momsalive1

In a word? Bullshit. Literary fiction, maybe. All adult fiction - especially genre fiction? No way. Of course, I never made it through the first book of his trilogy (Can you spell "bored" and "pedantic," boys and girls?) so make of my (strongly felt) opinion what you will.

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momsalive1

LOL! Your opinion is much more informed than mine, and I will keep it in mind when I read them again. Boring and pedantic is my overall impression of Narnia (based on only the first few books), but not all of His Dark Materials - it was a thrilling story to me. However, my dazed recollection (after many near sleepless nights of racing through the books) of the last book was that he got more and more heavy handed as time went on.

So what's the difference between literary fiction and other fiction?

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I read the Narnia books as a kid and loved them. I thought they were exciting fantasy adventures, and, being a nice (?) Jewish girl, had no idea Aslan was supposed to be Christ. I have to say, though, that I just saw the movie and was pretty unimpressed. It had all the flaws of a "kids' book," and I was bugged by every one of them. I honestly don't remember enough about the Pullman book I partially read to say anything specific about it other than that I never bought into the characters or the world and felt very keenly that the author had A Point. Which, looking at his quote, is a pretty fair assumption. I don't actually mind books with a point, by the way. I just prefer it not to be capitalized and hammered at me. That said, I seem to be in a distinct minority in my dislike of Pullman (and of Harry Potter, if it comes to that, though my reasons there are different).

As for literary fiction, my quick and dirty (and not necessarily correct, I hasten to add) definition is that 1) it's intended to be Taken Seriously (so in fact it very often does have A Point), and 2) form and language are frequently more important than a traditional (beginning --> middle --> end) story. Whereas "regular" fiction, much of which is genre fiction (a plus, in my book), pays a lot of attention to storytelling. Sometimes that's to the detriment of good writing, but imo plenty of literary fiction is badly written, too. And the best popular fiction is well-written. And it can often make a point, too, it just doesn't make The Point the point of the whole story.

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momsalive1

I thought the first third or so of Narnia was great, but after the scene with faun it lost me. There seemed to be many Significant Looks and Important Moments I would have appreciated more if I knew the stories better. As it was, the story struck me as thin and flat - I didn't get the characters at all - how does being a responsible older brother set you up to suddenly morph into a warrior king? I am sure it didn't help that I found it too hard not to tick off all the things Peter Jackson did so much better.

I think what resonated so much with Pullman is how he writes about science without losing the mystery or glory of the natural world - the whole reason I do science is to be awed. I don't like the agenda I know now that he has, and it will be a test (to me) of the strength of his writing to see if it holds up when I re-read it with that agenda in mind.

So what don't you like about Harry Potter?

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I had similar Narnia problems. Too many things seemed to just. happen. without motivation or explanation, and it bugged me. As for Harry Potter...OK, bear in mind that this is entirely my opinion and I'm clearly part of a minority of, if not one, very few, but you asked, so here you go.

I think the books were over-hyped out the ass. The first few were cute enough as kids'/teens' books, but there's not enough substance or real characterization there to interest me. The three main characters had a bit more depth than anyone else, but all the rest struck me as charicatures or collections of traits rather than wholly integrated personalities. And some stuff just struck me as cutesy for the sake of being cute but were actually quite stupid. Like vomit-flavored jelly beans. That's a three-year-old's (OK, maybe a seven-year-old's) potty humor, minus the actual potty, basically. Though I have no doubt that if she'd thought she could have gotten away with shit-flavored jelly beans, she would have included them, too.

The first three books at least had a sense of pacing and storytelling, though. I hit #4 and it was like swimming through oatmeal trying to read the damn thing. Slow, overwritten, poorly structured and just plain dull. I'm sure there was an actual story buried in there somewhere, but I realized that after I'd gotten around halfway through and it had sat untouched by my bed for six months that it was a story I didn't care to labor to find. I gave the book back to my sister and haven't lost a moment to wondering if I should have soldiered on. The publication of the next two books counted as non-events on my personal radar, and the publication of the last will be the same, I don't doubt. I've caught the first three movies on cable and found them pretty bad, and I imagine I'll eventually see the rest on cable, too, and stay culturally current enough that way. But it's all just mho, and most of the world clearly disagrees.

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bridgewalker.livejournal.com

God, but I love it when you talk dirty!
In the end, all authors are self-serving. Writing is a form of performance, and performance is by nature, self involved.
Cynical, but just my two pennies.

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momsalive1

**points down to reply to ffiondove**

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OK, talking about talking dirty... My eyes are pretty bad, and when I first saw your icon I thought Jefferson said "I cannot live without boobs"!

And yes, I think there's a certain amount of truth in your cynicism, though less in writers (most writers, anyway - obviously not Pullman) than in actors, singers, etc., who by definition are more present for the audience.

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I liked Dark Materials - but I'm a sucker for atmosphere over substance! I loved the descriptions of Lara's Oxford,and the mist over the Gyptians in the Fens.

Where I take objection is his "style over substance" pop at serious literature - because that's just lazy! It works as a specific criticsm of certain writers; for my money he's right if that point is applied to both Martin Amis and Ian McKeowen (sp) but Vikram Seth or Salman Rushdie (on a good day when he's not too busy being a pretentious git) absolutley not!Carol Shields - sometimes - Unless I thought was staggeringly good while Larry's Party was pants!

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I think he's totally wrong about Ian McEwan - Amsterdam, Enduring Love, Atonement - those are ALL about good and evil inside everyone's hearts (which is, I think, the Big Theme he's talking about), and the stories are, IMO brilliant.

Agree with you about Salman Rushdie for sure ;)

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Well have to agree to disagree about Ian McEwan, I just find him as far up himself as Pullman is. I imagine him lying in a darkened room having an "oh darling I'm an artist" moment about three times a day!

But as a complete aside for a kids book which is a belting good yarn and very well researched I have no qualms in reccomending "Wolf Brother" and it's sequel "Spirit Walker" about a stone age child. Spellbinding stuff.

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Well have to agree to disagree about Ian McEwan, I just find him as far up himself as Pullman is. I imagine him lying in a darkened room having an "oh darling I'm an artist" moment about three times a day!

Yeah, I'm sorry - I think McEwan is a brilliant writer and if he is full of himself it's with cause ;)

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Interesting. I never think anyone has cause to be full of themselves. I always find the more brilliant a person the less like that they are. At least in my field, a 2 bit hack lawyer is always more full of themselves than an appeal judge!

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I think it's perfectly possible to be very brilliant and not all that modest - the lack of modesty may not be an attractive character trait, but it's certainly not something that detracts from the brilliance. An immodest person who is NOT brilliant? Well, then that's just a ridiculous figure.

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Well again we will have to disagree -unpleasant character traits always tarnish brilliance. And I don't think it's necessary to be modest in order not to be full of yourself, there is a middle path. After all self efacement can be just as attention seeking as it's opposite. One needn't shout nor whisper, one can just adopt a normal tone of voice.

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I think perhaps we are getting to the point where it's a bit rude to be arguing in someone else's journal.

However, I actually think part of why we are disagreeing is cultural - being up yourself is the one character trait that the British despise utterly. A certain assurance yes, a quite arrogance undoubtedly, but Pullmanesque self agrandisment -absolutley not. And it's cost us more than one brilliant prime minister.

And yes - I find McEwan's writing self concsiously pompous and tiresome in the vein of "oh look at me I'm writing something IMPORTANT" he just makes me want to scream "oh get over it!"

But interesting as this is, I think we should stop, this isn't really the place.

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momsalive1

No don't! This is very interesting...

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Hmmm! Well, I know this is going rather far afield from momsalive's post, but would you then argue that somehow Beethoven is less of a genius than, oh, Haydn, because he was not nearly as nice of a person? Or that Caravaggio is somehow less of an artist than Fra Angelico because Caravaggio was a murdering, thieving, all-round bad egg and Fra Angelico was a beatified saint?

Now, I admit that someone's public persona inevitably has some kind of an effect on how I view their work - and in an age when there is so much of a celebrity culture it's inevitable that we will know more about the producers of art than people did in the past and perhaps that taints our view of their art, but I am aware of that tendency in myself and try very hard either not to know too much about someone (as with actors) or try not to let my feelings about the person interfere with how I encounter their artistic output.

And getting back to McEwan, is it just that you find his works too consciously literary and that's why you think he's full of himself, or has he actually given interviews where he denigrates other people and is all puffed up about himself, as Pullman obviously seems to enjoy doing? I'm curious because I'm wondering where your dislike of McEwan comes from. I happen to vehemently dislike the final volume of "His Dark Materials" and of course, Pullman's interviews are not making me like him much either, but I actually disliked the books before I ever disliked the man. I think Neil Gaiman is way too full of himself too, but I still love his work and was particularly fond of Anansi Boys which I recently read.

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momsalive1

This argument sounds vaguely familiar - something about whether a work has a quality you can separate from the artist, or from the writer's cultural context. I'd think you would have to be able to separate them, or give up on the idea that there can be any objective judgement of quality.

The same issue of the New Yorker had an article about the proliferation of literatry prizes. It mentioned a novel that has risen into the canon of world literature as an example of Maori fiction; the Maori are indigenous to New Zealand. It is an interesting example of whether context makes the quality because she is not, by many measures, Maori. Initially what made this an important novel was that it's author was Maori, so I guess knowing she "is only 1/8 Maori and was reared and educated in Anglophone society" make it less important.

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I'd think you would have to be able to separate them, or give up on the idea that there can be any objective judgement of quality.

I'm not so sure about separating from the writer's cultural context - I think it is almost impossible (and it was very frustrating to me personally) for example, to read, oh, Machiavelli without understanding the cultural context that made him see a strong unifying authority like his "Prince" as critical to the existence of his polity - precisely because Florence in his times had undergone a series of weak regimes that came very close to destroying the state. Or taking the examples of paintings, I think it is hard to understand the cultural shift of Dutch painters painting bourgeois families without the context of the revolt and an understanding of why they stopped painting The Holy Family all the time, you know?

So I would not argue that we need to take cultural contexts out of our readings of works of art; but I do think we need to take the personality of the author/composer/artist out of the equation - it is a fallacy that the nicest people make the best art (and it was only that more modest thing I was arguing for anyway ;)). This is why I brought up Caravaggio who was really a horrid man, but who is one of my favorite painters ever and whose religious paintings are incredibly beautiful, moving, and dare I say, spiritual, regardless of whether he actually followed any of the precepts of Christianity himself ;)

I think in our current world, it's harder to do that - because "access" to celebrities is so much easier with the internet and the fact that authors interact more personally with greater numbers of fans (or have the opportunity to do so.) I mean, I know Dickens received many, many fan letters but he didn't have a blog and his responses didn't get broadcast 'round the world and that stuff that makes us so able to say "that Philip Pullman, what an ass!" or whatever!

It's very hard, of course, to separate personality from content - but I find I can do a better job of that with authors and musicians (and since I'm not a fan of a lot of living artists, that doesn't come up as much ;)) better than I can with actors. I'm not sure why that is, but the fact that I think Neil Gaiman's a little too grasping of celebrity doesn't interfere with my enjoyment of his work the way that knowing about Russell Crowe's outbursts of rage interferes with my enjoyment of his work. A paradox, I think!

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ffiondove.livejournal.com

No I think he is utterly wrong......it amazes me some of the bollocks these people spout, still he has us all talking about him......

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momsalive1

"..still he has us all talking about him......"

babiecuz pointed out that performers are self serving, and I guess performers catch our attention regardless of the content. It surprised me that he was so dogmatic about it and since I don't know squat about literature, I assumed he had some basis on which to say that. My flist knows better!

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I think Philip Pullman is, pardon my French, full of crap. And the way to make your own work more popular is NOT to denigrate other people's, IMO, but to write some really good stories. I loved The Golden Compass, and progressively grew more and more disillusioned with the series until The Amber Spyglass was the most disappointing long-awaited book that I've ever read - I was so excited when I started it and then Pullman sacrificed characters and story on the altar of his need to lecture everyone about how god is dead and make his "Paradise Lost" parallels really, really clear. Feh!

I think he's not completely wrong about literary fiction but I would argue that other practitioners of the art of YA fantasy are at least as good as he is (for starters, people like Diana Wynne Jones and Garth Nix and others have addressed many of the same issues) and I would also argue that really excellent adult fantasy fiction (and there's not a lot of that, but it exists - China Mieville, George Martin) address EXACTLY those large themes about good and evil and the choices that we make. Moreover, a lot of "literary" writers, like Ian McEwan (who's won the Booker Prize) ALSO address those kinds of themes - I think he's got a very reductionist view of adult fiction!

Sorry to go on at length like this, but Pullman just comes off more and more as kind of bitter that he's not as popular as someone like Rowling and therefore it MUST be because of whatever extraneous reasons and blahblahblah. I'll be skipping those movies, I think!

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momsalive1

Rant at will - I thought maybe my flist would have some opinions about this! Now that I think of it, that interviewerer should have asked some elaboration - in what sense is LOTR "just spun candy"? Or maybe that's not really her job - the quotations she choose did speak for themselves.

I thought that the distinction between adult and children's fantasy was one of complexity, but maybe not? Is it like the movies - violence, language and sex?

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