★★★☆☆ The Problem of Susan and Other Stories, by Neil Gaiman
There are two kinds of readers...
The Problem of Susan and Other Stories
Neil Gaiman
There are two kinds of readers...
...those who read the title The Problem of Susan and immediately know who Susan is and what the story's about, and those who remain clueless. For those in the second group, Susan is one of the four Pevensie children, the heroes of many of C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia.
The Narnia books are perhaps the most famous examples of portal fantasy for children. In them the Pevensie kids Lucy, Edmund, Susan, and Peter visit a world in which there are talking animals and magical and mythological creatures. The King of the Beasts, the lion Aslan, is a barely disguised representation of the Son of the Christian Trinity. As Aslan tells Lucy at the end of the third book (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) after telling her she and Edmund won't return to Narnia,
"It isn't Narnia, you know," sobbed Lucy. "It's OK. We shan't meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?"
"But you shall meet me, dear one," said Aslan.
"Are—are you there too, Sir?" said Edmund.
"I am," said Aslan. "But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there."
In the final book, The Last Battle, Lucy, Edmund, and Peter are sent to Narnia for the last time, never to leave again. It transpires that the three of them died in a rail accident, and this is their afterlife. You will notice that Susan's name is missing. From what Lucy, Edmund, and Peter have to say we are given to understand that Susan has fallen from grace and no longer believes in Narnia.
The Chronicles of Narnia tell us nothing of Susan's eventual fate. She was not with the other three when they died in the accident. (It is somewhat vaguely and obliquely implied in The Last Battle that she may have lost her hope of Heaven.) That is The Problem of Susan that Neil Gaiman here deals with, in graphic novel form.
Gaiman is kinder to Susan than Lewis was.