Susan's Return
Susan's private reflections upon being returned to Narnia with her siblings only a few months after she thought they had left forever. Many, many writers have discussed "The Problem of Susan".
Ana Mardoll's Ramblings . provides some excellent deconstruction of the Narnia Chronicles and it has partly been the discussions in her blog which have stimulated me to consider the first few chapters of Prince Caspian from Susan's point of view. She is given very little empathy by the writer and apart from shooting the Telmarine's helmets and beating Trumpkin in a shooting contest, she barely plays any positive role in the story. She very quickly becomes the sister you love to hate and I think that stinks. Let's see what's really going on in that there head of hers. Please give some feedback and I'll see about writing some more, especially when Aslan starts playing coy as he leads them up the gorge.
... Susan's Return ...
As Susan clutched Lucy and Edmund's sweaty palms and the tugging, stretching, prickling feelings got stronger and stronger, she could not hold back a cry of anguish!
After being back from Narnia only a few months, she had just reconciled herself to finding herself back in an adolescent body again, losing everything she had once known. And now, just as she had been preparing for the uncertainties of returning to school, surrounded by all those other teenage girls, the chanciness of teachers, and an uncertain future with the Second World War going on around their ears, she could now feel herself being tugged back to somewhere… probably that OTHER PLACE again! It was unmistakeable. It was painful. It was unwelcome.
"Aslan! Aslan, Stop playing with us like this!" she wanted to shout, but as yet the thought was still just a desperate feeling and thus inarticulate.
And then she could hear her own dear horn ringing in the distance, almost like the sound of a train several miles away. But it was not a train, it was the brave call of someone in need, Tahwoot, tahwoo! Tahwoot, tahwoo! ringing in her mind. She found she wanted to respond, in fact, could not do anything but. The vibrations compelled her, almost made her feel she was being turned inside out. The extremity of the agony and the ecstasy continued until she felt branches sticking into her back and she realised that she and her siblings were stuck in a shadowy, spiky thicket.
The sound of the horn was gone. The sound of the trains were gone and the smell of the dusty country railway station. Instead, there was the rustle of leaves and the distant roar of surf, punctuated by the gasps and groans of the others, the tearing of clothing and the snapping of twigs as they fought their way free on the slopes of a densely forested hillside.
For a moment, Susan was fleetingly hopeful of one thing, that she had been returned to the stature and station of her former life. But a short moment later she heard Lucy's piping naive little-girl voice saying "do you think we've got back to Narnia?" And Edmund's immature boy's voice replying... "
Susan was thunderstruck and she felt her body and clothes. "Dash it all!" Her body was still that of a thirteen year old, stuck in a horrible scratchy school uniform. She groaned, wondering "how many times am I destined to go through the trials of puberty in one lifetime?". She assumed Aslan would send them back once again and that once again it would have taken no time at all. Mordantly, Susan rather hoped this would be a short visit.
For Susan had no doubt they were in Narnia. The sounds were right. The trees looked Narnian. The colour of the sea, the smell of the estuary, the geology of the rocks. The position of the sun in relation to the coast and the time of day. Later, from the hill's brow she could glimpse the Archen Mountains to the far south. They were unmistakeable. But she held her counsel and fumed quietly whilst they all took to paddling and searching for shrimps! Lucy even wanted to pretend they were smugglers of all things! Idiot child.
Were the others going to pretend they were on some rambling summer holiday too? She wished they would wake up.
It was later that day as evening fell that she finally found the gold knight chess piece and used it to confirm to the others what she had known all along. Nothing else in the obvious range of evidence seemed to get through to them. In the midst of her flood of memories, grief and irritation she almost said "No Peter, we aren't just anywhere, yes Peter we are back in Narnia, yes Peter this is the ruin of Cair Paravel and yes Peter we are probably being expected to do something heroic even though we are children again."
And then Peter in his utterly smug way began to talk to them all as if they had all been blind and that by Jove, why didn't they all just jolly well buck up and realise where they were, in the ruins of Cair Paravel.
Patronising git. Oh he was humoring Lucy, certainly, but really, did he have to take that tone?
And Aslan in his utterly frustrating manner was not showing himself... again... until such time as he chose to make a grand entrance... and get maximum attention, she supposed. "Typical old queen", she thought.
As far as she was concerned, he could damn well come and find them if they were so important to his schemes.
And damn it all if Edmund and Peter didn't then get all excited and want to go knocking holes in the old door which they knew very well would be there in the morning.
Reluctantly, she had followed the others as they clambered down the dark stairs into the dusty treasure hoard and it was here that she finally felt that she could willingly reclaim something of her old self. With the quiver of arrows slung at her back and her shapely bow clutched in her hand, she began to feel just a little as if she could begin to be Queen Susan again. Just a little. But it was a forlorn hope. They were still children. Their castle was in ruins. They were cut off from the mainland. There was no evidence of the townlands which had grown up on the banks of the nearby Great River. There was no sign of any of the forest peoples. Not even a Talking Bird to give them news. It seemed they were alone in the world.
The next day, as they rescued the dwarf with Susan's arrows having pierced the Telmarine soldiers' helmets, sending them into a panic, Susan finally felt something of her old capacity thrill through her. She had drawn back the bow and taken aim, and it was as if her arms, her eyes, her spine and her fingers, all settled in to some preordained, remembered pattern. She felt like she was Artemis, graced with Olympian power; her shots true. Of course with that bow she could not really miss her target, but she knew from long experience that the way it worked was that the bow harnessed her and honed her abilities, not the other way round. She knew that after a few days shooting here with it, she would be able to pick up any bow and still be a reasonable shot.
Like Rhindon and the shield were apparently doing with Peter and like the cordial's presence was doing with Lucy. She found herself watching Edmund. He did not receive one of these gifts; the crutch that the three others used to get their balance in this world. He had been gifted with his life! This entire world was his crutch. She would see Edmund breathing it in. All of it. He almost seemed to be growing into an adult in front of her eyes; yet still just a young child.
Oh, why did Aslan do this to them? This manipulation, this gifting, this confusion of age, life, world and experience?
Amidst her puzzlement and anger, Susan did wonder if this was a new beginning. Really. The ushering in of the Narnian life again where nearly everything worked in synchrony? Or a false start? Like the racemaster's gun that fires you into action but at any moment might fire again, leaving your heart in your mouth and your body flushed with wasted adrenaline. Susan kept wondering this as the day proceeded and as Trumpkin's tale unfolded.
For Telmarine Narnia sounded horrible. Everything pushed back, repressed, banished, murdered... mutilated. Only the trees seemed to have gained some kind of upper hand and that was only in the Eastern and Southern parts according to Trumpkin, which must have been where the ghost stories had come from. She could imagine the dryads menacing the unwanted Telmarines, planting themselves to loom over the expanding habitations; disappearing overnight to save themselves from the axe, leaving mad panic in their wake. But according to Trumpkin, most of the few "Old Narnians" as Trumpkin called them, that were left, had long ago even ceased to wage guerilla warfare and were holed up in distant mountain retreats, just surviving and biding their time, even isolated from each other.
And for some reason, for generations, the Caspians seemed to have placed their seat of power in central Narnia on the Northern side of the Great River, alienating themselves from the sea. Not unlike Jadis she reflected, but they didn't even have the excuse of the deep winter ice! What was it with these foreign invaders that they avoided the sea? And to have razed Cair Paravel! What! Why?
But she began to realise other possibilities as her powers of executive thinking reasserted themselves.
These Telmarines must be a hopelessly inward looking people. Trapped in some past? Like some migrant people whose cultural ways become desperately frozen when they live amongst a dominant culture? But they had clearly become dominant themselves. None of it made any sense.
Except the image of the Northern Giants clobbering the castle to pieces came into her mind. Whoever had ruled for some centuries after the Golden Age would still have had them to contend with, and if Cair Paravel, the seat of rule in Narnia had been broken… well… it might have been quite easy for the Caspian Telmarines to just walk in, build a castle overlooking the valley of Narnia and say "we are the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve who rule here now, get used to it. We will beat the giants back". For all Susan knew, the Narnian populous might have welcomed them with open arms… for a while.
And Trumpkin was asking them to follow him into South Central Narnia, to the hill of the Stone Table. That was now covered by some mouldering ancient mound. This was like a nightmare. And Aslan had brought them here... to have them to trek to the Stone Table once again…of course. It was always like that.
"Who was it that said the magic can't work the same way twice?", Susan thought bitterly.
As they rowed their way to Glasswater Creek along the shoreline past several headlands, Susan had naturally become exhausted. But she could also feel the old muscular strength returning to her limbs and her back as she and Peter and Edmund took turns. After they had finally rowed up the creek for several bends and dragged the boat up onto the bank, and had a short rest, she felt positively brimming with Narnian courage and energy.
But her body was still that of a 13 year old girl, self-conscious, her mood jittery. What she wouldn't give to even be 18 again. But it seemed they probably weren't staying that long. They were here only to instal someone else, this Caspian the Tenth.