The Oxford and Cambridge Schools of British Fantasy

From Slate’s interview with Maria Sachiko Cecire, professor at Bard and author of Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century:

J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, of course, as many people know, were friends and colleagues, but they were actually working to reform the English curriculum at Oxford, in addition to writing their own fantasy.

They were the architects of this curriculum, which went into effect in 1931. And they really had an enormous role to play in the kinds of questions that were set in examinations, the texts that were required for undergrads to read; then this had this kind of huge knock-on effect in terms of what people were studying for the next nearly 40 years at Oxford. There’s still some vestiges of that curriculum in the Oxford education today. Then the younger authors I was looking at were Susan Cooper, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Diana Wynne Jones, and Philip Pullman. They all studied this curriculum and got their degrees between 1956 and 1968.

This curriculum at Oxford was really heavy on medieval literature, just at the moment when most other universities were going in the direction of modernism and the kinds of writing that we now associate with literary fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries. At Oxford they were doubling down on medieval literature and also looking at it not just as examples for linguistic analysis—which was how it had been primarily studied in the 19th century under philology—but really looking at it as literature. Really seriously asking students to meditate on both the English medieval past and also this idea of magic and enchantment. . . .

And for comparison’s sake, I also went to the archive at a few other universities, including Cambridge, which went in a really different direction from Oxford in the ’20s and ’30s—much more intentionally towards modernism, towards more contemporary texts, and cutting out medieval requirements for their undergraduate English degree.

And interestingly, Cambridge didn’t really have the same legacy of children’s fantasy writers. T.H. White was at Cambridge at a really interesting time, when there was still a medieval requirement, but right as they were ending it. If you compare his The Once and Future King to, say, The Lord of the Rings, they’re so different in the way they talk about the Middle Ages, with a different level of reverence. There’s anachronism in White’s writing, and pretty profound critiques of the warlike nature of the Middle Ages and of a lot of the nostalgia for that period. Whereas Tolkien and his students tend to be a lot more reverent of that material.

See previous discussions of Tolkien as a teacher of future fantasy writers in 2010 and 2011.

Guest Reviewer on The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage

Godson has some things to say about The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage:

…the book ostensibly isn’t on the scale of the trilogy. I was somewhat worried, until I realised that whilst the book limits itself to the Thames, almost entirely to Oxfordshire, and for swathes two buildings, the adventure is still epic beyond belief.

To think critically for a moment, this book can almost be called magic realism, not fantasy. Or at least it is fantasy of the Terry Pratchett school - it can tell very ordinary stories on a heroic scale. The echoes of Pullman’s predecessors and contemporaries are obvious. Add Pratchett’s humour to Gaiman’s dark twist (Pullman jokingly called La Belle Sauvage ‘His Darker Materials’) to C. S. Lewis’ storytelling and worlds to Lewis Carroll’s allegory (and, as one critic pointed out, the fact that Pullman’s heroine is called Alice is slightly on-the-nose) and you begin to approach Pullman’s brilliance.

Approach, mind you - La Belle Sauvage is a clinic in how to structure a novel, allaying each fear I had almost as soon as I had it, the pattern mimetic of the action itself. It brought to my mind the episodic nature of the Icelandic Sagas at one point, a Christie-esque murder mystery at another, thrillers, love stories and epics at others. It transcends genre, and does so to the tune of Pullman’s beautifully simple prose, that captures in the same way as the originals a Romantic quality that is inherently readable for everyone.

The full essay is on his school’s book blog.

A Golden Time for a New Golden Compass?

The news that there’s a deal for a television adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series is very intriguing for us fans. It also shows how the economics of special-effects adventure dramas have changed in recent years.

In 2007, New Line’s adaptation of The Golden Compass cost an estimated $180 million to make. But that movie just didn’t capture the books’ magic, earning only $70 million in the US. That was so little that New Line’s parent corporation restructured the division the next year, bringing it under the control of Warner Bros. (The film made more overseas, but most of that money went to distributors, not the studio.)

Now television shows like Supergirl can afford digital visual effects on the same level, despite having a lower budget. And miniseries have become quite lucrative. So it’s possible to conceive of a His Dark Materials adaptation that’s not only visually stunning but tells the complete story of the three books.

Philip Pullman is part of this new deal. So is New Line, perhaps because it still holds the dramatic rights, and Scholastic. The production company, Bad Wolf, is new, without any completed projects, but its founders have brought on the BBC, their former employer. They also have ties to HBO, which would be a prime customer for the series in the US. All that makes me feel a little more hope than usual that this announced deal will lead to an actual show.

Philip Pullman in Three or Fewer Dimensions

Princeton’s Cotsen Children’s Library has a podcast called “Bibliofiles,” and this comes from its new conversation with author Philip Pullman:

I’ve written four fairy tales. I call them fairy tales—I Was a Rat!, Clockwork, The Firework-Maker’s Daughter and The Scarecrow and His Servant. They’re different from my novels because the characters are flat rather than round. That’s the way I think of it.

When I’m doing a novel such as the Sally books or “His Dark Materials,” the purpose, what you’re trying to do, is make the characters as real as you can make them, which involves a certain amount of three-dimensionalism. Now you know they’ve got depths, depths sometimes which they’re not aware of themselves. So you want to make those characters as real as possible.

But in a fairy tale, such as the four books I’ve mentioned and of course, “Puss in Boots,” I've done that, and the Grimm tales, the Tales from the Brothers Grimm, character isn’t such an important thing. All the characters in a fairy tale are pretty flat, really. They don’t have much depth. And the interest of the story is not in the psychological complexity of the character so much is in the incident and what happens and what succeeds and will follow it. So they’re different kinds of writing.

Pullman is of course pulling from E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, as well as the Victorian distinction between “novels of incident” and “novels of character.”

Pullman on “your appalling self-consciousness”

More from the Mother Jones interview with Philip Pullman:

The central moment in the account of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis is when they sort of come to after they've eaten the fruit and they realize they’re naked and try and cover themselves with fig leaves. That seemed to me a perfect allegory of what had happened in the 20th century with regard to literary modernism.

Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I’m telling a story! Oh, that can’t be the case, because I’m a clever person. I’m a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I’ll write Ulysses.” [Laughs.] Actually, I don’t think that was Joyce’s motive—but a lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller. So they tell it backwards and they tell it in the present tense and they cut loose the pages and shuffle them around—all that kind of stuff.

When I first started writing, I tried to do that sort of thing, but I realized that there was a limited value in that. And it also made it difficult to read, and I didn’t really want my books difficult to read. This is the value for me of writing books that children read. Children aren’t interested in the least about your appalling self-consciousness. They want to know what happens next. They force you to tell a story.

This isn’t the only Christian allusion that Pullman drops in this interview—though he also describes himself in this interview as an agnostic and is notorious in some self-conscious circles for portraying organized religion in a harsh light. Which shows you can take the vicar’s grandson out of the church, but you can’t take the church out of him.

Of course, Pullman has other levels of belief:

The state of mind which I put myself when I tell a story is one in which superstition flourishes very easily. And I welcome that because it helps me. A story, to me, has a particular sprite, like the angel of the spirit of that story—and it’s my job to attend to what it wants to do. When I tell the story of “Cinderella,” the sprite does not want me to make it into an allegory of the fall of communism. The sprite would be unhappy if I did that. I can’t put it any more clearly than that because it’s a strange area and I’m not very sure about it myself. But I’m perfectly happy about being superstitious and atheistic.

An almost supernatural way of divorcing his authorial consciousness from the act of storytelling.

Philip Pullman’s School Story

From the Mother Jones interview:

The range of individuality [in] children is infinite, but every class of children seemed to have the same groups. And there was a chief girl and a chief boy—a girl that all the other girls of that age looked up to and imitated and a boy that all the boys looked up to and imitated. I realized that if I got them on my side and exclusively taught them for a couple of weeks, maybe for the first full term, then I wouldn't have any trouble. Teachers often make the mistake of thinking they’re the boss of the class; they’re not. The boss of the class is sitting down there somewhere.

Pullman taught school at the beginning of his career. He seems to have taken a practical approach.

Tolkien the Teacher

Back in early 2010, I quoted reminiscences about J. R. R. Tolkien at Oxford from Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper, as collected by Leonard Marcus. Cooper said, “He was a wonderful lecturer,” but Jones said his lectures were “absolutely appalling.”

It looks like many more people shared Jones’s response. Adam Gopnik’s recent article in the New Yorker about high fantasy for young readers begins:

At Oxford in the nineteen-forties, Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was generally considered the most boring lecturer around, teaching the most boring subject known to man, Anglo-Saxon philology and literature, in the most boring way imaginable.

“Incoherent and often inaudible” was Kingsley Amis’s verdict on his teacher. Tolkien, he reported, would write long lists of words on the blackboard, obscuring them with his body as he droned on, then would absent-mindedly erase them without turning around.

“I can just about stand learning the filthy lingo it’s written in,” Philip Larkin, another Tolkien student, complained about the old man’s lectures on “Beowulf.” “What gets me down is being expected to admire the bloody stuff.”

Since Jones and Cooper were at Oxford at about the same time, and since Cooper can appreciate theatricality when she sees it, most likely she was remembering the more popular lectures of C. S. Lewis.

According to Philip Pullman, Tolkien left his stamp on the Oxford curriculum even after he had retired from teaching: “every undergraduate had to read and study—and suffer—Anglo-Saxon.”

Harry Potter and the Flawed Interpretation

Last month The Awl published Maria Bustillo’s attack on the Harry Potter series in the guise of a review of the movie adapted from the sixth-and-a-half book. The essay struck me as far more ad hominem and nasty than it needed to be, and simply erroneous in some aspects.

Bustillo is correct, however, that J. K. Rowling’s books undercut her progressive surface themes through the structure of the magical world where they take place. Most particularly, as the article notes, there’s the congenital divide between wizards and muggles, and the never-resolved issue of the house elves.

But Bustillo misses how the books give so many of their good characters solid Anglo-Saxon names (Harry Potter, Granger, Weasley, Dumbledore, Black) while the worst villains have Latinate and French names (Lucius Malfoy, Voldemort, Lestrange). And foreigners are always funny—even as the books depict a modern multiethnic British society. In other words, Rowling’s fantasy world is both founded on some deep British prejudices and inclusive in how it defines being British.

Bustillo errs in identifying the Weasleys—middle-class civil servants—as aristocrats in Rowling’s world simply because they’re wizards. In fact, the Weasley clan is dedicated to good governance, deference to democratic authority, and protection of “muggles.” Symbolically, I think their ancient homestead actually reflects another deep prejudice: that the countryside is nicer than the city, regardless of class.

Bustillo closes with praise for Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, which I can’t fault but I also can’t see as a ground-breaking recommendation. I wonder if she’s ever applied her critical eyes to that series and how it, too, reflects British notions of class. (All servants’ daemons being dogs, for example.) And perhaps we can discuss whether fantasy literature’s potentially Manichean presentation of good and evil needs to be reflected in critical thinking about it.

Another Recollection of Tolkien

Back in March I quoted recollections of Prof. J. R. R. Tolkien from Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper, found in Leonard Marcus book of interviews, The Wand in the Word.

Yet another future children’s-book author who encountered Tolkien at Oxford was Philip Pullman. He’s a decade younger than Jones and Cooper, so by the time he was at university Prof. Tolkien was a wealthy celebrity, retired from the classroom. Pullman told Marcus:

He was a genial old fellow in his seventies, world famous by then. The rector of our college…invited me and a couple of my friends to dinner to meet the great man. . . . it was Tolkien who fought the great battle to retain Anglo-Saxon as a subject of study at Oxford. Because he won that battle, every undergraduate had to read and study—and suffer—Anglo-Saxon.

And so we were all introduced and sat down to dinner. One of my friends was on one side of him; the other friend was on the other side. I was seated across the table. Professor Tolkien turned to the first fellow and said, “How are they pronouncing Anglo-Saxon these days?” That was one of the things the scholars argued over, you know: the different ways of pronouncing the wretched language! My friend had done as little work as I had, and had no idea. So he just sort of gaped and goggled and tried to make up an answer.

Which displeased Tolkien, who turned to the other fellow and said, “Now then, you man, did you enjoy The Lord of the Rings?”

My other friend had to say, “Well, I’m awfully sorry but I haven’t read it.“

I could have answered that question, at least. But that was the end of Tolkien’s conversation. He never got round to asking me anything.

The young Pullman was a fan of Tolkien, but he’s become more critical. Perhaps if the professor had paid him more attention back then…

I Was a Rat’s Narrative Voice

Philip Pullman’s short novel I Was a Rat! offers an example of his unusual approach toward narrative voices, which I highlighted last Saturday at Southern New England SCBWI’s “Encore!” session.

Here’s a description of that approach from Laura Miller’s 2005 New Yorker profile, titled “Far From Narnia”:

Pullman is a partisan of the third-person omniscient narrator, which he thinks of as a character in itself—a disembodied “sprite.” This ringmaster of many a nineteenth-century novel can, as he told me, “go anywhere and do anything and see anything, and is both male and female, both old and young, wise and foolish, cynical and credulous, all these contradictory things at once. The narrative voice that tells Middlemarch is just as much a made-up character as Dorothea or Mr. Casaubon.”

Inspired by the Cinderella legend, I Was a Rat! recounts the experiences of a young rat whom a fairy godmother turned into an ersatz princess’s pageboy, and various people he encounters.

Among those people are an elderly couple who take the boy in and call him Roger, the officials and students at a school he briefly attends, a carnival showman who offers him the chance to become a rat-boy again, a gang of young housebreakers—a gamut of Dickensian types.

We also get periodic glimpses of a tabloid newspaper’s coverage of the new princess and the mysterious rat monster. I suspect those might have been the impetus for this book, published in 1999 as Pullman’s His Dark Materials series made him into a public figure in Britain, a spokesperson for both children’s literature and religious skepticism. (He’s been trying to use that prominence to speak out against “age-banding” of books and registering of all adult visitors to British schools.)

Having become a boy only a week or so before, Roger is a total naif, and he has a tendency to revert to rat behavior, such a nibbling on things. [This may be less unusual among boys than I thought when I read the book. This summer, while greeting guests at Longfellow National Historic Site in Cambridge, I saw a boy about nine years old gnaw a hefty stick into small pieces. He chewed on other sprigs as well, enough that I wondered whether to tell him that the law forbids removing flora from National Park sites.]

I Was a Rat!’s narrative voice scurries from one part of the story to another. Thus, we’re inside Roger’s head when he enters a classroom for the first time, but when the headmaster takes him away we readers stick with the rest of the class and witness what happens next through their eyes. Sometimes we follow the elderly couple, and other times the carnival huckster and his wife, and yet other times we’re detached from any character.

The result is a lively and often funny romp, yet not one that takes us deep into Roger’s experience of having turned from rat to boy. Perhaps that metamorphosis wouldn’t be so funny close up. But I can easily imagine other writers choosing a different narrative approach, focusing more narrowly on Roger’s perceptions and activities and leaving the supporting characters to the side.

Golden

Three books, eight to thirteen years old, previously read but not harshly, to be auctioned at Sotheby’s in London for an estimated £1,500-2,000. These are the ordinary first-edition British hardcovers, not a special issue, not signed by the author--and not stickered with the Carnegie Medal.

That’s about a quarter the estimated cost of a Hugh Lofting drawing for The Story of Doctor Doolittle, and less than a twentieth the estimated cost of a Beatrix Potter sketch of Peter Rabbit, pre-publication. But imagine what these books could be worth in another hundred years.

G. P. Taylor Seizes His Opportunities

In the fall of 2007, G. P. Taylor, author of Shadowmancer and less successful books, issued an open letter to his American fans on the dire threat of the Golden Compass movie. Here's one example of it being spread around the 'net.

Taylor stated:

The reason why I wrote the book [Shadowmancer] and all the others in the series was because of one man and the damage that his books were likely to do to the Christian Church.

Almost two years earlier, I’d been at home in the vicarage, reading a copy of The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. I’d heard a great deal about the book. Newspapers and literary critics praised it. Christian groups wanted to burn it. I wanted to know what all the commotion was about.

Fifty pages into this award-winning, best-selling book for children twelve and up, here’s what I’d learned: God is a liar. God is senile. God is the enemy of humanity. I started to get mad.

Pullman’s book reworks Milton’s Paradise Lost so that Satan’s side are the heroes. Early on in the book, two rebel angels spill God’s great “secret”:

'The Authority, God the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adoni, the King, the Father, the Almighty – those were the names he gave himself. He was never the creator. He was an angel like ourselves – the first angel, true, the most powerful, but he was formed of Dust as we are … He told all who came after him that he had created them, but it was a lie.' - (so Pullman said - notice he doesn't give God any other name such as Allah or Shiva - I wonder why?)

It's curious that Taylor described the book as The Golden Compass rather than using its British title, Northern Lights. It's even more curious that he'd told the same story about reading Pullman's later book in that series, The Amber Spyglass. Indeed, Taylor's description of the book, with its "fifty pages in" and "two rebel angels," doesn't fit The Golden Compass at all. And does anyone recall that "Christian groups wanted to burn" The Golden Compass in 2000-01 (the period Taylor was describing)?

It's also notable that back in 2004, when there was no brouhaha in America over the Golden Compass movie but Harry Potter movies were already big, the Los Angeles Times reported: "Taylor has said that he was moved to start writing out of his concern that the dark powers in [J. K.] Rowling’s Potter books are given too much weight." That article contained no mention of Pullman. This 2003 Guardian article is likewise silent on Taylor writing in reply to Pullman.

Indeed, there seems to be a general discrepancy between what Taylor has told the American press and public and what he said to reporters in his British home. Taylor painted a different picture of how religion flavored his writing in an interview with the BBC about four years ago:

Andyc: Does being a vicar help you to be a good writer?

G.P. Taylor: No, because everybody thinks the book is a Christian book, so I have to explain it is not. Just because I'm a vicar does not mean I have to write a Christian book. It has hindered me in a way, because some of the reviewers look for things which are not there.

Even this article on his website written by the author of his autobiography portrays Taylor quite differently from his open letter to Americans:

Taylor says that Christian themes in his works are a natural part of the writing process. “If I was a Buddhist,” he says, “my books would be influenced by Buddhism.”

Taylor takes exception with the suggestion that his novels are “Christian books,” meant as entertainment for true believers. And he doesn’t want to “brainwash” anyone with Christianity. Instead, he wants to engage readers in a game of “what if.” “I want my readers to think, ‘what if there’s another force that lies beyond death?’ It’s trying to get people to open their minds, to think the impossible thing.

In contrast, the open letter shows little interest in open minds. It does, however, urge everyone to buy G. P. Taylor's books.

Taylor has a new book series out, adding some comics to his usual prose. The BuddyHollywood.com announcement of that series contains this paragraph:

Taylor surmises this interest in his works is due to the film success of another English children’s author. “I was talking to some kids at a school and this guy shows up in a very old tweed suit. He sat at the back of the room and looked very musingly at me all the way through [my presentation.] I thought, What’s going on here? Is he one of the teachers or what? He turned out to be an Oxford don. He said, 'I’ve heard all about you. We think you’re the new C.S. Lewis.' I thought, Poor old one! (laughs). Then he went off and wrote a thesis about G.P. Taylor being the new C.S. Lewis; when that went out, that was it.”

An "Oxford don" speaking in the first person plural ("We think...")? That's almost a laying on of hands. Yet before that press release, Taylor's website credited the "new C. S. Lewis" meme to the BBC, a Korean broadcasting service, and unspecified American news media. No Oxford dons were ever mentioned.

Taylor has displayed some ambivalence toward that comparison. Once he vowed to stop writing the Shadowmancer series because of being "branded as the new CS Lewis." Yet oddly enough, he keeps using that phrase in press releases and interviews. If you Google "G. P. Taylor" and "new C. S. Lewis," most of the hits are on his own websites or in material issued by him, his publicists, and his publishers. And toward the end of his open letter, Taylor proudly claimed that his books "have earned me the title of 'The new CS Lewis.'"

Finally, here's an update on Taylor's magical form of aging. His MySpace page, updated as recently as this month, describes him as 43 years old. He was also 43 five years ago in the Guardian. In 2006 Spero News reported both that he was born in 1958 and that he was 42 years old in 2002. The LA Times agrees with the former date, reporting Taylor as age 46 in 2004. Taylor himself told the Independent that he had been five years old in 1963. In that case, since MySpace was founded in late 2003, Taylor was 45 years old at the earliest moment he could join.

Revisiting Baum and Pullman

Back in my first month of blogging, I posted an entry called "Pullman and Baum tackle the same scene". It noted some parallels between Philip Pullman's The Scarecrow and His Servant and L. Frank Baum's The Marvelous Land of Oz, particularly a scene in which a clever child pretends to translate between two characters who are actually speaking the same language.

This morning I heard from Laurie Frost, author of The Elements of His Dark Materials, that another guide to Pullman's trilogy, The Rough Guide to His Dark Materials by Paul Simpson, cited that posting to support this statement:

The story of Oz--in celluloid and literary form--has had a significant impact on Pullman's imagination. As the fantasy writer J. L. Bell has shown, Pullman's The Scarecrow And The [sic] Servant is directly influenced by Oz, paying homage to specific scenes and character names.

Actually, I didn't show that at all. I simply pointed out some similarities, but I didn't feel they were close enough to prove influence, nor did I have any evidence about Pullman's reading. The Wizard of Oz is not such a presence in British culture as it is in America, and Baum's sequels are even less known over there.

Both Baum and Pullman wrote about live scarecrows and characters named Jack. Other authors have explored the idea of a live scarecrow as well, and Jack is not simply a common name--it's generic.

As for the translation scenes, I found it interesting to consider how the two fine authors handled the same notion. My only implication about influence was that if Pullman had been inspired by Baum, he made more of the idea: his character's "strategem actually plays a role in the plot" while "Baum's scene is characteristic vaudeville [with] no consequences." But a fake-translation joke is basic enough that it could well have occurred to each of these authors (and others) independently.

Simpson's book appears to be a very "rough guide" indeed. I'm flattered at being cited in it as an expert, but surely there are better ways of gathering information about Pullman's influences than trawling for remarks on the internet and reading too much into them.

Frost tells me she had actually asked Pullman about the possibility of inspiration from Oz in connection to the interaction between Dorothy and Toto, which reminded her of the tighter bond between Lyra and her daemon, Pan. (The Rough Guide makes the same point with a picture from the MGM movie.) Frost writes:

I was flabbergasted when he wrote back that he has never seen the movie, or read the book. He knows a few of the songs, and he has seen Wicked! which he found very confusing, but that's the extent of his Oz knowledge.

Frost's Elements seems to be self-published; it's the only title from The Fell Press. It doesn't have the benefit of the Rough Guides' branding or market reach. But it has an endorsement from Pullman himself, and it's clearly a more reliable guide to what actually inspired him.

The Real Star of The Golden Compass?

All along, my main question about the Golden Compass movie was whether it would get Iorek Byrnison right. Would the studio be able to find just the right polar bear to play the part?

Fortunately, New Line studio also saw the polar bears as crucial to the movie. It found an ursine actor named Ian McKellen for the part--I hadn't even known there were polar bears in the British Isles. He turned in a fine performance, making Iorek The Golden Compass's equivalent of Aslan in Narnia, as the Shortpacked webcomic knows.

Iorek's scenes could have been even more effective, though. I recognized dialogue and action from the book in the scene that introduced him, but it still seemed surprisingly inert for one that involves a half-drunk polar bear smashing apart a building.

I went back to reread that part of The Golden Compass, and realized how heavily condensed it had been. Two long scenes were compressed into one, many details were removed (e.g., Iorek has to retrieve his armor from the local priest, for the first time we feel Lyra and her daemon Pan separating), and we never see Lyra restraining Iorek's killing instincts. Philip Pullman's narrative voice disappears, too, of course.

Such compression is necessary for a movie, of course, but in this case the result felt slower, not faster. Which leads me to quote Eoin O'Faolain at Screenhead criticism about The Golden Compass's drab pacing and repetitive plot twists:

Weitz’s utter lack of...ability to generate excitement through a sense of adventure is disappointingly evident throughout the entire movie. The film uses the old “hero is about to be killed but at the last second is saved by an ally” device four times in a row, making the action scenes rather bland. Characters appear and disappear in the movie having little valid reason to be there (while the witches are important in the books, they acted as a mere deus ex machina in the film).

(I believe that should be "deae ex machina.")

O'Faolain also criticizes Weitz for not being able to muster any "visual panache," but there I disagree: as a series of still pictures, The Golden Compass looked mighty good. But in its dialogue and in how those pictures move from one to another, in how new elements enter scenes, it felt a little too draggy and familiar. For example, I could have done with about half the number of golden-hued special-effects shots of what Lyra sees in her alethiometer.

The first time the movie sprang to life for me was Iorek's duel with another armored polar bear. That might have been because at long last there was no leaden dialogue explaining everything. Alas, we never got to see the bears' catapult attack on an airship, which appears in the book's final chapters; I've been waiting to see that scene for years now.

Instead, The Golden Compass's action climax is a long battle on an icescape--a scene with a fine cinematic antecedents, from Alexander Nevsky to The Empire Strikes Back. But here the movie's visual acuity failed. It's important to light such a battle so the audience can see what's happening. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of dim men in fur coats swinging at each other.

A Dull Adaptation, and There Wasn't Enough of It

There's an old joke about people complaining that the food at a resort is almost inedible, and what's more, the servings are too small. The Golden Compass movie fits that model. It was disappointingly shallow and pedestrian, but probably could have been exciting and rich if there had only been more of it.

The cast was well chosen and the scenes' visuals, with one exception (which I'll discuss tomorrow), are handsome, and I could have spent much more time in those settings. The dialogue, however, leaps so desperately from one expository moment to another that there's little room for character development.

New York magazine's comparison of two early scripts for The Golden Compass with each other and the final film traces what could have been:

Like many fans, we'd always assumed that [Tom] Stoppard's draft must have been a work of genius, and that his replacement by [Chris] Weitz surely doomed the project. Much to our surprise, upon reading the screenplays, we're wrong. Had Stoppard's screenplay been filmed, the movie would have been ponderous, a bit dull, and far too long. Weitz's original script was actually great and makes us sad about the movie that could have been. . . .

Weitz's early draft, though still long — 156 pages and likely three hours of running time — is sharper, funnier, and more streamlined than Stoppard's. It's also more exciting, more coherent, and significantly better than the final product. . . . Why was this all cut? Presumably, to keep the film to two hours. . . . In the end it was that decision more than any other that doomed The Golden Compass to mediocrity.

Most notably, of course, both early screenplays contain the end of the book, the crucial sequence cut from the movie entirely so that its ending would remain uplifting.

Chris Kohler at Wired agreed that, "Many of the problems with Golden Compass can be blamed squarely on the film's run time."

Rope of Silicon has posted a link to some footage cut from the end of the movie but included in the videogame. Stills from the same scene show up in picture-book adaptations of the movie, so the cut must have come relatively late. Obviously Weitz filmed something like the book's ending, but in concurrence with New Line studio cut those final scenes to make the movie shorter and less downbeat.

IMDB.com confirms something I’d suspected: those final scenes might show up at the start of a Subtle Knife movie, should one be made from the second book in Philip Pullman's trilogy. There the footage would serve as a bridge from Lyra's adventure to the new story (which starts with a different protagonist), and establish the stakes in the new plot. But will that movie now be made, given The Golden Compass's lackluster domestic earnings? The all-important worldwide box office figures will say.

Pullman Pulls for the Omniscient Narrator

Today's Guardian newspaper offers a column by Philip Pullman about the power of narrative voice. He seems to suggest that the style of narration distinguishes a “story” from the “literature” that expresses it by establishing tone, perspective, and characters’ interior lives. In particular, Pullman addresses the different tools available to moviemakers and novelists. He concludes:

And despite the profound and unsettling discoveries of modernism and post-modernism, and everything they show us about the unreliability of the narrator and the fallacy of omniscience, some of us still, when we read, are happy to accept that the narrative voice has the right to comment on a character, whether tartly or sympathetically, and the ability to go into that character's mind and tell us what's going on there. Do we ever stop to wonder how extraordinary it is that a disembodied voice can seem to tell us what is happening in someone's mind?

That narrative voice, with those mysterious powers, is the reason I write novels. I'm intoxicated by it.

I think Pullman's approach to narration is, if not actually idiosyncratic, quite uncommon these days. For many years before Lemony Snicket, most fiction writers tended to write either in the voice of a character or in a disembodied, unintrusive storytelling voice that closely followed the main characters(s). Snicket's success spawned a bunch of other snarky narrators, but few writers let their narrators intrude in other tones.

Pullman doesn't play by those rules. In a 2005 New Yorker profile, Laura Miller reported:

Pullman is a partisan of the third-person omniscient narrator, which he thinks of as a character in itself—a disembodied “sprite.” This ringmaster of many a nineteenth-century novel can, as he told me, ”go anywhere and do anything and see anything, and is both male and female, both old and young, wise and foolish, cynical and credulous, all these contradictory things at once. The narrative voice that tells ‘Middlemarch’ is just as much a made-up character as Dorothea or Mr. Casaubon.”

Pullman's narrative focus is also unusual these days in turning on a dime, entering a scene by following one character and leaving with another we've never tracked before.

But are such techniques unique to “literature”? I think equivalents exist in many other forms of storytelling, including cinema. In fact, Pullman’s description of a “disembodied voice...tell[ing] us what is happening in someone's mind” is clearly inspired by movie voiceovers. A purely literary way of describing an omniscient narrator might be “a never-identified historian recounting people’s thoughts.” It’s still an intoxicating, mysterious power, of course.

Looking Out for Iorek Byrnison

As soon as I received the last issue of The Atlantic, I turned to Hanna Rosin’s article “How Hollywood Saved God,” which was said to be about how the people making the Golden Compass movie had altered Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials saga to make its Gnosticism less troubling to non-Gnostics (not that those themes appear much in the first book).

I was disappointed to realize soon enough that that the reporter obviously hadn’t seen either the shooting script or the finished movie, and thus had no evidence on which to base any conclusions.

I did, however, note one passage about how the New Line studio came to option the book:

In 2003, when describing what sold him on the movie, Toby Emmerich, New Line’s president of production, explained, “It was two words: Iorek Byrnison.” Iorek is an “insanely awesome character,” he added.

That much-deserved praise for Pullman's armored polar bear came back to me this weekend when I read Charles McGrath’s story in the New York Times, “Unholy Production With a Fairy-Tale Ending.” Writer-director Chris Weitz initially declined to direct the movie because he felt it would be too big for him to handle.

The studio then turned to an even more unlikely director, Anand Tucker, known mainly for “Shopgirl,” based on the Steve Martin novel, who impressed the executives with storyboards suggesting how the movie might look. But Mr. Tucker and New Line soon ran into the kind of impasse that in Hollywood is called “creative differences.”

“You know, sometimes that’s really what they are: creative differences,” Mr. Emmerich said. From Mr. Emmerich’s own account and that of others, it appears that the problem with Mr. Tucker’s “Golden Compass” was that it was paradoxically both more expensive than the movie New Line was hoping for and smaller in scale. The deal breaker may have been when Mr. Tucker, as a cost-cutting move, decided to eliminate the bear fight, the movie’s great set piece.

Yes, that seems like a very quick way to lose a job: eliminate the most important scene for the studio head’s favorite character!

(Though, plotter that I am, I can’t help but wonder whether Tucker was simply proposing to eliminate that scene in order to force Emmerich to raise the production budget enough to get it back in. When federal agencies do that with their budget requests to Congress, it’s called the “Washington Monument ploy.” It doesn’t always work.)

The movie opens this weekend.

Bombast Launched against The Golden Compass

William A. Donohue, president and sole voice of the politically conservative Catholic League, has proclaimed a crusade against the upcoming Golden Compass movie, claiming that Philip Pullman wrote the His Dark Materials series in part to "denigrate Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism."

Donohue's crusade takes the form of issuing press releases and speaking bombastically on television, which is his normal business (as detailed by Media Matters and Talk to Action). He's also selling a "booklet" (size unknown) of his opinions on Pullman's books for $5 apiece, or ten for $30. As of 2005, Donohue's salary was over $300,000, and that money has to come from somewhere.

The Golden Compass takes place in a fantasy world, with people's spirits manifest as companion animals, talking polar bears, and tree branch-riding witches. That world also contains an oppressive church, called the "Magisterium," which the book does indeed portray in a poor light. (Something about killing kids to obtain their spirits--you know how books can blow these things out of proportion.)

In a 2004 interview on the BBC show Belief, Pullman acknowledged taking some of the Magisterium's terminology from the Christianity of medieval western Europe, but said:

we're talking about another world, remember, and we're talking about a world in which the Catholic church develops in a very different way, because [John] Calvin became the Pope in the history of Lyra's world.

He also spoke of the emotions that motivated this story:

it's a deep anger...and yes, horror at the excesses of cruelty and infamy that've been carried out in the name of a supernatural power. And it's not only the Catholic church that is guilty of this, of course. The Protestants were just as guilty of burning the Catholics and their town, and of hanging the witches. And both sides are guilty of persecuting the Jews. And then you get Moslems killing Hindus, and Hindus killing Moslems, and Sikhs killing Moslems and Hindus. . . . .

I think it was a physicist [Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg], who said the truest thing about this. He said, good people have done good things, and bad people have done bad things without the help of religion, but for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

That's the kind of fair, rational thinking that gets Donohue angry enough to go on television and sell booklets at $5 apiece, ten for $30.

It seems more than presumptuous for Donohue to think that the Magisterium in Pullman's make-believe world is the same Roman Catholic Church that he's appointed himself to defend in the US. Wouldn't he be better off insisting that there's no connection or similarity between his own church and an oppressive institution based on imaginary power? But apparently he sees an insult there, or an opportunity.

For myself, I'm really looking forward to seeing Iorek Byrnison in action. There's a character who truly fights for people's rights.

Pullman Panel Promotion

Following breadcrumbs laid through the woods at Educating Alice, I found Saestina's report on a panel in Oxford where Philip Pullman participated in promoting the upcoming film adaptation of his novel Northern Lights/The Golden Compass.

The most interesting tidbits, I thought, had to do with Pullman's creative process while writing the books, lo those few years ago. He's mentioned the inspiration for the trilogy title before:

His initial inspiration for the book was the landscape of hell that Milton describes in the first two books of Paradise Lost, which is also where the title His Dark Materials comes from. The original working title for the trilogy was The Golden Compasses, also from a quotation from Paradise Lost.

That would be from Book VII:

Then staid the fervid wheels, and in his hand
He took the golden compasses, prepared
In God's eternal store, to circumscribe
This universe, and all created things:
One foot he centered, and the other turned
Round through the vast profundity obscure;
And said, Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds,
This be thy just circumference, O World!

Saestina's description of Pullman's remarks continues:

When Northern Lights went to the US editor, he thought the [original series] title was a reference to the alethiometer, changed it to a singular compass and made it the title of the first book instead of the trilogy as a whole. This is, apparently, the same editor who changed the name of the first Harry Potter book from Philosopher's Stone to Sorceror's Stone, which Pullman said, "obviously makes no sense."

Not to quibble, but the US publishers of the Harry Potter series and Pullman's retitled (and soon to be renumbered) trilogy are different companies. In fact, to confuse matters beyond easy meaning, the UK publisher of Northern Lights is the same multinational firm as the US publisher of Harry Potter.

It may also be worth acknowledging that a stone which conveys magical immortality makes much more sense--in modern usage--as a "sorcerer's stone" than as a "philosopher's stone." Yes, I support educating fourth-graders in the history of Renaissance scientific nomenclature as much as the next guy, but let's face it--until that happens, there's a case for "sorcerer's stone."

And it definitely seems noteworthy that while J. K. Rowling's Philosopher's Stone title survives in the UK and around the world, for both book and movie, Pullman accepted the US title for his first volume even though that meant he had to find a new series title. Such is the power of US sales.

An item of more interest to story creators:

Pullman really struggled with the first chapter of Northern Lights. On his sixteenth draft (according to him, I think this may have been hyperbole) he was hit with the idea of daemons and it all came together.

What, at least from this hind perspective, seems like a fundamental element of the His Dark Materials universe, and even of some of the books' plotting, wasn't part of Pullman's original planning.

Fuse #8 provides a link to another Golden Compass movie promotion, an advance trailer spotlighting the half-finished special effects.

Visiting the Far North

The producers of the first Golden Compass movie, due in late 2007, have unveiled the necessary website.

To heighten the sense of being in an strange parallel word, explore the site in an unfamiliar language, such as suomi. (That is, assuming you don't already know suomi.)

Unfortunately, the site does not respond to the Bork Bork Bork! add-on for Mozilla for added boreality.

Maybe I'm not taking this movie pretentiously enough.