Pullman rips on LOTR, others

[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.