Sunday evening already?

[cleolinda]

So, here's what's new in the world of L'affaire Lexicon:

soleta_nf remembered Steve Vander Ark saying at Convention Alley 2004 that "his real reason for starting the lexicon was that he knew JKR would be publishing an encyclopedia someday, and he hoped that, by having already created one, he would be the person she approached to help her with it."

Comments

[theatre_angel]

I think he was criticizing the Narnia books for the ways that they dealt with the religious themes. Fundamentally, they aren't very different from His Dark Materials, but Lewis' way of handling the themes was very cold and proposed answers that Pullman, and probably a lot of other readers, found unsatisfying. In Pullman's books, there are no real answers proposed (though you could argue that the Republic of Heaven is one), and his series could pretty much serve as a commentary and an examination. I'm curious as to what you found un-subtle about the way in which he handled being "preachy", I can't really remember a part in any of the books where I found him being that at all.

[discogravy]

to be fair, CS Lewis later regretted some of the coldness in his early writings (cf his "The Problem of Pain"; whereas he had in his earlier life dismissed pain, when it seriously hit home for him (death of his wife) he lost some of the coldness that commonly gets attributed to him (or at least his earlier writing). See also Lewis' "Shadowlands" (or film based on,) or his "A Grief Observed"

It's very odd...

[dakiwiboid]

When I was a child, I found the Narnia books very comforting, probably because of the idea of escaping into a world where good things were possible and happy endings could happen appealed to me. There are no happy endings in Pullman, and the deaths and separations seem even more horrific to me than the ones that take place in the Narnia books. I'm glad that I'm not a child growing up with the Pullman books, to be honest.

Re: It's very odd...

[theatre_angel]

Oh, I totally get that. I remember reading both when I was very young and found Narnia more accessible because of the happy endings it provided. I think what bothered me as I got older was, again, Lewis' handling of the themes: denying Susan entrance to Narnia because she grew up (condemnation of sex, which is a very human thing, has never sat well with me in religious contexts), and ultimately killing the children at the very end. As if death were supposed to be better than life, when they could have Done Good in the world with what they'd learned from their adventures, as Pullman proposed. In a way, HDM is the more real series -- it embraces human frailties and flaws and does not embrace any certainty of happy endings and does not answer all the questions it asked. In a way, I always found it more true to life.

I get really annoyed with Pullman's choices, though

[dakiwiboid]

Is realism always necessary in literature? Do we read fantasy for realism? Did he really have to destroy just about every potentially nurturing relationship those poor kids got into, except for the essentially sterile ones they're left with at the end? I don't think that's positive at all. Reading this as a kid might have driven me away from fantasy altogether. Doing Good in the World is no substitute for not having love.

I don't think it's any more realistic for Lyra to plan to do a Prisoner of Zenda thing where she sits in the College gardens with her Beautiful Memories once a year while she's married to someone else than it would have been for her to actually have had some kind of a future with Will. It's just another form of romanticism.

Re: I get really annoyed with Pullman's choices, though

[theatre_angel]

Pullman's said that he never intended to write fantasy, that he's actually averse towards the genre. Which is a bit weird, when you think about it, because it seems as though he could easily have pulled out and written some meditation on Paradise Lost or some modern book that was an exploration of the Christian faith. Which would not have been as exciting or interesting, but which would have worked. So though his decision to ultimately pursue fantasy is certainly a factor, I think HDM needs to be approached as not exclusively fantasy -- it does contain undeniable elements of realism, and this is Pullman's attempt to tie together the real world and the one of our imagination. The best fantasy is the one that contains parallels to life