I see that New Line is ramping up the publicity for their big holiday release The Golden Compass, based on the first novel of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. What's alarming is that New Line is explicitly marketing this film (at least in the trailer I saw) as similar to The Lord of the Rings. In addition, the look of the film and elements of the story are bound to remind viewers (especially younger ones) of 2005'sThe Chronicles of Narnia. I suppose if the Narnia film had been a New Line production then the studio marketers would be linking The Golden Compass to that as well. Be warned, the worldview of Philip Pullman is diametrically opposed to that of Tolkien and Lewis...in fact Pullman loathes both the Narnia books and LOTR. In a 2005 article in The New Yorker about Pullman, Laura Miller writes:
Pullman loves Oxford, but he’s far from donnish. His books have been likened to those of J. R. R. Tolkien, another alumnus, but he scoffs at the notion of any resemblance. “ ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is fundamentally an infantile work,” he said. “Tolkien is not interested in the way grownup, adult human beings interact with each other. He’s interested in maps and plans and languages and codes.” When it comes to “The Chronicles of Narnia,” by C. S. Lewis, Pullman’s antipathy is even more pronounced. Although he likes Lewis’s criticism and quotes it surprisingly often, he considers the fantasy series “morally loathsome.” In a 1998 essay for the Guardian, entitled “The Dark Side of Narnia,” he condemned “the misogyny, the racism, the sado-masochistic relish for violence that permeates the whole cycle.” He reviled Lewis for depicting the character Susan Pevensie’s sexual coming of age—suggested by her interest in “nylons and lipstick and invitations”—as grounds for exclusion from paradise. In Pullman’s view, the “Chronicles,” which end with the rest of the family’s ascension to a neo-Platonic version of Narnia after they die in a railway accident, teach that “death is better than life; boys are better than girls . . . and so on. There is no shortage of such nauseating drivel in Narnia, if you can face it.”
And there's more.
At one point, Pullman and I stopped by the Eagle and Child, an Oxford pub where Lewis and Tolkien used to meet regularly with a group of literary friends. (They called themselves the Inklings.) A framed photograph of Lewis’s jowly face smiled down on us as we talked. In person, Pullman isn’t quite as choleric as he sometimes comes across in his newspaper essays. When challenged, he listens carefully and considerately, and occasionally tempers his ire. “The ‘Narnia’ books are a real wrestle with real things,” he conceded. As much as he dislikes the answers Lewis arrives at, he said that he respects “the struggle that he’s undergoing as he searches for the answers. There’s hope for Lewis. Lewis could be redeemed.” Not Tolkien, however: the “Rings” series, he declared, is “just fancy spun candy. There’s no substance to it.”
Well, it's perfectly fine for someone to have literary/artistic issues with particular books (I'm not a big fan of Lewis's fiction either, although I love Tolkien's), but I suspect most of Pullman's problem is with the Christian worldview behind those books. Pullman is an atheist. Well I'm not saying you shouldn't read books written by atheists or go see films based on them, but don't be deceived, there's an explicit anti-Christian agenda here and shame on New Line for deceptive marketing.
Lewis didn't write the Narnia books as explicit Christian allegory, but he did hope that they would prepare young readers to recognize and accept Christian doctrine later on in life. Pullman might say that he didn't write his books as explict anti-Christian or humanist allegory, but I'm willing to bet he hopes they subtly introduce ideas that come to fruition later. If I were a Christian parent I'd be far more worried about The Golden Compass than Harry Potter.
Read more of Pullman's anti-Lewis rantings here.
UPDATE
New Line selling 'The Golden Compass' as 'Lord of the Rings IV'
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