Pullman rips on LOTR, others

[Guinevere]

Originally said byPhilipp Pullman:
"'Lord of the Rings,' which I take to be a trivial book."
“just fancy spun candy. There’s no substance to it.”
“ ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is fundamentally an infantile work,”

Grrr... reading such public statements really gets my hackles up!

Like gorthaur_cruel and Quempel mentioned,
this is really quite insulting to all of us who love Tolkien's works and have found meaning and timeless wisdom in them.
And how would Pullman explain the fact that there is so much secondary literature about Tolkien, so many educated and intelligent people occupying themselves with Tolkien's works since decades? Are all these people "immature dolts"?
Really, Philip Pullman should be forced to read Prof. Shippeys book "Tolkien, author of the Century"!!

I have read the "His Dark Materials Trilogy" this year, just so I could form an opinion on Pullman's own writing.
I must admit, that they were very thrilling to read, I liked especially the first volume, but the farther I got, the less I liked it, and the end was downright disappointing. (I agree much with William Cloud Hickly's post!)
They are well written, so one can't stop reading, but once finished, there's nothing that would make me go back and reread , quite unlike LotR.

Originally Posted by Lush

Pullman strikes me as very cerebral and high-arty, but it may very well be that the stuff that imititates Tolkien has actually replaced Tolkien in his mind.

Ha! I really think you are on the right track, Lush!

After all, Pullman said he read the LotR as an adolescent and it doesn't look like he has reread the book since then, let alone the Silmarillion. So his misjudgement on LotR derives from hazy memories of an adolescent (who obviously read it just as an adventure story, much like Peter Jackson did) or perhaps even from seeing the movies.

He is obviously biased by knowing that Tolkien was a devout Catholic.
Like Sir Kohran wrote in his excellent post, in LotR God (Eru) is never mentioned. The hobbits have no religion at all.
It's more about the Northern "Theory of Courage":doing the right thing, because it is right, and not because you get a reward in heaven. But obviously Pullman doesn't see or remember this at all.
And if he states that

“Tolkien is not interested in the way grownup, adult human beings interact with each other.

he should read "Aldarion and Erendis" .

[davem]

Brilliant demolition of HDM:
http://johncwright.livejournal.com/134046.html

[Alonna]

If Mr. Pullman thinks as highly of himself as he seems to based on his interviews, I wonder if he can explain why everyone is trashing the film version of his book. It is currently labeled as rotten by Rotten Tomatoes. Perhaps he should take a long look at why the film version of the "trivial book" turned out to be a far better film than the adaptation of his own.

[Nerwen]

Hang on. Any book can be made into a bad film. That doesn't prove anything.

[davem]

I think its plain that in HDM the message became so dominant in Pullman's mind that the story was thrown away. Pullman is a talented writer - but that's the problem: he's talented enough that he can present boring, illogical & frankly silly ideas in an exciting & interesting way.

The whole 'killing the ghosts' thing in HDM is typical. As the writer of the piece I linked to states, Pullman, in getting rid of God & Heaven & being unable to adopt an idea like reincarnation, is left with offering nothing at all - when you die that's it. You get dissipated into some kind of 'ocean' of matter.

Now that strikes me as being a pretty depressing concept, even if was true - all the people you care about, your friends, family & pets, will die & disappear forever & you'll never see them again, & when you die you'll also just disappear forever.

OK - let's say that's true - & for all I know it may be. It seems to me that the most honest response is to acknowledge the sadness of that, even to grieve over it. The most dishonest response is to present it as some kind of glorious 'liberation' from boredom. But, as I say, Pullman is a skilled writer & can present the ugly in a beautiful way, or the hopeless in a positive way. And too many readers fall for the style & miss the substance. I mean, could we not expect just one character out of all of Pullman's Multi-verses to mutter 'Ey up - that's a bit rubbish!' But no - everyone seems blissed out by how fantastic it is to dissipate into nothingness.

Its a bit like one of those 'well-meaning' adults who can't wait to tell children (for their own good, of course) that there's no Father Christmas or Tooth Fairy - some do it in a stark & simple way, others, the more 'creative' ones, do it in a 'positive', upbeat way, but in the end the children have some of the magic taken from their lives for no better reason than that an adult decided they would be better off without it.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

I absolutely *love* this:

Philip Pullman, author of The Golden Compass, hits back at critics who accuse him of peddling "candy-coated atheism". "I am a story teller," he said. "If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon."

Like he wasn't peddling a message? Like he didn't write a sermon? Puh-leez.

As one commentator at the link site said, it appears that somewhere towards the end of writing Book I Pullman was visited by annoying Jehovah's Witnesses and therefore spent the rest of the time scribbling "GoD SukZ!"

[Lalwendë]

More Pullman/Tolkien hype eh?

Because that's all it is. Hype. He plays on how he's not like Tolkien all the time and for a very good reason. Which author could ever even hope to be like Tolkien? You very rarely see any fantasy author laud Tolkien because as an inevitability they are all compared to him in reviews an on blubs (even on the covers of HDM); writers instead choose to brush over the influence Tolkien has had as something from childhood (Pratchett, Gaiman, Rowling etc) or they go for the anti-Tolkien thing (Pullman, Moorcock etc). To open up and say "Oh yes, I'm the biggest fan of Tolkien, ever" would be tantamount to admitting you are, in fact, Terry Brooks.

So Pullman is simply doing what others have done and going for an angle. There's a blog he writes on somewhere or other on t'internet where he quietly mentions how much he likes Tolkien's work but that never makes it into his hype...it doesn't 'sell'.

And remember who he is, a member of the British Chattering Classes, and one thing they Do Not Like is Fantasy. To do what Pullman has done and produce a work, nay, a trilogy of fantasy novels is tantamount to heresy. The Chattering Classes like their younglings to read serious works of fiction about 'real' things, such as the Tracy Beaker books and whatnot. Things About Dragons And Wizards are only to be tolerated, you can tell this by the fact that Potter novels are published in 'discreet' adult covers so you can hide the fact that you are reading something 'silly and childish' on the tube. And the sheer number of parents I've heard attaching the words Harry and Potter to swear words and exasperation...you can just tell they'd far rather their kids were reading novels about African orphans or something. When Pullman is quoted in The Observer as saying Tolkien Is Pants you can hear the cogs whirring in the minds of Jocasta and Tarquin of islington thinking "Hmmm, these Dark Materials books might be just the ticket for the children" because they are Not Like That Silly Tolkien.

The proof for me is however in the pudding and His Dark Materials is awesome and I'm not going to let what the writer says in his Observer interviews sway me towards dislike.

A lot of people do not and did not like Tolkien but this won't stop me liking their work. Now I must dig out that particularly nasty passage in A Writer's Life which details exactly what Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin thought of Tolkien's lecturing style.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Ah, yes, Amis. Who is at least honest enough to admit he didn't give a tinker's damn about Old English and was only there because it would be on the exam. No wonder he was bored.

Surely we've all encountered a professor or two like Tolkien. The Freshman English 101 survey in the 500-seat lecture hall is not their milieu- but catch them in a seminar with a few genuinely interested upperclassmen......

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hickli

Like he wasn't peddling a message? Like he didn't write a sermon? Puh-leez.

All writers--all writers--display a fundamental world view in their work. Lord of the Rings has one--one that puts off some readers because it offers a 'sanitised' version of class social structure.

The presence of world view becomes particularly apparent in science fiction and fantasy where, because the genres are designed to present imagined/alternate worlds, writers can fall into the habit of overemphasising the world view, so much so that it becomes dogmatic rather than merely assumed.

Milton had a similar problem. Swift toyed with the possibilities. It's what puts me off Heinlein. It isn't peddling a message so much as struggling with the genre.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Of course all writers have a worldview. But the amount of didacticism with which they present it varies considerably. I was responding to Pullman's claim that he wasn't sermonising, which is blatantly untrue.

I fact, in an interview done long before he had to worry about boxoffice, he expressly said his purpose in writing HDM was to 'undermine Christianity.' Now he has every right to do so if he wants: but please don't turn around later and fib about it.


On to Susan Pevensey and her nylons: I rather suspect that if someone had pointed out to Lewis pre-pub that that line could be interpreted the way Pullman (and others) have, he would quickly have amended it. He was trying to say that Susan had become enamoured of the trivial, the 'things of this world;' and had moreover confused them with being 'adult' whereas Narnia was 'childish.' Both Jack and Tollers really, really resented that sort of thinking; and unfortunately Lewis was enough of an Edwardian bachelor-chauvanist to associate 'trivial' + 'young woman' with a sort of Seventeen magazine caricature. He could just as well have said 'records and parties' or 'soap operas' or, if he were really aggressive, 'political theory and macroeconomics.' Rather like Jane at the beginning of That Hideous Strength.

Lord of the Rings has [a worldview]--one that puts off some readers because it offers a 'sanitised' version of class social structure.

However LR isn't about 'class social structure.' Aragorn or for that matter the Shire's squirearchs aren't engaged in stamping out democracy or an anarcho-syndicalist movement or whatever: whereas HDM is specifically at its core about resisting the evil Church and ultimately killing God and overthrowing the Heavenly dictatorship.