In Praise of Philip Pullman
I just finished reading one of the most amazing books I've ever encountered, and by "amazing" I don't mean "somewhat remarkable" or "really very good," the way you might say "This is an amazing omelet." I mean that reading it, you enter into a new worlds—worlds, in fact—full of danger and staggering surprises and the profoundest possible mystery. What's that? Which book am I talking about already? Glad you asked. I"m talking about The Subtle Knife, the second in Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials.
I discovered the series through a piece that Christopher Hitchens wrote about the Harry Potter books. Hitchens hoped that kids who had enjoyed those would, as he said, "graduate" to the Pullman trilogy. I was intrigued by that: Hitchens is often cranky but rarely flat wrong about anything, and if he put it that way there had to be something going on with the books he mentioned. And to be honest, I'd always felt something missing in Harry Potter, as much as I enjoyed the series. Rowling is a clever writer, diligent, a master of craft, but really not an artist. She imagined a world with witches in it, certainly, but the core of her universe is a sort of joke: The witches are just like us. They're individuals with strengths and weaknesses, and they have institutions that are broadly outlined parodies of real-world ones. And witches can do magic, but there's no real mystery there. They just can, the way some people can wiggle their ears. I'd have to say that the world she imagined is really rather conventional, and she's not the most imaginative or ambitious writer you could think of.
Pullman is a different story. He drops you down in the middle of things and you have to figure out what's going on, and by the end of the second book it's obvious that he's in the ranks of the most ambitious storytellers in history—Tolkien, Milton, like that. In this series he takes the deepest mysteries of science and the deepest mysteries of religion and fuses them, the way parallel lines meet in infinity. And he makes you feel it—there really are times where you have to stop reading to recompose yourself. And it's scary—I've been careful about reading it late at night, or in certain dark moods.
That said, yeah, it's probably classifiable as "fantasy" and it's also classifiable as "young adult fiction," and if you turn up your nose at that fine, go read some Joyce Carol Oates or something, you stupid hopeless snob. But if you liked HP and you're ready for a much, much wilder ride, or if you're open to the fantasy genre in general or you're just looking for a hell of a well-written yarn by one of the most imaginative people living today then check out this trilogy, starting with The Golden Compass.
I discovered the series through a piece that Christopher Hitchens wrote about the Harry Potter books. Hitchens hoped that kids who had enjoyed those would, as he said, "graduate" to the Pullman trilogy. I was intrigued by that: Hitchens is often cranky but rarely flat wrong about anything, and if he put it that way there had to be something going on with the books he mentioned. And to be honest, I'd always felt something missing in Harry Potter, as much as I enjoyed the series. Rowling is a clever writer, diligent, a master of craft, but really not an artist. She imagined a world with witches in it, certainly, but the core of her universe is a sort of joke: The witches are just like us. They're individuals with strengths and weaknesses, and they have institutions that are broadly outlined parodies of real-world ones. And witches can do magic, but there's no real mystery there. They just can, the way some people can wiggle their ears. I'd have to say that the world she imagined is really rather conventional, and she's not the most imaginative or ambitious writer you could think of.
Pullman is a different story. He drops you down in the middle of things and you have to figure out what's going on, and by the end of the second book it's obvious that he's in the ranks of the most ambitious storytellers in history—Tolkien, Milton, like that. In this series he takes the deepest mysteries of science and the deepest mysteries of religion and fuses them, the way parallel lines meet in infinity. And he makes you feel it—there really are times where you have to stop reading to recompose yourself. And it's scary—I've been careful about reading it late at night, or in certain dark moods.
That said, yeah, it's probably classifiable as "fantasy" and it's also classifiable as "young adult fiction," and if you turn up your nose at that fine, go read some Joyce Carol Oates or something, you stupid hopeless snob. But if you liked HP and you're ready for a much, much wilder ride, or if you're open to the fantasy genre in general or you're just looking for a hell of a well-written yarn by one of the most imaginative people living today then check out this trilogy, starting with The Golden Compass.
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