OT- His Dark Materials

Don Doggett · 14 Oct 2004, 17:08 · from 2004-October.txt.gz

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: harlekin at earthlink.net (Don Doggett)
Date: Thu Oct 14 17:08:23 2004
Subject: (urth) OT- His Dark Materials
Message-ID: <3A667AE8-1E3E-11D9-AE24-0003939CE29C at earthlink.net>

Hey everyone,

	I just finished The Amber Spyglass last night and I have to say I was 
pleasantly surprised by the entire trilogy.  The only review I read of 
it was backhandedly complimentary and very critical of Pullman's 
negative approach to God and the Church.  I think the reviewer dropped 
the ball though.  It seems to me the work is profoundly Gnostic and 
having taken that viewpoint, it couldn't go in any other direction.  
Careful reading reveals that Pullman (no matter what his personal 
beliefs, which I don't know) leaves open the question of an ultimate 
Creator.  All he's really saying is the God of the Christian Church 
ain't it.  He's the Demiurge, a big faker who makes the world a worse 
place than it needs to be.  It's really interesting to read him with 
Wolfe in mind.   Though Pullman isn't nearly as subtle a writer, IMO, 
he is certainly as humane, and probably more sympathetic to women than 
Wolfe. (Though I tend to agree with Blattid's fallen world theory 
regarding that).  But they're apples and oranges I suppose.

Just my two cents

Don

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