Hey look what I found

That IS disgusting. What was it about the whole "Aslan prefering death rather than life " thing. Of course that's not true. Whoever wrote that must be troubled.
 
Yep I'm not a big fan of Philip Pullman at all. If I ever get to meet him he will wish he was dead. If I say any more about this I will get kicked of the site lol :) .....
 
Faun 3.0 said:
It has nothing to do with the movies, and the mod can move this to the a Books
section,
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If you know where a thread belongs, put the thread in the appropriate category. If you know it DOESN'T belong there, don't post it there, please! It makes out lives so much easier.

iMove

Also, stay sane with this thread. Remember, everyone is entitled to their own opinions, even if it isn't the popular one.
 
I_Love_Anna said:
Don't even think twice about them, they are idoits. When does he kill the children?
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*** Spoilers: The Last Battle ***

If you haven't read The Last Battle, the children eventually leave this earth (and Narnia) for a new and perfected Narnia, Lewis' idea of heaven.
 
i respect phillib pullman as a writer and enjoyed his dark materials books prefusely but the way he speakes about narnia is as if someone has told him a slightly biased storyline of the books and that he has then simply let his imagination run wild! that probably only make sense to me.
Im not religious at all in fact im an atheist but that doesnt mean i hate the idea of god! i think Pullman hates God and so he has to hate C S Lewis' books because they bring christianity into them so much. I agree that he is entitled to his opinion but it seems to me that his hate for god blinds any rational view on the books.
In the short Pullman can shove his opinions up his....
 
I like the article actually, because unlike many others, it does really point out how biased and nuts Philip Pullman acts. And it is right that Narnia will find ways of defending itself. Like the fact that it will still be read a hundred years from now, and Philip Pullman's books will not.
 
Philip Pullman is a petty man. He has attack Lewis and Narnia on several occasions and they're not even fair comments. He states how "he" views the books as fact, like when he states Susan goes to Hell (where in the books does it say or suggest that?)
 
Oh, Pullman's blathering is old news by now. Nice to see Hitchens's take on it though. Of "His Dark Materials", I shall say as a certain literary agent (or it may have been Oscar Wilde, I forget) said of a struggling author's manuscript: "I shall waste no time reading it".

I would be delighted to kick Pullman's sorry backside at any time of his choosing - purely in intellectual argument, you understand. If he'd dared to present such a shallow, uninsightful, ill-reasoned piece of literary criticism in an English class, the professor would have thrown the chalk at him. :rolleyes:

And you can line up J K Rowling too, who reportedly thinks that Susan was rejected by Aslan because she discovered sex. :rolleyes: ^3
 
And you can line up J K Rowling too, who reportedly thinks that Susan was rejected by Aslan because she discovered sex. ^3
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I thought JKR was a fan of the Chronicles of Narnia?
 
Intriguing. It doesn't do anything for me and I would have preferred if he had created his own world and not tried to capitalize on Lewis' work, but some authors have made careers doing that.

I don't think that Rowling's comment means she isn't a fan, and it doesn't help that we don't have the context the statement was pulled from. Several people have expressed opinions like that about Susan, it is just conjecture and it doesn't mean that someone is less of a fan.
 
Phillip Pullman is a sad and pathetic man who will never be as influential as C.S Lewis. This I believe is the true reason for his loathing of Lewis.
He criticises Lewis for spreading a Christian message, yet he feels he has the right to to spread an anti-christian message! What a hypocrit! :mad:

And about the whole "death" thing, I think that Lewis is just exploring the idea of death in his novels, reassuring children that it's a natural part of life, not saying that it is better than life!!!! :rolleyes:

And the whole Lucy and Susan thing, I think that's mainly about Lewis's idea of the preservation of children as children. We live in a day and age where children are wrongfully encouraged to grow up before their time. Lewis is simply embodying the unspoiled beauty of Children in Lucy, and he even states that he has hope for Susan, in that she may eventually return to the true path. :)

And there's not a single passage in "The Last Battle" that implies that Susan goes to Hell.
I'm probably wrong about this, but I thought she was in America when the other children were killed on the train.
 
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This is an absolutely appalling excuse for journalism. Regardless of what your own feelings are on Narnia and HDM (I admit straight off, I vastly prefer Narnia and think Pullman can be very irritating) please, please take the time to look at how biased and inflammatory this article is.

Last year he won the Whitbread Prize, normally reserved for adult authors. Now Radio Four is handing over three of its precious Saturday afternoons for an adaptation of his trilogy, His Dark Materials. Nicholas Hytner is preparing Pullman’s works for the stage of the National Theatre, and Hollywood is hoping to do for him what it did for Tolkien.
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Look at that for a minute. His Dark Materials is hardly exceptional in any of this - LotR had a Radio dramatisation

Here is the reason: Philip Pullman is the man who may succeed in destroying a country that the liberal intelligentsia loathe even more than they despise Britain. That country is Narnia, discovered long ago by millions of English-speaking children, and still beloved by many of them.
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He doesn't even try to give any basis or support for this claim. Where is his evidence that "the liberal intelligentsia" (whatever strange hive collective they might be) loathe either Britain or Narnia?

The creator of Narnia, C.S. Lewis, though dead almost 40 years, is the most influential Christian in modern British culture, not because of his faith but because his stories are so good.
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So Lewis's faith is unimportant, because his stories are good, but Pullman's lack of faith is to be our sole guiding criterion. Surely, regardless of one's own views, one can see the hypocrisy in this position?

The cultural elite would like to wipe out this pocket of resistance. They have successfully expelled God from the schools, from the broadcast media and, for the most part, from the Church itself.
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Come again? This terrible elite have managed to kick God out of His own church, and now they're moving onto the library. Does this make sense to anybody?

Philip Pullman allows them to remove Him, and replace The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with Pullman’s very different country of the mind —rebel angels, friendly daemons and witches who are not wicked but good (though Pullman also has a wardrobe).
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Because we all know that there are only two childrens books in print in the English language at the moment. And the rules say you're only allowed read one of them. Presumably for every child there is copy of HDM, and one of CoN. The parents pick one, and the other is burned forever.

Pullman puts forward a complex theory of man’s true destiny, and his stories are a powerful epic that everyone should read.
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At last. A sentence that makes some modicom of sense. Read a book, before you make up your mind about it.

[Pullman]has described the Narnia Chronicles as grotesque, disgusting, ugly, poisonous and nauseating.
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Luckily, we can read the books for ourselves and decide whether or not his reading is a fair one. You can enjoy a man's work without being brainwashed into his way of thinking. The number of fans of Narnia who are not devout Christians is itself indicative of that (although the first paragraph of this article would like you to believe such people do not exist.)

While Lewis portrays rationalist atheists as comically ghastly and joyless, Pullman depicts priests as evil and murderous, drunk and probably perverted, and the Church as a conspiracy against happiness and kindness.
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Alright, so you're saying they both call each other's side names. If that's the case, how is one any better or worse than the other?.

The bad are to be found among the religious, the respectable and the well-off.
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What a ludicrous notion! :rolleyes:

Pullman would have made better use of his dark materials if he had sought to co-exist with Lewis rather than to attack him. Narnia may have no weapons of mass destruction, but it has a powerful guardian, and I have a suspicion that it will find ways of defending itself.
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I do believe that Pullman's work is in places the weaker for it's author's extended vitriol against the instituation of the church. But if he'd 'sought to co-exist with Lewis' he wouldn't have written very good books, would he?

I know that Pullman's works are controversial, and the ideology in them is not everyone's cup of tea, but I'd far rather read both books and decide for myself than take my opinions from a journalist whose writing comes this close to propaganda.
 
Malacandra said:
And you can line up J K Rowling too, who reportedly thinks that Susan was rejected by Aslan because she discovered sex. :rolleyes: ^3
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where did you hear that? not that i'm questioning you, but just wondering.......
 
The Rowling quote, for those who are asking for it is:

J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, has said:

"There comes a point where Susan, who was the older girl, is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She's become irreligious basically because she found sex, I have a big problem with that." (Grossman 2005)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Narnia :)

I don't agree with Rowling. Susan chose not to go to the meeting and because of that her destiny took a new turn. The 'lipstick, nylons and invitations' comment was, more or less, meant to symbolize Susan’s interest in materialism of the secular world over her faith (Narnia). And yes, if she did indeed plan on or was already involved in sexual affairs that is part of materialism, since it involves putting ones secular desires ahead of their spiritual ones. Of course I'm basing this on the Christian perspective since living in sin drifts one away from their faith, whether they like to admit it or not ;)
 
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