Black and White?

Ron Charles, the latest critic to explain how Harry Potter is destroying literature as we know it, serves up this pearl of wisdom:

The vast majority of adults who tell me they love "Harry Potter" never move on to Susanna Clarke's enchanting "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell," with its haunting exploration of history and sexual longing, or Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials," a dazzling fantasy series that explores philosophical themes (including a scathing assault on organized religion) that make Rowling's little world of good vs. evil look, well, childish.

Yeah, sure, whatever. Of course Philip Pullman is a better literary craftsman than J.K. Rowling. But the kind of hectoring Manichaenism on display in Pullman's His Dark Materials makes Rowling look like Patricia Highsmith by comparison. Difficult as it may be to believe, one can be a masterful prose stylist and have a somewhat childish worldview, all at the same time.

Peter Suderman has a more thorough (and polite) dressing down of Charles' essay here.

Comments

What's so awful about J.K. Rowling's craftsmanship? Writing prose that appeals to a huge range of ages and intelligence levels isn't easy.

If had you told me a dozen years ago that some unknown author was going to become a billionaire, I'd have been quite relieved when it turned out to be Rowling.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 16, 2007 4:28 PM

Philip Pullman a "masterful prose stylist?"

Please. Talk about grade-inflation. He's a competent story-teller with an unchallenging prose style.

And I wouldn't call his worldview "childish." Children are rarely so stupid. No. I'd call it hopelessly *adolescent*. Even today, he seems to think that what stands between us and his gooey "republic of heaven" is an excess of sexual repression!

A true product of his ridiculous generation.

Posted by Steve Burton | July 16, 2007 4:49 PM

I don't get the "by comparison." Is Highsmith really renowned for her mature and nuanced perspectives on good and evil? I thought she wrote thrillers, and really cynical thrillers.

Also: good and evil aside, is this Clarke stuff any good? Any fun?

jenny

Posted by jenny | July 16, 2007 5:27 PM

I liked the 1st two books in Pullman's trilogy, but I am afraid that The Amber Spyglass will make a better movie than it did a book ... which cannot be said for any of the Harry Potter books.

Posted by Anderson | July 16, 2007 5:52 PM

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is very good

Posted by Eric | July 16, 2007 6:16 PM

"Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell" was far too slow and far too long. One read hoping it would all eventually mean something, that all this hand-waving would have some point. And there was, ultimately, an emotional payoff to the story, but it was the payoff of a 200-page book, not one of over 600 pages. And its historical voice seemed far too forced, a stunt pulled off for far too long ("why, yes, we can see, dear, that you are able to tell a story while juggling five balls and standing on one foot, but it gets kind of distracting after a while, so why don't you just sit down for the rest of it").

The Potter books are not great, but they're a pleasant read. The characters and situations are engaging enough to distract the reader from his own life, but not so complex as to require a lot of attention. I read one of them--the fifth, I think--in the aftermath of a breakup, and it was perfect for that. It engaged me enough to distract me from my heartbreak for long stretches of time without demanding too much thought or complex emotion.

The books I would put as the grownup equivalents are by John Crowley--either his ambitious "Little, Big," which seems to start as a simple fable and then gets both bigger and smaller from there, or the sprawling, recently completed Aegypt tetralogy. Crowley *is* a masterful prose stylist--and in these books, the exquisite flow of the language always feels genuinely wedded to the story.

Posted by Steve | July 16, 2007 6:43 PM

"Manichaeanism"? Please. To call Mr. Pullman a Manichaean is an insult to the actual Manichaeans. (And to the 20th century writers who actually did hold a dualistic worldview, and who were much better writers than Pullman- Simone Weil and Jorge Luis Borges, for starters). The Manichaeans held that
1) there were two great Gods warring over the cosmos,
2) the creator of the world was evil,
3) salvation was through Jesus and his Paraclete, Mani
4) matter was evil,
5) sexual intercourse was evil.

Borges actually does a lot with trying to write stories within a Manichaean worldview. Pullman, as far as I could tell from reading his books (which to be fair are quite well written), believes in no creation, no god, no salvation, and that matter is good and sex is Very Very Good. I know he fancies himself a neo-Gnostic, but in fact he's just a tired metaphysical materialist, and there are enough of them in our culture that his argument is boringly familiar. His third book in particular is like a parody of every atheist argument i've ever seen, and his God is such an absurd caricature of the Christian God that his 'death-of-God' scene doesn't even rise to the level of blasphemy, it's just silly. Pullman manages to make atheism seem so vapid that he might actually succeed in converting one or two people to Christianity. he certainly made me more comfortable in my spirituality. Someone should write a sequel in which Will and Lyra realize the horror of what they have done, repent of their sins, and spend the rest of their lives in monasteries.

Posted by Hector Dauphin-Gloire | July 16, 2007 9:51 PM

My frustration with Pullman knows few bounds and I find it insulting when people bring him up as a literary icon of children's or fantastic literature. The His Dark Materials trilogy begins with a marvelous story and his writing style is indeed impressively complex, but in the third novel he lets go of all writing style and story in order to slam his readers over the head with a theology that is as simplistic as the attempt to proselytize makes his writing style.

Though I understand the admiration for the first two book in the series, Phillip Pullman ends his series with an arrogance that leaves no room for subtlety or differing view points, and this is the author that is being held up as an alternative to Rowling.

I am a literature grad student who is writing my thesis on Tristram Shandy and Midnight's Children and do not doubt for a second that the humor and twisting allegiances and care for readers in her books have far more in common with these vast and engrossing works of literature that demand a revaluation of the world that is around one than do didactic works like Pullman's.

It is precisely the arrogance of the quoted reviewer and Pullman that I see as the most damaging failure of criticism in our time.

Posted by magnoliasitter | July 17, 2007 5:05 PM

Everyone who claims to be into fantastic literature in any way should read Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books, some of the most neglected of the century. That is all.

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