Cordelia: I get it now. You're all spies. Probably all Russian. And you've brainwashed me, and want me to believe we're friends so I'll spill the beans about some nano-technology thingy that you want. Gunn: So I look Russian to you? Cordelia: Black Russian. Angel: That's a drink.

'Hell Bound'


Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.

There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."


beth b - Jan 01, 2010 8:40:25 pm PST #10727 of 28370
oh joy! Oh Rapture ! I have a brain!

I just read Prince Caspian with my mostly 5th grade book club. The nonchristians -- missed all the christian myths( or synbols if you prefer) . But --- and mostly because they are all Percy Jackson fans-- they picked out a bunch of the greek mtyths references. None of them recognized the wild ride. The only other one I have read in that series is LWW. I read it as a kid and never went further with the series. My plan is to read the rest of them, partly because the mixing of various mythologies is fascinating -


Seska (the Watcher-in-Training) - Jan 01, 2010 8:43:00 pm PST #10728 of 28370
"We're all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?"

the Dwarves in Narnia struck as pretty obviously anti-semitic stereotypes.

Not to mention the... interesting representation of Islam.


Strega - Jan 01, 2010 10:13:12 pm PST #10729 of 28370

The Last Battle also features a happy ending in which all the kids and their parents die in a train accident so that they can stay in Narnia forever. Oh, except Susan, who is presumably left to mourn her entire family as her punishment for liking boys.

That was my favorite of the series as a kid, but as an adult it's quite nasty for a variety of reasons. But then, I think I would have liked His Dark Materials more at 10 or so than I did as an adult. Particularly the first two books.


Typo Boy - Jan 01, 2010 10:50:07 pm PST #10730 of 28370
Calli: My people have a saying. A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken.Avon: Life expectancy among your people must be extremely short.

I don't want to take this too far. There is much to like in the Narnia series, and Susan I think is punished not for liking boys but for denying the existence of Narnia. Still I think the reaction to Susan's situation is generally justified. The excuse for punishing her is added at the last minute; it is not really foreshadowed well. And her rejection of Narnia IS associated for the interest in boys and parties. When people read her as being punished for liking boys they may be missing a denotation, but are dead on in the connotation. Some of the remarks made later in life by Lewis seem to indicate that for various reasons he needed someone to survive and be left on earth remembering to make some sort of moral point, and Susan was more or less a last minute pick for that.

Yeah my main criticism is Dark Materials is not a bit of religion bashing. I think religion is powerful enough to stand up to it, and has done enough harm and given enough passes for that harm that it maybe needs a bit of literary bashing as a counterweight. My objection is that the writing is not as good as it could be. And that is a same because some of the character and world building are magnificent. I'm pretty sure that part of the problem is that Pullman changed his mind about where the plot was going between volumes.

I think one defense one could make of Lewis is Pullman is that the writing is better - a lot better. Though I think there are long bits of Dark Materials that are as good as anything Lewis did - just not the work as a whole. I'd love to see Pullman tackle something like this again, maybe on the same theme or maybe on another. But I think he is one of those writers like Lewis whose writing is strengthened by having a didactic purpose, even if it can get out of control on occasion.


erin_obscure - Jan 02, 2010 6:07:41 am PST #10731 of 28370
Occasionally I’m callous and strange

I never saw Pullman as antireligious, but as against an oligarchy using religion as an excuse to control people and do terrible things in the name of religion. I saw it as vilifying the elders, rather than the practice of religion.


Strega - Jan 02, 2010 10:01:47 am PST #10732 of 28370

Susan I think is punished not for liking boys but for denying the existence of Narnia.

I don't find that any less nasty. Especially when the end result is that her own family dismisses her. There's nothing about her being left to remember them, or to learn something from their violent and inexplicable death. If that was Lewis's intent, he failed massively at communicating it. In the last third of the book they essentially say, "Susan sucks because she thinks Narnia was just a childhood game; let us speak of her no more." And they don't.

Pullman's far from perfect, and I'm not quite sure how to compare them, given that they were writing for such different audiences, but I really can't agree that Lewis is a better writer in any artistic sense.


Typo Boy - Jan 02, 2010 10:06:13 am PST #10733 of 28370
Calli: My people have a saying. A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken.Avon: Life expectancy among your people must be extremely short.

but I really can't agree that Lewis is a better writer in any artistic sense.

I think Lewis is more consistent. The nasty parts stick out because they are not the bulk of the books. Pullman fails in large swathes of the book. I agree that Pullman's best matches or exceeds Lewis's best. But Pullman is at his best much less.

Also in terms of religion vs. relgious institutions: I think Pullman thinks the premises of religion are both false and require a great deal of wilfull denial. Hence he sees the the problems of religious institutions as a pretty inevitable result of religious belief. Not that every religous person (or even most religious people) will do evil, but that religious institutions are inevitably corrupt.


Gris - Jan 02, 2010 12:48:38 pm PST #10734 of 28370
Hey. New board.

but I now fail to understand why organized religion didn't join together for an ecumenical burning at the stake.

Well, they did successfully kill the movie.

I thought the movie being really boring and the book having a different audience than the oft-compared Narnia books killed it. Certainly I hated it, and I love the first two books without any explanatory parentheses.

I love Narnia, too.

I think Pullman is mostly against the misuse of religion in the first two books, but poses his thread a bit in the last one, which leaves me very headscratchy on a number of levels.


-t - Jan 02, 2010 4:57:02 pm PST #10735 of 28370
I am a woman of various inclinations and only some of the time are they to burn everything down in frustration

I think Pullman thinks the premises of religion are both false and require a great deal of wilfull denial.

But he ends up postulating a universe that works on equally supernatural and arbitrary rules as those espoused by the vilified religious institutions. That's where he lost me.


Typo Boy - Jan 02, 2010 6:27:40 pm PST #10736 of 28370
Calli: My people have a saying. A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken.Avon: Life expectancy among your people must be extremely short.

But he ends up postulating a universe that works on equally supernatural and arbitrary rules as those espoused by the vilified religious institutions.

Several levels to that. One is he is painting a picture of how appalling the actual existence of supernatural beings would be. Another layer is a picture of how distorted and corrupt religious institutions are even when representing actual supernatural beings. (The first layer weakens the second. If you build a world in which all the gods are devils then it does not prove much about the nature of temples for all the temples to be corrupt. )