(Untitled)

[aerynne]

While browsing Amazon to find a book my brother might like for his birthday, I ended up on the reviews page for the Philip Pullman trilogy His Dark Materials. Unsurprisingly, nearly all of the one-star reviews say something along the lines of "oh my god these books are atheist! I would not let any child read these books and adults should stay away

Comments

[lightcastle]

Oh I agree. Mind you, I do think Rowling was without higher agenda. :)

[aerynne]

Well, yeah. But C.S. Lewis? Come on, lady.

[lightcastle]

Well, *I* thought that until I was in my teens or something. :-)

(Yeah, she does sort of destroy her own argument.)

[alice_ayers]

How old is your brother?

Also, I'm interested in how much less Catholic The Golden Compass (which the only book I read and one I didn't love) was made in order to have the very Catholic Nicole Kidman participate.

[lightcastle]

From what I understand, ALL references to the Church have been removed. It is some nebulous "authority" now.

[aerynne]

He's turning seventeen. The other one was easy; at twenty-one you get a how-to-mix-drinks manual.

I started it years ago on a friend's recommendation and remember not being completely absorbed by it, but about a year ago we listened to the audiobooks and they were lovely. It's rare that an audiobook grabs me more than the original in print form.

I have heard that they have completely gutted the religious parts of the story. This makes me very dubious--what the hell are they going to do with the end? I heard similar things about the The Dark Is Rising movie, although I never read the books.

[tirinian]

From what I heard about the The Dark Is Rising movie, they actually did the reverse there - took a bunch of generic/pagan weirdshit from the books, and made it Christian weirdshit, rather than taking a bunch of clearly-Catholic stuff and making it random bad guys.

The books are quite good, and well worth reading, although the style of story/amount of weirdshit varies a lot over the five of them.

[tober]

Indeed. While the Narnia books are not exactly Chick Tracts, they're still chock full o' Jesus.

[anonymous]

Children's books and stories have never been meaningless fluff; look at Roald Dahl's books, or The Outsiders, or Where the Red Fern Grows, or even the more recent Holes. These are books that accurately portray a child's world for what it is: a harsh, bewildering place that is almost entirely outside of their comprehension or control, but one that also harbors good people and beautiful things that are worth the trouble. The really fine children's books, the ones that last, are about children struggling with this world on its own terms - they're about growing up.

Remember, at the end of Dahl's The Witches, the little kid who was turned into a mouse (remember? the kid whose parents didn't love him?) doesn't get turned back. He stays a mouse forever. It's never been about sunshine and rainbows - at least not ones that aren't earned.

Re: Whoops

[aerynne]

Exactly. When you give a kid a book that's all sunshine and rainbows, they will generally disdain it for being "for babies". They want books that are like real life, and they're not unaware of the darker side of it.

I am currently reading a book of Roald Dahl's short stories for adults, and man, are they ever bleak. I can't read more than one or two in a row--I keep having to insert some fluff to keep from going crazy.

Re: Whoops

[ironrat]

Is that the Omnibus? Many of those stories are brilliant and wonderful.

[ghudson]

I thought Pullman was laying it on pretty thick.

It's been probably two decades since I read the Chronicles of Narnia. Is it just that Lewis was recreating the story of Jesus in a fantasy setting, or did he eventually come out and start preaching? I don't think I realized the religious overtones in the Narnia books until they were pointed out to me years after I read them. In contrast, you can't read the Dark Materials series and not get a good idea of what the author thinks.

(I'm reminded of someone who tried to sell his used Thomas Covenant books to a sci-fi/fantasy bookstore and was turned away because titles like _The Power That Preserves_ made the clerk think they were crazy religious tracts.)

[lerta]

This is a decent start on what I want to say. I don't really follow that reviewer's logic, so I can't quite respond to it directly. But, I did find the way Pullman went at it to be - odd. Even more after reading an interview with him. Close-minded one-track atheists bug me as much as close-minded one-track Christians.

I did like the series, but much more at the beginning. I had a hard time making myself finish the last book. I felt like he was trying really hard to make a social commentary and that he believed he was following some sort of flawless logic. And I ended up so distracted by the flaws in his logic, and so annoyed at him trying to make his point, that the story really suffered.

[aerynne]

There was totally some heavy-handedness there, but I was willing to let him get away with it because I found the story so interesting. YMMV.

Have either of you read the Narnia books since you were a kid? Pullman has nothing on Lewis for obvious overtones. I'd estimate that the average kid is about as likely to see either.

[tirinian]

Honestly, for all people talk (complain) about the overtones in Narnia, the only books where I think they're really that strong are The Magician's Nephew and The Last Battle (the creation and destruction stories have some pretty specific Christian counterparts, although they do stuff wrong for a pure Christian allegory, too). The rest of them are adventure stories with a God figure, but saying that God is specifically Jesus rather than Apollo or Vishnu is pretty hard from the text, without getting into "But Lewis is a big Christian apologist, so it must be Jesus!"

Even in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, which is the next most strongly Christian, you've only got three major possibly-non-generic-god points: people announce he's coming, he comes back from the dead after sacrificing himself, and he's got a father/boss who doesn't appear in the story himself. They add up to Jesus if you're looking for him, but if you're not, they could apply about as well to Horus/Osiris or Dionysus or someone. (Given that he summons Bacchus