My brother forwarded this article from The New York Review of Books by Michael Chabon of Wonderboys and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay fame: a highly literate and mildly disappointed review of Phillip Pullman's epic. I'm not sure I agree with everything Chabon wrote, but I found the review interesting. I especially liked the defense of the legitimacy of the genre which he puts in the beginning of the essay, a portion of which I quote here (without permission, bad kitty, so I'll put in this: the following quote is copyright © 1963-2004 NYREV, Inc.):
Like a house on the borderlands, epic fantasy is haunted: by a sense of lost purity and grandeur, deep wisdom that has been forgotten, Arcadia spoilt, the debased or diminished stature of modern humankind; by a sense that the world, to borrow a term from John Clute, the Canadian-born British critic of fantasy and science fiction, has 'thinned.' This sense of thinning--of there having passed a Golden Age, a Dreamtime, when animals spoke, magic worked, children honored their parents, and fish leapt filleted into the skillet--has haunted the telling of stories from the beginning. The words 'Once upon a time' are in part a kind of magic formula for invoking the ache of this primordial nostalgia.
But serious literature, so called, regularly traffics in the same wistful stuff. One encounters the unassuageable ache of the imagined past, for example, at a more or less implicit level, in American writers from Cooper and Hawthorne through Faulkner and Chandler, right down to Steven Millhauser and Jonathan Franzen. Epic fantasy distills and abstracts the idea of thinning--maps it, so to speak; but at its best the genre is no less serious or literary than any other. Yet epic fantasies, whether explicitly written for children or not, tend to get sequestered in their own section of the bookstore or library, clearly labeled to protect the unsuspecting reader of naturalistic fiction from making an awkward mistake. Thus do we consign to the borderlands our most audacious retellings of what is arguably one of the two or three primal human stories: the narrative of Innocence, Experience, and, straddling the margin between them, the Fall.
There's more. I recommend you read the article to get the full impact of the argument.
Those of you who have read the "trilogy" might be interested in this article, which, I warn you, is long. You might be able to tell from here that Chabon tied the series into Milton's Paradise Lost, to which, in part, Pullman was responding in writing His Dark Materials. I quite enjoyed reading the article, especially as Chabon refered to so many other fantasy and SF books, and pointed out that the Mrs. Cooper in The Subtle Knife might be a little reference to Susan Cooper of The Dark Is Rising fame, which is cool! (I don't feel stupid about not noticing that when I read the His Dark Materials "trilogy" as I hadn't yet read the The Dark Is Rising sequence so I couldn't possibly have noticed then. :p)
Also, there is another book in the series coming out (The Book of Dust), so it's a trilogy no longer (hence the quotes). Sorry, ET. Looks like you'll be waiting like the rest of us.
Those of you who have read the "trilogy" might be interested in this article, which, I warn you, is long. You might be able to tell from here that Chabon tied the series into Milton's Paradise Lost, to which, in part, Pullman was responding in writing His Dark Materials. I quite enjoyed reading the article, especially as Chabon refered to so many other fantasy and SF books, and pointed out that the Mrs. Cooper in The Subtle Knife might be a little reference to Susan Cooper of The Dark Is Rising fame, which is cool! (I don't feel stupid about not noticing that when I read the His Dark Materials "trilogy" as I hadn't yet read the The Dark Is Rising sequence so I couldn't possibly have noticed then. :p)
Also, there is another book in the series coming out (The Book of Dust), so it's a trilogy no longer (hence the quotes). Sorry, ET. Looks like you'll be waiting like the rest of us.
