On what happened to Susan

This is a fictional story concerning what happened to Susan. It's a little better than what Philip Pullman seems to have assumed. It looks as if J. K. Rowling has the same problem as Pullman with respect to Susan.

See also this from letter to children: HT: Jason Pratt

From another letter to a boy named Martin: "The books don't tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having then turned into a rather silly, *conceited* young woman. [emphasis mine] But there is plenty of time for her to mend, and perhaps she will get to Aslan's country in the end--in her own way." (ibid, p 67.)

See I Told You So

In a post I redated from 2005 I wrote: Yeah, and I'll bet Pullman thinks C. S. Lewis went to his room after his exchange with Elizabeth Anscombe and spent three days in a fetal position planning the Chronicles of Narnia.

And in an another interview I hadn't read when I wrote that Pullman said:

But I must come back to what you were saying about Lewis. I don’t think he did set out to evangelise. How many children do we know who have read the Narnia books and didn’t realise they were about Christianity? If he was trying to evangelise, he would have made it jolly clear that Narnia was… He wrote those books at great speed and under great emotional pressure, and I’m inclined to think this began with that famous debate when the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe carved chunks out of him.

OK, nothing about the fetal position. But good heavens these guys are so predictable. Notice, there's nothing about the actual arguments, or the revised chapter, or anything like that. I'm out of author's copies, or I'd send Pullman a copy of C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea.

I really would like to make the Anscombe Legend "bloody deceased."

Philip Pullman on C. S. Lewis

Hugh Chandler, my former dissertation advisor at the University of Illinois at Urbana, sent me this interview with Philip Pullman concerning his "loathing" for C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia. David Downing, my fellow IVP C. S. Lewis author, wrote the following "roaring" response:

Pullman obviously brings a lot of anti-Christian baggage to his reading ofLewis; I think he would have "loathed" the Chronicles, regardless of the characters or incidents he found there. Pullman is being willfully obtuse when he says THE LAST BATTLE is about Lewis killing off his main characters. The book explains in one sentence what happened to the children on Earth; it spends the last third of the narrative showing their lives in the eternal morning of the new Narnia, with Aslan and his faithful followers from all generations. THE LAST BATTLE is not about sad endings in this world (tho Lewis knew all about that from childhood), but about wonderful beginnings elsewhere. For a creative writer, Pullman shows are markably stunted imagination in his inability (unwillingness?) to envision the worldview of faith. In any case, I think the less said the better. Others have berated the Chronicles, getting more attention than they deserved with muddled & befuddled psycho-babble. But their effect on the popularity or critical reputation of the Chronicles have been no more than that of gnats trying to bring down a lion. Isay, "Let the heathen rage," and pay the Pullmans of the world no mind . . .

David C. Downing

Yeah, and I'll bet Pullman thinks C. S. Lewis went to his room after his exchange with Elizabeth Anscombe and spent three days in a fetal position planning the Chronicles of Narnia.

P. S. This is a redated post, which I have updated because The Golden Compass is in theaters.