Welcome to this episode of the Oxford Fantasy podcast, I'm Dr Caroline Batten, and I am here today with fantasy author Katherine Langrish to talk about her new book, From Spare Oom to War Drobe: Travels in Narnia with My Nine-Year-Old Self. Katherine, welcome. It's so wonderful to have you. Thank you so much for inviting me. So this is a really sort of thoughtful and generous book about the Narnia Chronicles.
And I suppose just to sort of start out, when you set out to write this book, what did you envision it doing? What's the job of the book? How would you describe it to readers? I think the genesis of the book was my memories coming back to me of how much I adored these books when I was a child and wondering whether I would feel the same way about them if I read them as an adult after at least 20 years.
I had read them to my own children when they were 10 or 11, but now there have been a couple of decades passed since then. And I have a lot of children's books. I write children's books, I own, still, most of the children's books that I loved as a child. And some of them are on the bookshelves are behind me and I often reread them. But these Narnia books I had not actually gone back to for a couple of decades.
And I thought, well, why am I not tempted to go back to them, and what would I think about them if I read them now? So over a period of about 18 months, I was rereading them, making notes and memories of my childhood self's opinions and passion and just genuine adoration of these books came flooding back so clearly that I realised the book had to be a conversation, if you like, between me and the little girl I used to be. And so that's really where the book comes from.
Some of it's... a lot of it is, as an adult, I can see a lot of interesting stuff about where Lewis drew his inspirations from, and the fact that he was a professor of Renaissance and mediaeval literature is very, very apparent, as you know, as an adult who studied mediaeval and Renaissance literature. And that's all fascinating. I think it gets missed because a lot of people think Narnia equals Christian symbolism. And that's there, of course. But there's so much else.
And philosophy, Plato, Platonism, all sorts of things, other children's books, Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, fairytales. It goes on and on and on. A lot of that I wouldn't have spotted or cared about when I was nine years old. and some of the things that I loved about the books still work for me, they really do. And then one or two things I lift an eyebrow at now, but I know that my nine year old would have gone, don't be so silly.
This is perfectly right. This is the way. Of course, of course Jill and Eustace ought to beat up the bullies at the end of The Silver Chair because they were horrible! And now I think, mm, not so sure about that. So that was where it was coming from. It's a conversation between me and the child who read those books a long time ago,
in the 1960s. Mm hmm. So what were the moments that sort of jumped out to you when you were rereading as things that still moved you, that were still powerful and important? And why those particular moments? Well, I mean, almost everything that seriously moved me as a child still, I think everything still does. Lewis is a remarkable writer. There's no question about it.
So, of course, Aslan's death in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which I was not expecting, I didn't clock at all that Aslan had anything to do with Jesus. I still didn't clock that even after he'd come back to life, even though I knew the story perfectly well of of Jesus's passion, it didn't occur to me that they were the same, that there was anything similar about them. And in fact, in some ways you can see that as an adult, but as a child, it's not the same.
A lot of people talk about the Narnia stories as allegories, and they really aren't. There isn't really that one to one correspondence, and I don't think Lewis was doing it for that reason either. He wrote in one of his essays that as a child, he found it difficult to feel as one was told or not to feel about the death of Jesus.
And he'd already had these pictures in his head, as he said, of a wonderful lion We've been dreaming of lions, he said, and of a faun walking through a snowy wood, carrying an umbrella with parcels under his arm. And it's sort of... the things came together for him.
And he realised that he could write a fairy tale, which I think might, I think possibly the idea was it might help children to understand the emotions that adults might feel about reading the Gospels, but I don't think ever saw it necessarily as as a sort of a match. You know, this is Jesus. I just don't see it that way. I mean, I think you did – he contradicts himself quite a lot in his letters. You know, sometimes he said one thing, sometimes he said the other.
And I think you can forgive him for that because people were pressing him. And you have this reputation as a Christian apologist now. But I think that the Aslan moment is actually quite a pivotal one in the sort of series as a whole because it's incredibly emotionally powerful. I remember reading it as a kid and being deeply moved by it, and I didn't realise that it had anything to do with Jesus either. And actually, when I when I found out how similar – we won't use the word allegory.
But how similar and parallel the stories run. I was miffed. I felt a bit cheated. It was like someone had been trying to sneak me broccoli into what I thought was a delicious dessert. In the book, also, you say that Lewis felt sort of similarly disparagingly about that kind of allegory, that, you know, that it takes the meaning out of things. And that's very much that's very much how I felt when I encountered it.
But he seems to perhaps be trying to do something different or better that I didn't quite access as an obnoxious 10 year old who felt poorly about Christian allegory. I felt the same way when I got to the end of The Last Battle, where it becomes very explicit. There's this moment where He gets a capital letter, and it's, 'He did not look to them very much like a lion anymore.' It's not – what? What? Where's Aslan, I want Aslan back!
So children, I think, probably fare better in Narnia if these parallels don't really occur to them, or are left by adults for the children to find out for themselves. If your parents suddenly start telling you this, but I think it comes necessarily for everybody, but it can spoil the story. Although I know I have one friend who told me that – she was probably cleverer than I was – she picked up on the parallels between the Crucifixion and Resurrection and the Aslan story.
when she first read it, she said, aged about 10. And she said it was like a door opening for her because she realised that books could have more than one meaning. And I thought that's a very, very impressive thing to realise at that age. I certainly didn't. But I mean, there are so many other very, very moving moments. One of the ones that still leaves me with a lump in my throat is when Reepicheep goes over the wave at the end of the world in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
And then it says, 'And nobody can say from this day to that, nobody can ever say that they've seen him again. But we have to believe that he he landed in Aslan's country, which was his sole desire.' And that's a very emotional moment, because you can see that this is a little animal who's got such great courage and purity of heart. And he's Narnia's Galahad. And he's going to find the divine. And he's so brave that he's joyful about it.
And it might be the end of him, but. It's remarkable, I think it's remarkable, I think that book teaches more than any church service I have ever been to about the nature of holiness and what it might actually feel like to meet or to encounter something holy without being remotely preachy about it. I think it works very, very well. Another wonderful moment is when Aslan brings the dead King Caspian back to life at the end of The Silver Chair.
Oh, in the moment when Rilian, Prince Rilian is reunited with his father, whom he hasn't seen in, what, 10 years. And his father's on his deathbed. Even as a child, I was like, oh, no, they only just got to meet and now he's dead. And then, of course, Aslan sort of blows away the scene in Narnia and then the children and the dead Caspian are back on Aslan's Holy Mountain.
And then there's this. I suppose quite difficult moment, where Eustace is asked by Aslan to pluck an enormous thorn from a thicket, and it's a foot-long thorn, and drive it into his paw, and Eustace doesn't want to, But he does it, and this great drop of blood splashes down. And I mean, you could say it's not suitable for a children's book. I, I didn't mind it. It made sense to me. It was better than waving a magic wand and saying, ding dong, you're better, I'm bringing you back to life.
It sort of went to show the cost and the pain of doing something so amazing, if it were to be possible. So I think she had an enormous grasp of emotional truth. I think he shows you the cost of things. And children are often aware of that cost, right? Children are very much aware of sort of the darkness in the world, even if they don't sort of grasp necessarily the way that darkness always manifests.
But when you're a child, you know, there are fairies at the bottom of the garden and there's also a monster under the bed. Yes. Children are aware of death, of pain, they are aware of the cost of things, they're aware of danger in the world and the best children's book authors speak to that directly. You're right, though. I mean, again, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, there's that moment where they come to the Dark Island, which you never see.
And Pauline Baynes's illustration shows this wonderful crosshatch darkness the ship is sailing into with the stern lantern just showing. And it's absolutely terrifying, all the more so because it turns out you never actually reach land. We never see an island. It's just a darkness. We can believe that perhaps there's an island there, But I think even as a child, I realised that it wasn't a real place because they pick up this mad swimmer who's, I mean,
here all the resonances are from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The swimmer is crazy because he's been left in this terrible place, you can't believe that he's ever going to be rescued or able to get out of it, which is the predicament, really, the emotional and mental predicament of the Ancient Mariner. And he says this is the island where dreams come true. Not daydreams, Dreams.
And then we get these surreal images conjured up by the sailors who are suddenly thinking of the most terrifying and horrible nightmares. Can you hear the sound like a huge pair of scissors opening and shutting? The gongs are beginning, I knew they would. And it gives me a shiver even now. And all children, I'm sure, know what it's like to have terrible dreams. I certainly did. And we know the power of those dreadful dreams. And you don't have to, at that point in your life, be thinking.
But this is also a metaphor for deep depression or mental illness. You just know that this is a terrifying mental place to be and thank heavens when they get out of it. And of course, the bird which brings the light is an albatross, which again, straight from the Ancient Mariner. You don't have to recognise any of these things. You don't have to know where they come from for them to work. They work. But it's such a rich tapestry which he weaves. Really amazing.
Because there are Ancient Mariner references, sort of very explicitly, but also this is The Odyssey, right? This is the sirens and the lotus eaters. And it's also very mediaeval in its resonances with so much of this is the bit where where Reepicheep sails off and say no one knows for sure where he went. That's profoundly mediaeval. Right. That shows up in so much mediaeval Christian poetry.
There's actually a bit in an old English poem called Maxims that says that God alone knows what happens after death. And we will never be able to access that. It will never be available. Yeah. And the end of Beowulf where the ship goes off and no man knows Who unloaded that cargo. Yeah, so could you tell us a little bit more about the sort of influences you discovered in Lewis on your reread?
You mentioned Plato as well? Yes. Well, I mean, Plato was definitely one of Lewis's touchstones, wasn't he? He crops up an awful lot. And there's that tag that the professor kept saying, oh, it's Plato, it's all in Plato, what do they teach them in these schools? Actually, Lewis never has a word, he didn't like schools and he never says anything good about schools. Schools are terrible. There's nothing they can do right. To go from the childish to the non-childish.
There was a connective imagery all the way through Lewis's work, particularly obvious in the Narnia stories. But quite apparent in everything else he wrote, including literary criticism, Christian apologetics – all vast rambling housers or labyrinthine palaces where you come across finally a particular room. It might be a room containing a secret. The secret may be horrifying. The secret may be wonderful. And that came up a lot.
Came up a lot. And then I thought to myself, of course, you've got fairy tales like The Sleeping Beauty, where the Sleeping Beauty climbs a winding stair to a turret room which she didn't know existed, and there's the fairy spinning and she pricks her finger on the spindle.
Now, George McDonald, who was one of Lewis's models and one of his great loves, the books of George MacDonald, as I'm sure everybody listening to this knows, showed him – set his feet on the way, I think, to finally becoming a Christian writer or accepting Christianity early, early on. And of course, in The Princess and the Goblin, you have the little princess Irene, who, once again, can't go playing outside because it's a rainy day.
And she goes exploring in her palace, in the castle in which she lives, leaving her nurse behind. She explores upstairs through rambling, up into rambling garrets and attics and past all sorts of doorways where it was horrific – She wondered what could be behind all those shut doors. Lucy thinks that when she penetrates the magician's house in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, behind any of the doors on the passage might be the magician, invisible or even dead.
What might be there? There's this sort of exploration and terror. And Irene, of course, gets up into be the topmost terrace and finds a room in which her great, great, great, great, ever so many greats, grandmother is sitting spinning, where you have, of course, George MacDonald is is channelling the Sleeping Beauty. And this grandmother is a very serene, semi divine presence. She's ageless. She can manifest as as a young woman, a beautiful queen, an old grandmother. And she has these powers.
And one of the things she tells Irene is that when she returns downstairs, people will tell her that she, the grandmother, doesn't exist. But Irene must hold to her knowledge that she does. And of course, Irene runs back downstairs and tells the nurse and the nurse is angry and says, Princess, lots of princesses make up stories.
But I never heard of one that insisted that they were true. And so Irene gets into trouble for telling fibs in the same way that Lucy gets into trouble with her brothers and sisters because she said she's been to Narnia, she's seen a faun and she's been there for ages. And they say, you've just come out of the wardrobe, you been gone a few minutes and of course you've made it up. So that was a very close parallel.
And you can find more things like that running through the book, The Wood Between the Worlds in The Magician's Nephew. It's very reminiscent to me of a bit in Alice, Through the Looking Glass, Alice comes across a wood where things have no names and she enters this wood and immediately she can't remember who she is.
She doesn't know the name of anything, and she just wanders. It's not a terrifying place, but she sort of wanders through it having lost all her memories and all her knowledge of anything really, and comes across a little fawn and she doesn't know it's a fawn, and she can't remember the name of it, and the fawn, a talking animal, notably, doesn't know she's a human child.
And they walk through the woods together very happily until they come to the outside and then the fawn remembers, oh, you're a human child and I'm in danger, and springs away, and there's this kind of combination of Edenic innocence, but also there's a sort of terror to it, too, because what does it mean to have forgotten who you are and what your own name is, and of course, the same The same soporific danger can be found in the Wood between the Worlds.
It's a place where you could easily just drift off and never recover yourself. So I don't necessarily think that Lewis was deliberately channelling that, but he would have read those books. And so I think these things sometimes spring up from somewhere deep inside you. So that's on the children's side. And then on the sort of grown-up Lewis side and the grown-up me side, all sorts of things.
So at the end of, at the end of The Last Battle was a great deal of John Bunyan, of The Pilgrim's Progress. There's a very strong resemblance. It was in the last few pages, where they're going further up and further in, and you could almost map it onto Christian arriving in heaven, having crossed the river at the end of half of The Pilgrim's Progress. It's very,
very similar about their friends coming out to meet them and and sort of travelling very fast upwards to the Holy Land. And enormous amounts of
Milton. So Paradise Lost figures very, very strongly and obviously something in The Magician's Nephew where the description of the steep hill crowned with a green wall and a gate and an orchard in which the Tree of Life grows, to which Digory and Polly have to fly on Fledge the flying horse to bring back the apple, which will restore, will protect Narnia from the evil Digory's brought in by awakening the evil Queen Jadis in the city of Charn.
It's modeled very, very clearly on the description of Eden in Paradise Lost when Satan arrives and the description is very, very similar. And Satan, like the witch, you remember, there's a quatrain which is written on the gates that the children read and it says come in by the gold gates or not at all, take of my fruit for others... Anyway, basically, you've got to take take the fruit for other people, not for yourself, and you mustn't climb the wall.
You've got to come in through the gates, the proper way. And, of course, the witch has climbed the wall and stolen an apple for herself, which means that she's now effectively immortal, but she's also, it's not doing her any good. She looks worse than she's ever done before. And that's what Satan does in Paradise Lost. He doesn't come in through the gates, he leaps the wall in one bound and then settles in the Tree of Knowledge of Good and E vil in the shape of the black cormorant.
So there's a lot going on there. There's also a bird in the tree above Digory where he sees plucking the apple from the Tree of Life. And it's not, in this case an evil bird, but it's a bird that's a guardian that's sort of keeping an eye on him. And he realises that he better not be tempted to take that second apple. It really is very fascinating because there's so much more that I could say and did say in the book, but I'm sure that I could continue to find further references.
It's almost endless. He was so well read. So many of these connexions also that you've made in the book were not ones that I'd ever noticed and I sort of read it and thought, oh, of course, of course, this is Paradise Lost. How could it be anything else? But reinterpreted through Lewis's particular lens. He's sort of weaving together all of these literary references to sort of build something.
where the whole is more than the sum of its parts, which leads to his sort of famously kind of patchwork secondary world, right, that draws on all of these different sources. So how would you describe Lewis's secondary world? In the book you say that to compare it with a closed system like Middle-earth is to miss the point. So what is the point? How is his secondary world working? Well, I think it works because... I think it works for two reasons.
One is because a lot of these things are things that children have already come across, or at least children of my generation had already come across, most of us have been exposed to the Greek myths, for example, in some rewritten form. Most of us have probably been given fairy tales, Hans Andersen's fairy tales, for example, in which we would have met the Snow Queen. And so when we meet the White Witch, she's obviously a horse from the same stable.
I don't think that I would have read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and thought, oh, the White Witch is like the Snow Queen. I would not have made that connexion, but I would have recognised her as a type that I met before, I think, without necessarily making that connexion. I think I write in the book that children tend to see differences where adults see the similarities. And I think that's just a difference in the way children read, and the way adults read.
We tend to be sort of looking for, oh, where did you get this from? This is what I was doing when I was reading the books for the second time. Oh, look, I can see how similar that is to this. Whereas the child just, this is a story and it's a different story from other stories. I'm going to read the story. But nevertheless, we would have kept stumbling upon things that seemed familiar.
And children don't really mind if you jumble things up. I personally didn't mind that there was Father Christmas in the book. It was Christmas. Christmas is going to happen and they hadn't had Christmas in Narnia for a hundred years. And what better way to have it than with Father Christmas? He certainly couldn't have it with the baby Jesus. So that was one get out.
And I think when you've come up with such a wonderful phrase as 'always winter and never Christmas', it's a very, very difficult thing to get rid of. He would have wanted to go with that. I think it's also, it's just done with a lot of love. He liked all these things. Still, he still read fairy tales, he said when he was 10 years old, he pretended, he would read fairy tales, effectively covering the book with brown paper.
He didn't put it like that, but he wouldn't want other boys to know he was reading fairy tales, but now he was a man. He read them perfectly happily and talked about, you know, just because I like beer doesn't mean I don't like honey. So you can like all these things. And so we still like them and he just threw them all into Narnia and stirred it up, and what you get is Narnia and it's a child's paradise.
It's not really meant to be a serious secondary creation, he wasn't really, I don't even think he was that interested in the map, I would be very interested to know if Lewis ever drew a map of Narnia himself or whether that was all left to Pauline Baynes, I have no clue. But I'm pretty sure that in parts of The Last Battle, he lost track of where things were in relation to other things. So in that sense, I don't think he was setting out to make this a consistent world and it's not.
But it still felt so real to me that I could almost not bear to think that it wasn't real. I wanted it to be real so much and so badly and so many children of my age felt that way and perhaps some still do. Brian Sibley writes in his wonderful Forward to my book that he actually tried sitting in his parents' wardrobe, waited, waited till they had gone out, and then squashed himself in his parents' wardrobe and sat there hoping that the backboard would dissolve and he'd find himself in Narnia.
I never tried that, but I can quite easily imagine doing it. Narnia is permeable. We know that from the stories. Children from our world can get there. And if we can get there, I don't really see why everything else shouldn't be able to get there as well. So it works to me. It worked then and it still works for me in that sense. I think you just got to give up the idea of that it's a place like Earthsea or Middle-earth.
It's not such a place. It's more of a fairy, it's almost a fairy land, but not quite. Yeah, I like very much this point about Narnia being permeable to us, to our world, not only to children who might come through, but also maybe to ideas, to images, to figures like Father Christmas, that could kind of slip between the boundaries of worlds. Yes. Yes. That is, again, a very thoughtful and generous reading of Narnia. Thank you. Well, I felt generous towards it.
I mean, I don't know. There are points at which I sort of part company with the opinions I held as a child. I don't think he's fair to his brown-skinned people. To effectively cast an entire race of people as a best deluded and at worst worshippers of a fearsome demon, I'm very uncomfortable with that. Because he's very good on the children, on girls and on women.
I think. Some disagree. But when I was a little girl, I was just so happy to come across such strong female characters as Lucy and Aravis and Jill and Polly, who were all quite different, but better characterised than any of the boys, apart from Eustace. They're very strong people and you can tell that Lewis likes them.
You write better about girls than he does about boys. I think. With the exception of Eustace and Digory, who I think are both him, Digory is very obviously him as the little boy who lost his mother and desperately, desperately wants to to save her. But Eustace is also, I think Lewis and I would never have – I didn't I didn't spot this until very recently, I think. He didn't enjoy school, he was very bright and very smart.
And Eustace is actually one of the brightest, the smartest and most intellectual of boys. He does ask questions about himself and his predicaments. And then, of course, Lewis gives Eustace this wonderful journey where he's, in fact, converted into a very different sort of person through the grace of Aslan.
So, yeah, I think those two boys have got a lot of Lewis in them, whereas I think that Peter and Edmund are basically stock heroes, stock hero boys from fairly dull – you know, they're all called Frank or Jack or, you know, that sort of boy. I think you just know they're just going to be decent chaps. Edmund, of course – no, I should take that back about Edmund because of course he does start off, again, a very bad tempered, grumpy, difficult little boy.
But as soon as he's become, as soon as he's got his conversion, if you like, then he does become a bit more boring. It's definitely – Eustace is more interesting. So perhaps the boys are most interesting when they're being difficult, but the girls are interesting all the way through, including Susan, I think.
I think also Lewis is good at occasionally reminding us that children don't behave badly because they're bad, to the core; children behave badly when something is wrong, when they're afraid of something, when they've gone to a horrid school and everything's started to go wrong for them after that. Right. He sort of slides in these little reminders. But I think we probably need to circle back to the Calormen and to the sort of infamous problem of Susan.
You say in the books, that there are a lot of unexamined judgements in Lewis. And you note throughout your work the really very blatant racism in the books, as blatant honestly as the racism in Tolkien, especially when we hear about the Men of the South. Right. These sort of caricatures of people of colour that are really very offensive, genuinely racist.
And then there's the whole... Susan doesn't go to heaven because she likes lipstick and nylons, which, as you say, is very silly, is profoundly sort of out of step with other things that Lewis has written about how you get to Aslan's country, how you get to go to heaven. And those little moments like, 'battles are ugly when women fight'. Ew. What do we do with them? How do we process and and respond to them?
You know, these are the sorts of moments in the books that that put me off Lewis when I was a kid. And so how do we, how do we deal with his own opinions creeping into his world in a very damning fashion? I actually did a Twitter poll. It was very, sort of, very rough.
But I asked I asked people whether they had children who read the Narnia books or had them read to them. Effectively, It turns out from, I suppose I probably had about 30 to 40 replies, that most current children, most of today's children encountered the Narnia books when read to them by an adult, quite often in school, quite often in classroom situations. And the teachers would say the children really enjoyed them. But then again, it's quite often only The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Then you found that some teachers would say, well, some children went on to read another of the books and a very small number, as far as the teachers knew, went on to read the whole series. So how many children are reading these stories independently? I'm not certain. If you're reading one of these books to a child, I think probably the best way to do it is not so much to sort of censor it as to sort of stop and say, well, what do you think about that?
Do you think that sounds fair? Or perhaps just not read the most problematic books to them at all? I personally wouldn't have read – I don't think I've ever read The Last Battle to my children because it's such a difficult book to read. If you're a parent, the best thing is to be aware of what they're reading and perhaps actually intervene and say, by the way, there's going to be some things in this story that we don't really agree with. If you come across them, let's talk about them.
But if you're talking about, how do we deal with it now as adults, looking at the books as adults and judging them as adults tend to do, I think the only thing to do is to say what we think. And that's what I'm trying to do in the book. I don't think it's excusable. I don't think it's excusable even if I said, well, yes, but that was then
And this is now, because as I say, I don't think it was excusable then. I was contacted by a poet, Vahni Capildeo, who said to me that when When they were reading these books as a child, they were in Oxford, living in Oxford. There were plenty of Indian families and West Indian families in Oxford.
They might have been invisible to the likes of Lewis, but they were there and that when they read the book as a child, they were, they were rather distressed by the by the depiction of the Calormen society as the slave-owning... there's absolutely nothing good to be said about it. A rule by tyrants and despots. Human sacrifice, for heaven's sakes. How did he have the cheek? It's very, very, very problematic. There's no question about it.
Well, and it has strong echoes also of the way that mediaeval crusade romances depicted people living in the Middle East. You know, this idea of 'Saracens' with heavy air quotes as a contemporary racial and religious term where they conflated, sort of intentionally, Muslims with Biblical pagans who worship Baal or any of the Greek gods.
There's this sort of... really uncomfortable dodge they try to do to to render people living in the Middle East more different. To literally demonise them, in fact.
It's interesting, isn't it? But in all the areas of the books and all the areas of Narnia of the Narnian world where you come across regimes or places that are not as Narnia would wish them to be, There is a lack of magic, and so Calorman is the same, there's no magic in Calorman, there's no magic under Miraz, there's no magic on the Lone Islands.
And yet, with Miraz, you do get this inkling into why people might become angry, and why people might end up being your enemies because they've been oppressed. So it wasn't that he didn't have a clue. So it requires, you know, quite a bit of sort of critical awareness to navigate these blank spots and these blind spots, really. How did you sort of write back to Lewis? What was that process like for you as as a child and what was the result like?
They're not very good. I mean, I was only nine. They were heavily derivative. So I you know, I sort of stole whole phrases and my characters were always saying things like 'with all good will, sire' and 'By the Lion's mane', and then there was I think there was a little tag which I picked up and used about three times where I think there's a point where – I can't remember where it is.
It's probably The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where they set off again, and it says, 'she was a live ship once more', and I used that about three times, 'she was a live ship once more'. So I'm definitely parroting a great deal. As it went on, it got less like Lewis and more like me, whatever that was. I was happier with comedy than I was with high drama, unsurprisingly. Well,
OK, how about a poem for the Lapsed Bear of Stormness? The Lapsed Bear of Stormness is mentioned at the end of The Horse and His Boy, because we hear about the deeds of Corin Thunderfist, who is the rather obnoxious younger brother of Shasta. So anyway, here we go. I hope you'll appreciate my rhyming. High in the windy mountains and among the rocky crags, where travellers grew less and less,
They lived the Lapsed Bear of Stormness (it begins). Many knights with him did battle, but he slaughtered them like cattle. Corin Thunderfist decided this must stop. So on one winter day, he climbed up the northern side, and shouted far and wide, Bear, you're a coward. But I'll search for you til May, til the people cut the hay, and I'll box you to the ground and I'll still be safe and sound. So you better come out now and fight me. I'm not quite sure where this is going.
It's a long time since I read it. The bear came stumbling out and Corin gave a shout. The great match came about – and then I round it up quite quickly. Prince Corin boxed the bear around for thirty three rounds without a doubt. When he had finished it couldn't see, And this is the end of my verses three. So I think you can see that Lewis wasn't in any serious danger of competition from me at age nine. I think that's brilliant.
I like also that Corin's speech to the bear is longer than his fight with the bear in the poem. That seems correctly poetic to me. Thank you. Yeah, well, yes. However, I did enjoy doing it. It reminded me very much of the importance of fan fiction in the way that we engage with authors. Right. Because so much fan fiction is written to remedy what the writers feel is sort of a gap or something left to be said, left to be explored, in a work that has meant something to them.
And so it's a way of kind of talking back to an author and saying, I'd do it differently or I want to spend more time here, or I would like to add this bit of myself into this world. A lot of writers of fan fiction seem to address the problem with Susan.
Since I've published this book, I've had at least three stories sent to me and some of them are really rather good, in which Susan deals with the fact that her entire family has been wiped out in a railway accident, grows up, does amazing things as she grows up, and eventually gets to Narnia her own way or gets to the heavenly Narnia in her own way, but very much on her own terms. And I rather like that. I think there is that...
When Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film came out, when we got to see Arwen at the beginning taking the place of Glorfindel, because, you know, she's riding a horse. She's doing something useful. She's rescuing Frodo. It's wonderful. And it was rather disappointing when for the rest of the film, all she does is wear a white dress and looks sad. Much more in line with the books, unfortunately. Yes. Yes. Well, at least there was Eowyn. But again, you know, you've got these men of their time.
There is sort of a pervasive sense sometimes, especially when poor Susan is concerned, that she's not she's not ever being thought of first. I mean, I think I don't know whether he saw this coming, but in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, she doesn't appear except she's mentioned twice and the first time is when it's explained why her younger brother and sister are at the aunt and uncle's house at all, Eustace's house. And that is because Peter is swotting for an exam with the professor.
And Susan has been taken on a trip to the United States because her mother thought she would get more out of it than the younger ones. And then he adds, she wasn't very – she was considered the pretty one of the family. She wasn't very good at schoolwork and was very old for her age. And that doesn't mean she was old for her age in a wise way or a sort of socially accomplished way, really, it just means sexually precocious, interested in boys. That was the code back then. That was what it meant.
So what, you know? And I thought that's already getting a dig into Susan. And then towards the end of the book, we meet her, we don't even meet her. That's when Lucy's looking at the spell to make beautiful her that speaketh it beyond the lot of mortals and is tempted to do so, again, because we realise, and I think this is rather good, because Lucy isn't such a goody goody. We realise that Lucy is jealous of Susan's looks. We've never been told this, but it now becomes apparent. And why not.
And so she realises that if she say the spell, she would then be the beautiful one. And of course, much of the book shows her living pictures of what would happen. And first, she's beautiful with this radiant face in these little pictures in the margin of the book. And Narnia is being laid waste as knights battle for her hand in marriage. And then she's back in England and Susan has come back from holiday.
And Susan looks just like the old Susan, but with a nasty expression on her face because she's jealous of Lucy and her new beauty. And he says, I will say the spell, I don't care, I will, and then Aslan appears on the page and growls at her, and that's the reason why she doesn't say the spell, not because she's got the self-control not to say it, but because she gets warned by Aslan, who does that quite a lot in this book.
But the effect of that, in a way, is still to sort of semi-demonise Susan, because even though we know this isn't something that's truly happened, even in the context of the book, it's a glimpse of Susan behaving in a way that's sort of antipathetic, and we're just left with that impression,
we don't get to meet Susan ever again. Or the way her family talk about her, when they're effectively in heaven, and I think The Pilgrim's Progress has a role to play here, because this is based on The Pilgrim's Progress where... it might be Ignorance, yes, arrives at the gates of heaven and is basically not allowed in because he's not gone the right way and is cast aside and sort of thrown back into Hell,
The narrator says, then I saw that there was a way to Hell even from the gates of heaven, as well as from the city of destruction. So that's a theological point that Bunyan is making in The Pilgrim's Progress, which is effectively to say, don't think you can get there except by the King's Highway. You've got to follow the rules. You've got to read the Bible. You've got to be in this church and do things in this particular way.
That is the way to salvation. There isn't another way to salvation. And it works in that allegory because we don't have any particular deep you know, we don't have any particularly deep connexion with Ignorance. It's just an object lesson. But I think that Lewis was so very much influenced by The Pilgrim's Progress while he was writing the second half of The Last Battle. It's part of his departure from Narnia, I think. It was the last book.
It was always going to be the last book in whatever order he was writing them. This was clearly the last book and he kind of breaks the world of Narnia open, all the way through it. We witness the destruction of Narnia. That's what happens. And it's a hard book to read.
Yeah. So does this ending where Narnia's destroyed, death is put forward to us as a happy ending, and poor Susan is barred from heaven forever for a perfectly normal embracing of adult life and sexuality – does that taint what comes before, in the series? I don't think it has to. The implication is clear that Susan isn't coming to Narnia, isn't going to be coming to heaven, isn't there now. I don't really know what Lewis made of the idea that she's got a whole life to live out.
And surely they are now in a timeless place. Because they're in a timeless place, they're able to meet all the people that we've met in all the books going right back to creation of Narnia. They go into the paradise at the top of the steep hill and there's even King Frank and Queen Helen, who were the first king and queen of Narnia, the first son of Adam and daughter of Eve to arrive in Narnia and found this line of kings and queens. So all of time is there, all of Narnian time.
In that enclosure. So it's not very obvious whether they're in an eternal place or they're in a place where some sort of time continues to happen. I don't think he thought that through very well. But Susan hasn't died yet. And I mean, Polly seems to suggest that, it's Polly really into whose mouth is placed
The sentence, I think, that Susan will not get to heaven. It is not made explicit, but it says, she says something like, her aim is being to run ahead to the silliest time of her life as fast as she can, and then stay there as long as she can. And really, Polly's got no right to make a pronouncement like that. She cannot possibly know what Susan is going to do the rest of her life. So there is a get out for readers. I think, that we can think actually, we don't have to believe this.
We can imagine Susan, other things will happen to Susan in her life and she will to eventually come to heaven. So she's never explicitly barred, but she's very strongly criticised and she's certainly not there with them at this point. And we are told that she is no longer a friend of Narnia, which really is a hard thing to hear when Aslan tells the children at the end of the The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe that once a king or queen of Narnia always a king or queen.
So I really think she should have a passport back. Does it affect the books retrospectively? I don't think so, because you don't have to read The Last Battle, if don't want to, actually. You can – And I've always been an advocate of, if you really don't like the ending of something, you can say that the author got it wrong. I actually do think that we're allowed in our minds and heads to alter things.
One way of protecting yourself from from Susan's eternal damnation, I think, is just to say Lewis got it wrong. So of course she went to heaven, in the end, if you want to believe that. She came right and in any case, what was she doing wrong? Really? Just being a teenager, as far as I can see. It's an important lesson in the power of reading against the text.
Yes, yes, you can do that. I think it's allowed. Yeah, it's amazing the way that sort of things that are submerged within us bob up into consciousness and into full being when we're asked to tell stories, the things that we want to tell stories about are so very revealing of who we are. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And that seems like it might be as good a note as any to conclude on. Thank you so much. Yeah! We've talked a lot and it's been very, it's been great deal of fun.