In his correspondence with children who loved The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis more than once urged them to try making up their own stories about Aslan and associated characters. The holders of Mr. Lewis' copyrights, however, do not want any new tales of Narnia published under any circumstances. (I found this out years ago, when I explored the possibility of writing an interactive novel set in the Narnian world.) Therefore I'll never be able (in this life, anyway) to go anywhere with certain ideas I've had; but I can at least share with you what the ideas were. If things were different, there are two books I would write to fill in gaps in Lewis' saga...Narnian apocrypha, as it were.
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One book would be called Tales of Archenland. It would be more an anthology than a continuous-plot novel, because it would try to account for the times when Archenland drops out of the picture in the Chronicles of Narnia.
The first adventure in this book would revolve around that son of King Frank and Queen Helen who was the very first King of Archenland. In it, I would depict how there came to be a distinction between Narnia having more fantasy-beings than humans, and Archenland being the reverse. It might be, for instance, that a kind of grass grew in Narnia that was more nourishing to unicorns and centaurs than any grass existing in Archenland.
Another chapter would show the "gap" which first got me thinking of this project: what was the situation for Archenland when Jadis was ruling Narnia? Here's my guess:
During all of the White Witch's wintry regime, Aslan's power (working from a distance) caused her magic to lose effect on the Archenland side of Narnia's border. Not only did this inhibit Jadis from invading Archenland; and not only did it give the human Narnians someplace to escape to; but it also caused a sharp cutoff in the zone of magical cold. Consequently, throughout the "Jadis era," there was a continuous melt-off of snow along the Narnia-Archenland border. This created vast marshes across northern Archenland. The marshes both served as an added obstacle to evil forces invading Archenland--and allowed good guys from Archenland to sneak into Narnia on smuggling trips, bringing humanitarian (Narnitarian?) aid shipments to those forced to live under Jadis' tyranny. THAT would explain how, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Tumnus and others could have agriculturally-produced foodstuffs in spite of Narnia having no growing season!
Another tale would have to concern King Ram, son of Corin and Aravis--since he is supposed to have been Archenland's greatest king. To help him be the greatest, I would probably invent some entirely new hostile civilization for him to contend with--somebody west of Calormen, or perhaps on islands other than the islands visited by Caspian.
The very last of these Archenlandish stories would somehow involve somebody from Archenland venturing west of Narnia, at a time shortly before the events in The Last Battle. One way or another, this tale would work in the killing of that wild lion whose hide was eventually discovered by Shift and Puzzle.
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My other pastiche book would be a regular-length novel. It would confront the problem writers face when the body of fiction they would add to is itself now part of the real world's culture. If, for example, you wrote a novel about Count Dracula stalking around in 1998, that would mean that Dracula was a real person within the reality of the story. But in that case, what would you do about the fact that English-speaking civilization has for a century been familiar with Dracula as a fictional character? Would you, in your new novel, pretend that neither Bram Stoker nor Bela Lugosi ever achieved fame in connection with that character? Or would you pretend that Stoker "actually" based his novel (and so all future Dracula movies) on knowledge of a real vampire called Dracula?
For the apocryphal Narnian story I'm now imagining, I think I would take the first approach; that is, I would pretend that C.S. Lewis never wrote stories of Narnia--though I might acknowledge Lewis' existence in other ways. For this pastiche would be almost entirely set in our world.
Titled The Last Queen of Narnia, this would be an account of the life of Susan Pevensey after her whole family goes to Heaven rather sooner than expected. The action would possibly also involve the idiotic parents of Eustace, who would be all the more estranged from God because they would blame "those foolish, obsessive superstitions" for putting Eustace on the train ride that took him from this world.
Susan would first be encountered in the 1960's: already over 30 years old, in the very time when people over 30 came in for contempt. She would still be an attractive woman, and would be dating younger men in that desperate struggle to stay young which was predicted in The Last Battle. Various expository elements about her life since her bereavement would be worked in...and then the narrative would jump ahead in time to the 1970's--the time of the Jesus Movement.
Rejoining Susan, we would find her having been married and divorced since the hippie days. (The failed marriage, of course, would be one she entered in a non-Christian ceremony.) Young Christians would witness to her about Jesus Christ--and she, knowing perfectly well that Jesus and Aslan are one and the same, would experience a guilty conscience for her apostasy, and of course react in furious defensiveness. Only when this had led her very deep into depression would a new Narnia-related element be introduced into the mix, as follows:
In Narnia prior to its end, a female talking bird, a crane called Fraywing, somehow is transported into the Wood Between the Worlds. There she meets Aslan--in His only appearance as Aslan rather than Jesus--and He tells her she has a hard and noble mission--to outlive the end of Narnia, and to bring redemption to Queen Susan. The guinea pigs that were sleeping in the Wood since The Magician's Nephew are also awakened by Aslan, and turned into talking beasts so that they can accompany and assist Fraywing. These creatures are projected into our world at a logical place--the former site of Digory Kirk's country house, just at the time when Susan is visiting it without knowing why. Their appearance--TALKING to her--naturally makes it impossible for Susan any longer to delude herself that Narnia had been a delusion.
But having to remember the fact of Narnia is not the same as recovering the spirit of Narnia. The 1970's having also been a time of growing occultism, Susan and her new friends are soon sought out by witchcraft advocates; and, in a scenario somewhat like Ransom's debates with the Unman in Perelandra,these earthly evildoers try to pervert Susan's memories of what Narnia meant. They try to induce her to desire the magic without Aslan; and they try to make Fraywing assume the role of an occult "familiar." Fraywing, of course, knows better than to fall for that; she has just come from talking to Aslan. As for Susan, she does find salvation in the end--but not before earthly Christians have a hand in ridding her of the occult influence. This reinforces what Aslan told Edmund and Lucy about getting to know Him in His identity as Jesus. Coming to her senses at about age 45, then, Susan settles into a Christian community--where the members, assured by the Holy Spirit that Fraywing and the guinea pigs don't represent anything demonic, promise to keep their secret.
I think that these ideas could have worked out adequately, as pastiches of The Screwtape Letters have worked out adequately. But as Aslan said to the British children in the original books, we are not told what would have happened.
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