Since I am once again stuck in the lab
Dec. 5th, 2007 08:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redfiona99My review of Northern Lights
First as a book
It's not a bad book, by any means. It's a bit slow to get going and I'm not entirely sure I like Lyra as a character (I far prefer Pantalemon), but it's an interesting world, and I love the Bears and the faeries and the Aeronauts. I'm also interested in what he changed and what he hasn't, like Jordan blatently being Gonville and Caius (I think that's the right one), and I may have laughed myself silly at a Pope called John Calvin.
Admittedly the end does not bode well, as, with the exception of Pantalemon, we're leaving the characters I like best behind, unless Pullman pulls a Tsubasa, which I doubt somehow.
Now on it as a phenomenon.
I hear words like 'Pullman is the best children's author for 70 years' and I think once again, growed ups have no idea what children like, because when I was 11-12-ish (which is so the age this book is aimed at) I would have gone 'meh' and not finished it. There's a reason why all these authors the adults love do not tend to finish that high in polls when you actually ask kids.
Other than that, I really fail to see how this is in any way offensive. It's set in an alternative universe for goodness sake. And given that the arch-rationalist Lord Asriel is every bit as nuts as the Gobblers I don't think the atheists come out of it excessively well.
Also, for someone who is supposed to be the thinking person's Lewis, he really needs to get away from the whole noble uneducated savage (John Faa, Iorek, in many ways the Faeries). I mean, I totally dig the message that just because a grown-up says it doesn't make it right, and he did paint in some lovely shades of grey, but really, as a children's author he's not all that.
As for it as a film, it wasn't a book where I got a lot of vivid mental pictures (which is probably why I didn't like it, that and that Pullman writes so flatly) so whoever they've cast and whatever the pretty pictures are, it's not like I'm going to mind what it looks like. However, the one character that I had a ridiculously strong mental picture of was Lord Asriel, and it's not Daniel Craig. So of course, I look it up on imdb, and when I read the trivia section, who should have played Lord Asriel but Timothy Dalton, who is much closer to what I imagined. That's two of Daniel Craig's roles he's ruined for me now ;)
All that being said, there's one scene that I feel fully confident in assuming Daniel Craig is going to knock straight out of the park.
Something interesting about the development of children's literature
nhw, on my f-list recently read 'The Happy Prince and Other Tales' by Oscar Wilde (his reactions and some discussion here - http://nhw.livejournal.com/962081.html , Project Guttenberg link to the stories here - http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/902 )
And comparing that to 'Northern Lights' and the Potter books, and also Grimm's fairy tales is interesting. First of all, Grimm's fairy tales are more folk stories than children's stories but almost universally they have the children or the heroes succeeding by either guile or sympathy/empathy or a mixture of the two. Quite often the child heroes are orphans.
This continues into Victorian children's literature, only now children's books have to be Bildungsromane, there has to be a moral. We still get a fair few orphans but parents start to appear (if only to die of consumption later on). The bad die badly, the good die sadly and the reward for being good is entry into the Pearly Gates.
Then we get good stuff like R.L. Stevenson and E. Nesbit and hundreds of other authors who write fun, swashbuckling stories that have plot and no morals. I am very fond of these (in case you hadn't guessed). You get someone like C.S. Lewis who takes some of the earlier themes and twists them and manages to hide his morals well enough that I at least didn't spot them. And trust me, as a small child I was on the watch for moral stories as I distrusted them and found them deathly dull.
You get fun like Roald Dahl, where we had real children again and mischeviousness and magic. I do wonder if it was something in the air in Scandanavia, because you get the same features in Astrid Lingren's stuff and in Mrs. Pepperpot.
But now we seem to have taken a step back into the hideous world of Victorian morality tales because we get orphans, death being a reward and morals. Oh god, we have moralising again, and I like it about as much as I did first time round. The only thing being, of course, that if you asked the author's they'd insist these weren't morality tales (JKR, Philip Pullman, Jacqueline Wilson, I'm looking at you *). At least the Victorians were honest about it.
* I abhor Jacqueline Wilson the most of these because if there's things I'm not interested in it's tales set in the modern day about how hard life is and how the hell do you expect me to emphasise with a cow like Tracey Beaker anyway. I may have been forced to read one of her books in Year 6 of primary school, and it might, just might, have left me with an undying loathing of her and her works. I will however admit that children seem to like her.
First as a book
It's not a bad book, by any means. It's a bit slow to get going and I'm not entirely sure I like Lyra as a character (I far prefer Pantalemon), but it's an interesting world, and I love the Bears and the faeries and the Aeronauts. I'm also interested in what he changed and what he hasn't, like Jordan blatently being Gonville and Caius (I think that's the right one), and I may have laughed myself silly at a Pope called John Calvin.
Admittedly the end does not bode well, as, with the exception of Pantalemon, we're leaving the characters I like best behind, unless Pullman pulls a Tsubasa, which I doubt somehow.
Now on it as a phenomenon.
I hear words like 'Pullman is the best children's author for 70 years' and I think once again, growed ups have no idea what children like, because when I was 11-12-ish (which is so the age this book is aimed at) I would have gone 'meh' and not finished it. There's a reason why all these authors the adults love do not tend to finish that high in polls when you actually ask kids.
Other than that, I really fail to see how this is in any way offensive. It's set in an alternative universe for goodness sake. And given that the arch-rationalist Lord Asriel is every bit as nuts as the Gobblers I don't think the atheists come out of it excessively well.
Also, for someone who is supposed to be the thinking person's Lewis, he really needs to get away from the whole noble uneducated savage (John Faa, Iorek, in many ways the Faeries). I mean, I totally dig the message that just because a grown-up says it doesn't make it right, and he did paint in some lovely shades of grey, but really, as a children's author he's not all that.
As for it as a film, it wasn't a book where I got a lot of vivid mental pictures (which is probably why I didn't like it, that and that Pullman writes so flatly) so whoever they've cast and whatever the pretty pictures are, it's not like I'm going to mind what it looks like. However, the one character that I had a ridiculously strong mental picture of was Lord Asriel, and it's not Daniel Craig. So of course, I look it up on imdb, and when I read the trivia section, who should have played Lord Asriel but Timothy Dalton, who is much closer to what I imagined. That's two of Daniel Craig's roles he's ruined for me now ;)
All that being said, there's one scene that I feel fully confident in assuming Daniel Craig is going to knock straight out of the park.
Something interesting about the development of children's literature
nhw, on my f-list recently read 'The Happy Prince and Other Tales' by Oscar Wilde (his reactions and some discussion here - http://nhw.livejournal.com/962081.html , Project Guttenberg link to the stories here - http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/902 )
And comparing that to 'Northern Lights' and the Potter books, and also Grimm's fairy tales is interesting. First of all, Grimm's fairy tales are more folk stories than children's stories but almost universally they have the children or the heroes succeeding by either guile or sympathy/empathy or a mixture of the two. Quite often the child heroes are orphans.
This continues into Victorian children's literature, only now children's books have to be Bildungsromane, there has to be a moral. We still get a fair few orphans but parents start to appear (if only to die of consumption later on). The bad die badly, the good die sadly and the reward for being good is entry into the Pearly Gates.
Then we get good stuff like R.L. Stevenson and E. Nesbit and hundreds of other authors who write fun, swashbuckling stories that have plot and no morals. I am very fond of these (in case you hadn't guessed). You get someone like C.S. Lewis who takes some of the earlier themes and twists them and manages to hide his morals well enough that I at least didn't spot them. And trust me, as a small child I was on the watch for moral stories as I distrusted them and found them deathly dull.
You get fun like Roald Dahl, where we had real children again and mischeviousness and magic. I do wonder if it was something in the air in Scandanavia, because you get the same features in Astrid Lingren's stuff and in Mrs. Pepperpot.
But now we seem to have taken a step back into the hideous world of Victorian morality tales because we get orphans, death being a reward and morals. Oh god, we have moralising again, and I like it about as much as I did first time round. The only thing being, of course, that if you asked the author's they'd insist these weren't morality tales (JKR, Philip Pullman, Jacqueline Wilson, I'm looking at you *). At least the Victorians were honest about it.
* I abhor Jacqueline Wilson the most of these because if there's things I'm not interested in it's tales set in the modern day about how hard life is and how the hell do you expect me to emphasise with a cow like Tracey Beaker anyway. I may have been forced to read one of her books in Year 6 of primary school, and it might, just might, have left me with an undying loathing of her and her works. I will however admit that children seem to like her.
