There has been quite a buzz going around about the problem of Susan. You can read about it on Asking the Wrong Questions. It’s been chatted about on blogs around the world and on Christian writers’ bulletin boards.

I never saw Susan as a problem and have been rather amazed to find so many people outraged at the way Lewis handled her.

Philip Hensher talks about “the poor girl who gets sent to hell for wearing nylons and lipstick.” He also thinks we should “drop CS Lewis and his ghastly, priggish, half-witted, money-making drivel about Narnia down the nearest deep hole, as soon as is conveniently possible.” He thinks the books are “revoltingly mean-minded books, written to corrupt the minds of the young with allegory, smugly denouncing anything that differs in the slightest respect from Lewis’s creed of clean-living, muscular Christianity, pipe-smoking, misogyny, racism, and the most vulgar snobbery.” And so he’d rather see us give our children anything other than Lewis:

Don’t give your children CS Lewis to read; not the Narnia books, not the Screwtape Letters, not that appalling Is God an Astronaut? science fiction. It looks like rich fantasy, but it is the product of a mean, narrow little mind, burrowing into their ideas and pooh-poohing them. Give them anything else — Last Exit to Brooklyn, a bottle of vodka, a phial of prussic acid, even Winnie the Pooh — but keep them away from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

OK I put that in because it made me chuckle. Sure his comments are mean spirited but that little dig at the bear of very little brain made me smile. The guy’s a comedian.

But back to the problem of Susan.

JK Rowling, in an interview in Time magazine says, “There comes a point where Susan, who was the older girl, is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She’s become irreligious basically because she found sex, I have a big problem with that.”

And Phillip Pullman, of course, has his bit to add, “Susan, like Cinderella, is undergoing a transition from one phase of her life to another. Lewis didn’t approve of that. He didn’t like women in general, or sexuality at all, at least at the stage in his life when he wrote the Narnia books.” Yikes! Pullman actually thinks he has intimate knowledge of Lewis’s sexual preferences.

But no one has gone so far as Neil Gaiman. He discovered and started reading Narnia books when he was six and loved them.

And yet, even though Gaiman loved the books, he was bothered by Susan’s loss and so he wrote a short story about what happened to Susan after the rest of her family went further up and further in. According to The New York Times “Aslan performs earth-shaking oral sex on the witch” in Gaiman’s story.

In an Onion inerview, Gaiman says, “One woman described it as ‘blasphemous,’ which I loved, that a potshot at a fictional lion from a series of children’s books could be seriously described as blasphemous.”

Oh, yeah. That was hysterical.

How sad that he can’t see such a story is surely blasphemous. First of all, bestiality is blasphemous in a broad sense. And in the second place, any story that takes a beloved character from a book and perverts him is blasphemous. For instance, it would be blasphemous to make Winnie the Pooh have sex with Piglet. And finally, it is blasphemous to take a Christ figure and have him perform oral sex on a Satan figure. Yes, it is, Neil’s amusement notwithstanding.