Anfinwen wrote:Take a look at some of your favorite stories, and you'll see that there is rarely a happy ending without any casualties of one kind or another. This reflects life, and makes the joy all the more poignant because it is mixed with sadness.
Fair point, and that is the same point that Tolkien would have also made in his own works. But is Susan, herself, really a casualty, as so many people have suggested over the years? After all,
as far as we know, she was alive and not, herself, damaged physically, if she was neither in the train, nor on the platform at that particular location. If her parents were also on that train, visiting Susan is one of the most likely reasons for going to Bristol, especially as they told Peter, at any rate, that they were intending to go there.
If portrayed in a film LB, I would agree that it would be horrible for her to be "left out" of the Seven Friends of Narnia arriving in time for the end of Narnia, if she had a clear reason, in LB, to be on that Bristol-bound train, alongside any of her family. There would not have been any problem with portraying Susan as not being a friend of Narnia, if she had been merely accompanying her parents, who also went to an English version of Aslan's Country, as mentioned on LB's last page. And if she had survived as a casualty of that particular train crash, instead, she might very well have lost her looks, no matter how much makeup she would certainly need to use subsequent to the accident, and not for vanity either. Or maybe she might have been severely disabled, which, although it provides a similarly horrible life-changing challenge, is also hardly helpful in anyone's rehabilitation from alleged sins of vanity.
In Gaiman's version of the
Problem of Susan (2004), he has his elderly Professor Susan Hastings tell a college journalist that she realised that someone had to be left behind to bear witness to the existence of her brothers and sister, to identify them and help clear up after the train wreck that killed them. The journalist thinks Gaiman's Susan is "our" Susan Pevensie, you see.
Losing their entire families in an all too real man-made disaster does not of necessity make either Susan Pevensie, or Gaiman's Professor Susan Hastings a physical victim, or train-wreck casualties, themselves, let alone someone who is being picked on, simply because of her "sinfully worldly ways", as Gaiman's journalist rather rudely suggests, and which the Professor cogently queries.
But it does suggest that Susan Pevensie, in LB, could also be someone, like Samwise, who is left to clean up after Frodo finally boarded the ship to leave Middle Earth. Or like Horatio, in Shakespeare's play,
Hamlet, who arrives in Elsinor to clean up after Denmark's Royal family wipe themselves out. The really sad part of LB, above and over the destruction of Narnia, itself, in literary terms, is that the Earth-bound Susan Pevensie is spiritually handicapped to deal with her family's loss, at that stage, being in no position to realise her role in the story yet, having denied her Narnia adventures as childish, and having given up being involved in any way with her siblings' activities.
Yes, it is tragic to lose one's entire family, and it is also human instinct to try to rebuild after a disaster in the best way Susan could manage. Life must go on, after all. Us people in reality know this all too well. But C.S.Lewis in LB has left this rebuilding and
Susan's story and eventual fate to the readers' imagination. And therefore to a filmmaker's interpretation.
@ coracle: I do like your ideas also, but these are minor points: were there many police women in the 1940's? If any women were involved in rescue wouldn't it be more likely as nurses or volunteers at that time? And while I find Susan's recovery of the rings an intriguing idea, which would definitely work well, I wonder if she understands what the rings were for? After all, she doesn't seem to be very involved with the Professor or Aunt Polly at all, except as friends of her family.
How would you conclude Susan's story, if anyone here was filming LB? Or should anyone, even a film maker, really try to do so?