Phillip Pullman

Michael Straight · 25 Apr 2001, 10:33 · from urth-v0030.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: (urth) Phillip Pullman
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 10:33:17
Message-ID: <urth-v0030-0339 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0030/0339.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On Wed, 18 Apr 2001, William Ansley wrote:

> unlike themselves. And Pullman evidently regards the success of the first=20
> two volumes in the series to be a license to turns parts of the third boo=
k=20
> into a virulent anti-Catholic screed (thinly disguised but unmistakable).=
 I=20
> consider myself agnostic, but this aspect of the book made me=20
> uncomfortable. A certain anti-church bias is evident in the first two boo=
ks=20
> as well, but nothing like what comes out in the third.

Interestingly, First Things, a conservative, mostly Roman Catholic journal
has a mostly positive review of Pullman's series this month (May issue) by
Daniel Moloney.  He's not so concerned about the anti-church stuff as what
he considers the artistic/philosophical failure to create a convincing
alternative metaphyics.  He argues that the parts that work the best
artistically owe the most to the Christian story/worldview.  Not having
read the books yet, I can't say whether the article makes a good case or
not, but it and this discussion have convinced me to give them a try. =20
The article will be available on their website (www.firstthings.com) in a
few weeks.

-Rostrum

Here's a quote that may be a spoiler (so beware!):

"As is, I can fairly characterize His Dark Materials in this fashion:
imagine if at the beginning of the world, Satan's rebellion had been
successful, that he had reigned for two thousand years, and that a messiah
was necessary to conquer lust and the spirit of domination with innocence,
humility, and generous love at great personal cost.  Such a story is not
subversive of Christianity."

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net