Archive for January 2008
The scorn of Philip Pullman
I very much enjoyed reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which has recently spawned yet another fantasy film franchise, starting with The Golden Compass (titled Northern Lights outside the US).
But Pullman’s attitudes towards his predecessors, particularly Tolkien and CS Lewis (and I now no doubt join leagues of their defenders) are arrogant and a bit silly.
Pullman has disparaged Lewis as racist and sexist, to some extent a meaningless criticism as it applies to so much of the literature of that time. Modern readers, hopefully, know to read around such ignorance.
Then he dismisses Tolkien’s work as trivial, despite roots in European myth and lore even deeper than his own Miltonian echoes. But Tolkien’s sales are still far in advance of Pullman’s, making this criticism presumptuous, not to mention rather churlish. In Pullman’s Read the rest of this entry »
