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rug

(82,333 posts) Sun Sep 27, 2015, 02:33 PM Sep 2015

'The Golden Compass' Turns 20 (Its Daemon Has Probably Settled)

September 26, 2015 7:39 AM ET
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

There's a special place in the canon for the truly sophisticated children's fantasy series - Tolkein, LeGuin, Lewis, L'Engle and Pullman. This year, the first book in Philip Pullman's famed trilogy, "His Dark Materials," turn 20 years old. The novels in that series - "The Golden Compass," "The Subtle Knife," "The Amber Spyglass" - tell a kind of anti-creation story, the tale of a 12-year-old, Lyra Belacqua, her daemon Pantalaimon, and their epic struggle against a church called the Magisterieum. The books still inspire passion and occasional Ph.D. theses and maybe the mark of real excellence. They are still banned every now and then. To observe the 20th anniversary, Philip Pullman joins us in the studios of the BBC in Oxford. Thanks so much for being with us.

PHILIP PULLMAN: Thank you for inviting me.

SIMON: You've suggested that stories are the way to teach morality.

PULLMAN: Well, I'm not the first person to observe this fact that people remember stories better than they remember commands. One of the greatest storytellers of all time, Jesus of Nazareth, told stories in order to make his moral teaching more memorable, more explicit, more clear to everyone.

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=443439225

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'The Golden Compass' Turns 20 (Its Daemon Has Probably Settled) (Original Post) rug Sep 2015 OP

the trilogy is some of the best two books I ever read MisterP Sep 2015 #1

MisterP

(23,730 posts)

1. the trilogy is some of the best two books I ever read

Reply to rug (Original post)

Sun Sep 27, 2015, 04:43 PM

Sep 2015

Last edited Wed Sep 30, 2015, 03:14 PM - Edit history (4)

he also says the Stalinist USSR was a theocracy, blames "the Church" for infibulation of both sexes in East Africa, and said Narnia shouldn't be made into a movie (it's not "censorship" when HE does it!): he's oddly shallow in so many ways

on edit: it's been bugging me for years now, but it's supposed to be a scientist-burning Catho-Calvinist Tehran, and yet we have glamor models, cocktail parties, dance-halls, couturiers, people with same-sex dæmons running around in public, and the atomic Bomb AND the ability to send it across the multiverse to wherever the target's standing; his allohistory has no consistency, he just piles up some vague Popery-baiting he took from Kingsley Amis's The Alteration (like, I'm surprised that if Amis has an estate it hasn't sued because whole swathes are clearly plagiarized)

I think it's because Pullman actually has no idea about what Christianity IS, and just lumps together anything he vaguely resents and then windmills his arms at it: his out-of-print Galatea also has this problem, so it ends up irresolute and irresolute and you just shrug at the end of all the well-written adventure

it'd make a great miniseries, but he's always eager to move on and he knows less about actual Christianity than Dan Brown does

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