either, it’s hard to say (although that would probably have been too on-the-nose for such a story. The series is a fairly obvious allegory, but going so far as to speak the Name would have broken the illusion). And, of course, the stories come to a close with the discovery that, as Jill Pole guesses earlier, all of the ‘friends of Narnia’ have been “smashed up by British Railways,” so it’s not as if ‘real life’ is ever going to be something they have to deal with again.
Except for Susan.
She isn’t on that train, preoccupied as she is with her own life in her ‘real’ world. But with unseen and unnamed parents also traveling with the rest of her siblings, her ‘real world’ is suddenly upended. Somewhere in ‘real’ Britain, someone has to contact her – whether by telephone, telegram, or actual policemen arriving at her door with the news – and it falls to her to stand amid the wreckage and identify the remains of her family. And this is probably where my thoughts turned to her, and what she had to go through in facing this awful moment.
Of course, as I thought about it – and tried to reach out to others about their thoughts regarding this unresolved situation – I discovered more than a few things that had been written (and recorded, if I should count YouTube) about the subject. No less an eminence than Neil Gaiman (our generation’s answer to Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, in terms of British-tinged sci-fi and fantasy, but with less ‘humour’) has tackled ‘the problem of Susan,’ as he called it. But his take spends so much time in dreams, despite addressing the fact that years – decades, in fact – have passed since the accident. Susan – or at least, the person assumed by the reader (and her interviewer) to have been Susan – has had more than her share of the ‘real world’ that she craved at the time, and what does she have to show for it? An empty house, a doctorate in literature, and an unspoken thought that the God of either realm, be it Narnia or the one she lives in, has done her wrong. She can barely tell the difference, at least in action and temperament, between the Lion and the Witch, and sees them as colluding in her destruction as well as that of her siblings.
Seeing as to how I find myself identifying with Susan in terms of having to see you off – as well as being far too grounded in real world issues to be the child you always wanted to keep yourself as – I can’t relate to Gaiman’s take on her. Oh, the bitterness and the loneliness I understand, to some extent; and to be fair, I didn’t lose as much with you as she did with her family, so maybe it’s a matter of degrees. Would I be as likely to conclude that God and Satan were on the same team, pitted against me, if I had lost more than just you? I’d like to think otherwise, but it’s all hypothetical at this point. It does seem that Gaiman’s Susan never found our world’s Aslan (of course, if Gaiman hasn’t been looking for Him, either, how could he write otherwise?), and as such, lacks the hope I have to see you, and the hope she should have had to see them one day. After all…
“Once a King or Queen of Narnia, always a King or Queen of Narnia”
I like to think that Lewis applied the concept of eternal security to his books for children; this assurance is, after all, what brought the others back who had, like Susan, been told they would not be able to return to their beloved country again. The ‘real world’ serves only as a boarding school before the eternal holidays begin; Susan has, at the end of the books, a few more lessons left to learn before she can join them… as, I presume, do I.
To such end, I hope you’ll continue to keep an eye on me in the meantime, honey, and wish me luck. I’m pretty sure I’m going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 