What was Jack thinking?

[Erekose]

[David]

I think Lewis always held up the chilling possibility that people might be lost after all. Susan makes a decision to leave her belief in Narnia and she is excluded at the end. I remember how, in The Great Divorce, the narrator is still a ghost when the dawn comes. He doesn't make it in, just as Susan doesn't.

Lewis knew Pilgrim's Progress. He probably considered it an exemplar of Christian writing. At the end of that book, someone is cast away from the very gate of Heaven and the narrator is reminded that there is a path to hell even from the very verge of heaven.

As much as we want to get Susan into Aslan's Land, she didn't make it.

[Larry W.]

[a_hnau]

[Erekose]

[carol]

[Stanley Anderson]

[Tharkun]

[Edisonbaggins]

What are Centaur's Cave and Brave Again please?

[Tharkun]

Centaur's Cave is a novel about Susan after Narnia, it was written by a Carmelite Nun (no other information on her is available) Brave Again is a short story along the same vane, written by Michel Faber. I have absolutely no idea of what kind of quality either story is, because I have not read them, because almost no one has read them, because almost no one can read them! Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say almost no one may read them.
Why? Who knows, the Lewis estate does not seem to feel inclined to tell us. For years it was thought that perhaps they just felt Narnia was too sacred to let any one else touch, a stand that I can certainly respect, even if I am not certain it is how Lewis would have felt, but then came the Giant Surprise.
So now after years of apparently stonewalling legitimate questions for no reason, they decide to answer ridiculous questions nobody ask.

[Erekose]

[Larry W.]

I guess the two stories are locked away somewhere, and probably no one except Lewis' survivng family and perhaps some friends of the estate have read them. However, we don't know if Lewis personally approved them or if they were created after his death. It doesn't seem likely that he would have wanted any sequels to his books written by someone else-- he might have considered something like that to be a farce. Any stories about Narnia not written by Lewis couldn't be considered part of his canon, so we wouldn't be told the true story of Susan from another author's point of view.

Larry W.

[Erekose]

[Larry W.]

The problem is that something which isn't canon may not be completely what the original author intended. We don't really know what Lewis thought of the Susan stories if he did read them (and we are not even sure if they were written during his lifetime). I don't think Narnia stories written by someone else would be the real thing unless the author collaborated with Lewis, which he would most likely have not permitted. Lewis was even against dramatizations of his books so it would seem unlikely that he would want anyone else tampering with his work. If he did suggest that someone should write a concluding story about Susan he may have meant that in humor. It's hard to believe that he would be serious about having a Narnia sequel when it is seems so clear that The Last Battle was the conclusion.

Larry W.

[Tharkun]