Into the Wardrobe

I don't want to make heavy weather out of this but something has always bothered me slightly about The Horse and His Boy. One of the main themes in the story is the proposed marriage of Susan to Prince Rabadash. Now I know that she did not marry him in the end but in the story she was contemplating it. I also know that in the story because of the different time frame in Narnia she was old enough to be married BUT when she got back to our world she was a little girl again. Had the marriage taken place what then.....?

Bill

[from Bill]:
>Had the marriage taken place what then.....?

I suppose Aslan would say something like "no one is ever told what would have happened..."

But one can wonder the same thing about any number of "adult" things that children growing up would have experienced in all that time. I suppose, if one wanted to "work out an explanation" (which I think Lewis would not necessarily have considered, as it is just one of those things the reader is supposed to accept without questioning, else virtually no fantasy could ever be acceptably written), one might suggest that those difficult "adult" things would be swept out of their memory, much as traumatic experiences sometimes are in real life. In fact, as one thinks about it, Lewis must have had something of the sort in mind, for when the children return to Narnia in Prince Caspian, he indicates that they gradually re-develop lost or forgotten skills and memories acquired during their first visit to Narnia.

--Stanley

I think these responses to the original post are very insightful... I'm reminded (probably irrelevantly) of something which I am almost certain is in Pratchett - one of the characters unwittingly gets into an alternative reality (the Dungeon Dimensions?) and falsely experiences getting out again such that they think they are back in their original reality but in fact are not. The odd thing is that all the bizarre things that are now happening to them seem perfectly normal to them, and how they have always been, whereas we the readers know that there is a big problem. There's also that episode of the Simpsons where Homer gets an alternative reality machine (?toaster) and visits various alternative Simpson worlds e.g. where Marge and the kids are giant insects, where it rains doughnuts, and so on. Apologies for the digression!

I don't think this story is from Pratchett. It reminds me of the ending of a book by, I think, Robert Sheckley. Earth Hunt, maybe? Could that be it?

I remember the Simpsons episode. The final joke was that Homer stayed in the wrong reality, saying that it was ‘close enough.’