His dark materials

[methodius]

I've just re-read His dark materials by Philip Pullman.

It's not really a trilogy, but rather a single novel in three volumes, like Lord of the rings. Pullman rather immodestly claims that his books are better than those of Tolkien or C.S. Lewis.

I first read His dark materials about five years ago, and didn't like it much. I thought the first

Comments

Pullman, Peretti and Lewis

[methodius]

I suppose if I hadn't read a couple of Frank Peretti's books, Pullman's "angels" might not have struck me as quite so ludicrous, and the whole battle scene is pure Peretti.

When I first read The amber spyglass I thought the land of the dead part was a bit of a cliche -- rather like the paths of the dead in Lord of the rings (which has always struck me as one of the most unnecessary parts of that story). And Dante had one and Virgil before him and so on.

The mulefa and their wheels were quite interesting, and in some ways the most interesting part of the book, but also the part where Pullman's resentment of Lewis seems to come out most strongly. I may be misjudging, but it looks as though he takes Lewis's concept of hnau (from Out of the silent planet) and tries to counter the use Lewis made of it. In Lewis the villains are a mad scientist and an evil financier, who have their evil imperialistic schemes brought to nothing by a humanities professor.

But in Lewis's book the hnau of Malacandra are still biped vertebrates. Pullman makes his seem even more alien by giving them a different physical structure, but also tries to take revenge on Lewis by making the hero(ine) a physicist and the villain a priest (who wants to convert the mulefa from their "evil" practice of using wheels.

I suppose that having grown up in apartheid South Africa, the oyarsa of Malacandra's demolition of Weston's pompous racism and imperialism struck a chord with me. Though the setting was another world, it related to real human behaviour in this one, whereas Pullman's take on it just seems banal.