The Problem of Susan

My latest book is out! Nylons, Lipstick, and Narnia: Rewriting Susan Pevensie in Fanfiction is available now from Luna Press Publishing.

I must be honest: this book was written because I am a world-champion grudge-holder. I was a big fan of The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis when I was little. Then came The Last Battle, the final book in the series, and it got chucked across a room. The kids all died in a train crash, yay! Except for Susan, because doubt and lipstick made her unfit for heaven, the harlot. That’s what you get for liking nylons and having the temerity to go to parties instead of sitting round whining about how much better you had it running for your life from wolves and witches. Susan aside, I suppose the rest of the kids had to die. They were, all of them, getting too old for Narnia and who wants to survive their teenage years, really? Better death by British Rail. Susan will just have to bury her entire family on her own. It’ll be a good lesson for her. Character-building.

(If you hear a slam now, that’s the sound of the book hitting the wall, echoing through decades.)

So, yes. I hated the book as a kid and I hate it now. Happily, I’m not the only one who does! From the vast amounts of Susan-centric fanfic out there, it’s plain that there are a lot of Narnia fans who also can’t stand The Last Battle. Good. That book deserves to be hated, and there’s a great deal of pleasure in reading through fanfiction archives and realising that there are a whole bunch of people hating together. Hatred gets things done. So does disgust. So does disappointment.

Together, those things have combined to give Susan, in hundreds of different stories, a better end than she gets in canon. There are also a number of stories, to be fair, where the poor girl has it even worse. What can I say: fanfiction is a haven for drama. (Don’t look at me like that. You read it too.) But whether the stories give her a happy ending or a tragic one, they are all, implicitly, interrogating The Last Battle in particular, and the rest of the Narnian canon in general, and the ways in which that interrogation works – the shared themes, the multiple points of attack – are just plain interesting. They say things not only about how we see Susan, but how we see ourselves.

And that’s worth investigating.

I have a new book coming out! Nylons, Lipstick, and Narnia: Rewriting Susan Pevensie in Fanfiction is due out on the 18th of August, and pre-orders are open now at Luna Press Publishing.

Like many fantasy fans, I read The Chronicles of Narnia as a child. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is actually the first book I remember reading. I got it as a Christmas present and was utterly enthralled. As the years went on I read the rest of the books in the series, and they were all fine… and then I got to The Last Battle, which remains to this day the only book I’ve ever thrown across a room in disgust.

The problem was Susan: exiled from Narnia for her disbelief and her liking for nylons, lipstick, and invitations, she was the only one of her entire family to survive the horrendous train crash that sent them all to Aslan’s country. Heaven, supposedly, and they were all so happy to be there, to die in this horrendous way, and I looked at that book – I can’t have been much older than twelve, the age that Susan was went she first went to Narnia – and was deeply, irrevocably, revolted by it.

I have held a grudge about that stupid book for decades. Then I started reading fanfiction, and I came across Narnian fanfiction, and it didn’t take very long after filtering the characters for Susan to discover that there were a lot of other people as repulsed by that storyline as I was. I started bookmarking, and then I started writing about it: how fanfiction authors were re-imagining Susan to give her a better life away from Narnia… and away from Aslan.

Good for them. I like their stories better. And I hope, if you read this, that you do to.