Philip Pullman thinks it's all a bit silly

[Igneococcus]

"I just wanted to say, ‘Look, stop it. You’re all being silly.’ He says, from his lofty heights of cluelessness:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/335e06ce-1466-11eb-bca5-e85774a5f3b9?shareToken=3d2b297c40a1bcf4a765dd31286885a0

Tolkien was perhaps a better tutor in written form.

His notes on Beowulf (collected and published by his estate post-humously) are absolutely marvellous and made me feel something of his passion for it, and I'm saying that as someone who regarded GCSE English literature as literal torture.

Nesbit does sometimes go in for a pot of message though: remember the wonderful future world one of her groups of children gets into, with the child who has been "expelled" from school for the day because he tore up a piece of paper and threw the bits around in the playground, and little rhymes for kiddies ("I must not litter the beautiful street/with bits of paper and things to eat/I must not pick the public flowers/They are not mine, for they are ours" still haunts me) and general preachiness.

I misread it initially and thought it was talking about him sitting in his ‘smug, book-lined study’

A bit shit for someone of his stature to not care about any of this. Philip Pullman would have been well aware of JK Rowling getting death and rape threats. Yet he thinks we’re all being ‘silly’? Because he’s all right jack.

I find his attitude odd considering he wrote The Golden Compass which has politically-based experiments on children as a central plot line.. so he knows perfectly well. He’s too careerist or scared to say anything.

I mistyped there. Meant to say ‘Maybe’ he’s too careerist or scared. I don’t know the motivation but in any case his response was very disappointing.

AskingQuestionsAllTheTime thank you for those amusing anecdotes!

As for Pullman, that's hardly a unique reaction to women's rights issues amongst men, especially men that age. My dad's view was that we were all being hysterical rather than silly. Given my public activism, meetings with politicians etc he did reconsider at some point, and I did manage to eventually explain the negative impact of transgender ideology and legislation on women's rights to him (using the Scottish law designed to ensure equal representation on public boards), but then he went and forgot it all again. So, honestly, I'm not even going to bother explaining it again. Because he's not the problem. At least not in my view.

Now Pullman does have reach my father doesn't, but he's still not the problem in my view. He has a much right to his opinion as I do, and anyone who thinks we're being silly is much more likely to underestimate us and let us get on with it than those trying to stop us discussing the issue.

So while I understand why his remarks may annoy others, I just don't care enough about him to get annoyed, too.

He's inconsistent about Nesbit: 'It always struck me as blasphemous on the part of the children's writers of the so-called golden age, this sickly nostalgia that you see in AA Milne, E Nesbit [The Railway Children, 1906] Kenneth Grahame [Wind in the Willows, 1908], that squad' (Mail 2017)
But elsewhere he cites her as a major influence...

From an article about E Nesbit"
Philip Pullman:The books I read as a child shaped my deepest beliefs. When I was at university, my friends and I were thrilled to discover that our childhood favourites seemed even more powerful than we remembered. This was true of classic authors such as George MacDonald, Rudyard Kipling, E Nesbit and Tove Jansson; or 1960s writers like Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, Peter Dickinson and Ursula Le Guin." (SlaphappyLarry 2015)
Haha!

One of the themes in His Dark Materials is that going through puberty is an important part of life, and that interfering with that process is evil.

Oh yeah. It was beautifully written too.

But the characters had very gendered souls, didn't they? The shapeshifting (till puberty) animal part ("daemon") was always the opposite gender of the person's physical sex.
I think that's a Jungian concept? (anima/animus)
And Jung is a bit old-fashioned sexist...

Trying to be fair, I read

he didn’t understand the hoo-ha about JK Rowling’s exhortation that women, not people, menstruate.

as meaning that he didn't understand why she was being viciously attacked for it, as indeed anyone who wasn't entirely aware of the whole anti-women campaign wouldn't. Then he was himself attacked, found that equally baffling, and categorised all parties as "being silly".

As well as one or two excellent books with only about 50% Message in them, George MacDonald wrote some fair-to-average pap too: I recommend A Rough Shaking as an example of Goddy tosh. It does have the distinction of telling its trembling readers about a rat trying to eat a baby at one point, but that doesn't really redeem it. I get so bored with Children Too Good To Live (see At the Back of the North Wind. )

Dido, I completely agree with you about the chronicles of Narnia. I'm happily atheist, grew up in an oppressively religious culture and no longer like being preached to, but still found those books utterly magical and love them. Love the wacky sci-fi trilogy too (despite the sexism).

I didn't twig that Narnia was about Christianity until he really, really rammed it down my throat at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader with that wretched Lamb turning into Aslan. And then I was affronted and thought it must have been an accident, because nobody would be so obvious! (OK, I think I was seven at the time, so I hadn't yet noticed how preachy people often are in their writing for children.)

George MacDonald's Lilith and Phantastes are extremely weird. I don't remember the plot detail of either but they may well be the first true fantasy novels.

Pullman's criticism of A.A Milne as "sickly nostalgia" is codswallop. The Pooh books are very funny. There's a dry sense of humour there ; particularly in the writing of the characters of Owl and Eeyore. Eeyore is an immensely quotable character. And how anyone who can dismiss the sweetness and melancholy at end of The House at Pooh Corner as "sickly nostalgia" is bizarre.

I'm going off Pullman. He comes across as a bit vain and egotistical (and The Commonwealth of Dust was a bit dull)

It's about par for the course with Pullman though. His Dark Materials is supposedly an answer to Lewis and Christianity generally, but it's always seemed to me that he deliberately misunderstood both. It seemed unbelievable that someone with a brain would bother writing a whole series of novels to refute a straw-manned version of anything.

I suspect now he's like some of the New Atheist crew who imagine that it's religion per se that is related to irrational ideas, orthodoxies, and dangerous ideologies (because that of course describes all of them which is why only clearly stupid people like Lewis or Tolkien were ever religious), and somehow non-religious ideologies are exempt from these things. Any evidence of similar irrationality or bad behaviour in those is just by chance.

and The Commonwealth of Dust was a bit dull or indeed The Secret Commonwealth

@CousinKrispy

Dido, I completely agree with you about the chronicles of Narnia. I'm happily atheist, grew up in an oppressively religious culture and no longer like being preached to, but still found those books utterly magical and love them. Love the wacky sci-fi trilogy too (despite the sexism).

CousinKrispy that sounds almost exactly where I come from in relation to the Narnia books, which I also loved, except for the final one - The Last Battle which I loathed - horribly mysogynistic, and really upsetting unless you were a deep religious believer.

Spoiler alert: Only three of the children go back into Narnia - Susan is no longer one of them because she's become a teenage girl and is no longer interested in magical things, being distracted by (as I recall) boys and make-up and the like. Her siblings talk about her with some contempt, I think (I haven't read it since I was that sort of age myself) At the end of the book it transpires that the other three are now dead in the real world and will never go back to England as they get to stay with Aslan forever (happy happy, joy joy). I don't think Susan is even mentioned at that point but I was haunted for ages by the way she was now left to spend the rest of her life bereft of her family and excluded from paradise for the sin of being a girl on her way to becoming a woman.

Lucretia I agree. I loved Narnia, but The Last Battle is awful. There is some wonderful fanfic out there that carefully analyses the dialogue (the people harshest on her are Digory Kirke and Polly who would hardly know her) and postulates scenarios that might mean Susan is left behind not as a judgement, but because she is needed to do Aslan's work in this world.

Oh, I don't think the point with Susan was that she'd never join the others.

I think it was more about the fact that in adolescence many people lose sight of themselves.

She didn't die with the others so she would have the opportunity to find herself again.

I’ve tried with Pullman’s work, but I just don’t enjoy him as a writer. I feel there’s a coldness and a dislike of ordinary people at the heart of his books. (As a digression, I was thinking that PD James strikes me the same way, and I find her uncomfortable reading. And then I remembered her book The Children of Men - which is set in 2021. Given how 2020 turned out ... en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children_of_Men).

I love CS Lewis. I’m not at all religious, but he is such a wonderful writer of such lucid prose. I remember reading The Allegory of Love and thinking that while I disagreed with it, just reading it was pleasure and I wanted to agree with him because it is such a beautiful book.

And Tolkien’s Tree and Leaf is as good a handbook on how to write fantasy as has ever been written.

That's interesting about P.D.James, I never thought of her as disliking people in general. Though I did think she seemed interested in the question of evil.

I can't remember which P.D James novel it was but I was left with an impression she disliked ordinary people. It might have been Cover her Face or Devices and Desires

To be fair she didn't come across that way in interviews.

@DidoLamenting

I can't remember which P.D James novel it was but I was left with an impression she disliked ordinary people. It might have been Cover her Face or Devices and Desires

To be fair she didn't come across that way in interviews.

I found Cover Her Face kind of disturbing.

Agree completely, Goosefoot, I still can't understand how Pullman gets away with it in Dark Materials - when I first read them, up to about half way through the second vol I was expecting the actual, Christian church to appear and explain that the Magisterium had forgotten about Christ! Straw man indeed.I
The whole thing with Susan is, I feel, very relevant to a lot of The discussion here - she falls into the trap of stereotypical young womanhood, and prefers to 'perform' that rather than being her own self. Sound familiar? She's not punished and cast out, but left to grow into herself again.
This is a theme that Lewis returned to in That Hideous Strength with Mark, whose moment of truth comes when he has finally to choose between his own true self and the constructed self that he has used since school so as to belong to the 'cool' set. Again, sound familiar?
What I love about Lewis is his ability to skewer our tendency to nonsense; he understood human beings, largely because he was honest about his own self.
And I agree with t he 'lucid prose ' DanceLike Lewis can say more, more clearly, in fewer words, than almost any other writer.

This in the Sunday Times today "Defend your writers, publishers, or be damned: how the books trade went woke":

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/93e05a8c-139f-11eb-8d4b-d807836d5e13?shareToken=d5c446cc74f5c370af6f1d644166308f

Jane in That Hideous Strength exists only to be a Useful Psychic and a Good Christian-Style Wife and to have the Right Baby, though, and quite a bit of the book involves people persuading her to do the latter. Merlin, I seem to remember, says she ought to be killed for having used contraception and not had the Right Baby at the right time. I read it at fifteen and didn't re-read so I may have misinterpreted that, but it was one of my two takeaways from it, along with how easily the NICE (ie malign forces) took everything over and nobody who wasn't One Of The Good Guys In White Hats even tried very hard to stop them.

That last bit has coloured my ways of thinking ever since, so maybe there is some good in Lewis!

Some author of olden days ought to explain to The Times that the publishers were never "bastions of freedom of speech". There is a reason for the "colourful language" in Diana Wynne Jones' Wilkin's Tooth, published in 1973: she was not allowed to use even mild bad language like "damn" in a book for children, not even when it was entirely in keeping with the characters who used it. So they say "puce" and the like instead.