My Yahoo! + Movable Type Blog

“Pity those—adventurers, adolescents, authors of young adult fiction—who make their way in the borderland between worlds. It is at worst an invisible and at best an inhospitable place. Build your literary house on the borderlands, as English writer Philip Pullman has done, and you may find that your work is recommended by booksellers as a stopgap between installments of Harry Potter, to children who cannot (one hopes) fully appreciate it, and to adults, disdainful or baffled, who “don’t read fantasy.”
Michael Chabon

Books of Fantasy and the imagination are not only timeless, they also hold appeal for all readers whether young or old. Fantasy writers like Garth Nix, Cornelia Funke, and Patricia McKillip, working in a tradition that includes well know authors like Susan Cooper and less familiar writers like George McDonald, have added to the rich vein of literature available to discerning readers of all ages. Philip Pullman had authored numerous books for children and Young Adults before turning the literary world on its head several years ago with the publication of The Golden Compass, book one of the “His Dark Materials” trilogy. There is some question whether this series even qualifies as Children’s literature, with its dark, Miltonian undertones. It is a long and sweeping narrative, running 1300 pages with weighty themes and theological concepts that merit serious discourse and debate. Book 3 of the series, The Amber Spyglass, won both the Guardian Award and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, the first time a book ostensibly written for children had ever been considered for either. The book has generated some controversy (though nothing like that which followed the publication of Harry Potter), and widespread critical acclaim.

Trying to distinguish between children’s books and adult books is a little like trying to determine when childhood ends and adulthood begins. I doubt if anyone would call Alice in Wonderland a serious book. It was written for children—or at least for a child (Charles L. Dodgson’s niece), but it is hard to think of it as strictly a child’s book. It contains word games and logic puzzles that the most astute reader will appreciate. A plucky little heroine and the most wonderful ensemble of characters this side of the land of Oz make this a book that can be read again and again. What began as an innocent children’s book, The Hobbit; or, There and Back Again, grew into a mythically-charged opus, “The Lord of the Rings,” under the pen of another Oxford Professor, J.R.R. Tolkien. It wasn’t until midway through the first book, The Fellowship of the Ring, that it occurred to Tolkien that children were no longer his primary audience. Susan Cooper was quoted in an interview as saying that she did not write for any particular age group; it is the publisher who decides how they will be marketed.

Even if Pullman is not writing for children, it is clear that he is aware of a responsibility to offer children a clear and in his word “republican” view of the place that Fantasy can have in their lives. He even takes jabs at Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, contrasting the artificiality of the Shire, for example, with a great “republican” fairy tale like “Jack and the Beanstalk.” “The difference,” he writes, “is the connection, or lack of it, with the everyday.” In this he comes across like Chairman Mao extolling the virtues of proletarian labors over the affected tastes of the bourgeois elite. It seems the real problem with writers like Lewis and Tolkien is that their work is escapist (in fact, Fantasy is often branded with this label). C.S. Lewis escapes into his Christian tautology and Tolkien into an “idealized modest English landscape full of comfortable hobbits who know their social place,” which he compares to “an Old English Theme Pub.”

While I am a great admirer of Philip Pullman and consider “His Dark Materials” one of the most exciting literary achievements of recent times, I am troubled by his cosmology. While the majority of religions view life on earth as a preliminary to some sort of afterlife, what Pullman seems to be saying is that what’s being served here on Earth is the main course, and it is our obligation to savor it more fully. “Joy,” he says, equals heaven. His republican view of heaven, where human beings are responsible for their own destinies, is no better than traditional religions when it comes to explaining why everyone isn’t getting an equal portion at the feast. At least in the latter view there is a promise that things will even out in the end: “But many who are first will be last, and the last first.” In theological terms, we rely on our Maker, however he/she is called, to give us the strength to survive. In the Republic of Heaven, we must rely on ourselves. And each other. That’s not a bad ideal but given our track record over the past couple of millennia, we don’t seem to be equal to the task. Still it’s an interesting concept and brilliantly presented. One thing I do agree with Pullman about: he suggests that to look for evidence of what the republic of heaven might look like, we should begin by looking at stories. “And one of the few places we can be certain of finding stories these days is in books that are read by children.”

“All mystery resides there,” picking up where we left off with the excerpt from Michael Chabon’s review, “in the margins between life and death, childhood and adulthood, Newtonian and quantum, serious and genre literature. And it is from the confrontation with mystery that the truest stories have always drawn their power.”

Sources quoted:

Review “His Dark Materials” trilogy, by Michael Chabon. TheNew York Review of Books, v.LI, 5 (March 25, 2004)