When Anthony Bourdain Went to Narnia
Of all the billions of pages that make up the Internet, one of my very favorites contains “No Reservations: Narnia,” a work of fan fiction, from 2010, by Edonohana, a pseudonym of the Y.A. and fantasy author Rachel Manija Brown. The story is exactly what it sounds like: a pastiche of Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” and C.S. Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia.” Channelling the casual charisma of Bourdain’s first-person writing, Brown finds him visiting the stick-wattled burrow of sentient moles, where he dines on pavender (a saltwater fish of Lewis’s invention) and Sussex Pond pudding and is drunk under the table by a talking mouse. He slurps down eel stew and contemplates the void with mud-dwelling depressives. He bails on an appointment at Cair Paravel, the royal seat of Narnia, to bloody his teeth at a secretive werewolf feast.
The real Bourdain died almost two months ago, at the age of sixty-one, of an apparent suicide. Many of us who were fortunate to know him have been left sifting through our records, pulling out bits of unfinished conversations and half-plotted ideas. A few months before his death, I had e-mailed him Brown’s homage, after years of casually wondering if he even knew it existed. The question had also occurred to Brown herself: “No Reservations: Narnia” is her most popular piece of fan fiction. (She told me that she suspects it might be her most popular work, period.) When we corresponded, before Bourdain’s death, she said that she sometimes worried that Bourdain had been sent the link dozens of times.
There persists a mistaken belief, outside the world of fan fiction, that it consists of bad writing from floor to ceiling—ham-handed, indulgent, turgidly sexual, and thoroughly amateurish. For a full-throated defense of the genre, see the Harvard English professor Stephanie Burt on the subject. Or just read Brown’s story, which is so well-told, so deeply researched, so uncannily on point in its representation of the culture and cuisine of Narnia, and so faithful in its mimicry of Bourdain’s writing voice that it is sure to charm any reader who gives it a chance. Including, as it turns out, Bourdain himself. After I sent him “No Reservations: Narnia,” he replied that, contrary to Brown’s concerns, he’d never come across the story before. “This is astonishingly well written with an attention to detail that’s frankly a bit frightening,” he said in an e-mail. “I’m both flattered and disturbed. I think I need a drink.”
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