England is a Disease
The Pevensey children, Lucy, Edmund, Susan and Peter, are famous for their adventures in a far-off land, accessed through a wardrobe. In a short time, they helped liberate a kingdom and, despite their tender age, were chosen as rulers - their natural wisdom and English common sense setting them above the place's inhabitants.
And, of course, when the Pevensey children returned to school, they told their friends. It would have been better if they were teased and bullied for their stories - what happened was far worse. When Michaelmas half term arrived, their friends searched for passages to other worlds, wanting to rule their own fantasy kingdoms.
These children searched every nook and cranny of their family houses. They looked behind pictures, tapped wooden panels to find false walls, explored the potting sheds where the groundskeepers kept their pornography. And some of them did indeed find portals.
The full story was never uncovered, except perhaps in the Home Office investigations - and maybe a report exists, locked away in some dusty safe. Certainly, a number of unexplained artefacts from impossible lands were delivered to the British Museum. These were later confiscated and destroyed. Other items, like the tail of the Squirrel King, seemed less remarkable once brought into our world.
Children raised in the better sort of English school see themselves as natural rulers; but not every fantasy kingdom proves as tolerant of meddling schoolchildren as Narnia. A number escaped by the skin of their teeth, and others never came back. Some, even now, could be rowing in a slave galley on a purple ocean; or be broken in the cheese mines, flogged by anthropomorphic mice.
In the ensuing investigations, at least one child was found who had come back as something else. The government feared for what might happen if an invasion were launched through a portal. These passageways were filled with concrete, the dullest, least imaginative government workers being sent to do the task. The plan worked, and the fallout was limited to children's literature, as well as some strange sessions with Harley Street psychotherapists. England was safe.
Background
Not the first story I’ve written about Narnia - Holiday Wardrobe was read at Liars League in 2022 (video). I liked CS Lewis’s series as a kid but now I loathe them - and not just for the cheap Christian allegory.
There is something corrosive about the sort of fantasy novel that has people destined to be special heroes. It makes for compelling stories but Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is a clear example of what happens when children grow up wanting to be 'King of the World'.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces came out a few years before The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The hero’s journey is a powerful idea, but many books about this concept (such as Christopher Vogler’s) try to fit all stories to his structure. The problem with this is that the hero’s journey comes with a lot of hidden ideology.
Horror often works against these ideas of the hero's journey - people are chosen by chance and misfortune to be prey. They survive - or often do not - through the assistance of others. You might be able to fit the hero's journey onto Dracula, say, but there's a more interesting structure being used there, where a network of people fight an undead landlord.
Chosen one narratives are dangerous and simplistic. They promote the idea of bloodlines and rulers and individualism. It’s the sort of story that looks at ‘entrepreneurs’ as talented individuals, rather than seeing the alliances and social structures that support them1.
We need better stories.
Recommendations
Julia Indelicate’s Chronotopes project is a portraiture project where people are photographed alongside AI-generated images of themselves. They are fascinating pictures - beautiful black-and-white portraits of people holding their phones, with the phone displaying a generated image. There’s a lot to think about here - devices, self-image, automation.
The ‘debate’ about AI in art is boring. Some applications are bad, such as using these tools to generate stock images. But only the most tedious boor would reject all AI art. Projects like this help us navigate the coming future better than many opinionated articles on the topic.
The idea of the corporate genius is one of many things that made the King in Orange inevitable.
This is fabulous! I often wondered where all of the other pools in the Woods Between The Worlds led to, my greatest annoyance about the Narnia series was that these seemed to be entirely forgotten about.
Have you read the Narnia story in Crab & Bee's Matter of Britain?