[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I've spent quite some time over the last couple of days reading through the various dark materials that Philip Pullman links to on his site. It's interesting that he never voluntarily speaks about Tolkien at all, and about Lewis only when prompted. My guess is that, armed with the basic knowledge that Tolkien was a committed Christian and that Pullman is a determined agnostic with atheistic leanings, poor journalists see the opportunity to set two authors up against one another in the sort of childish war of words so beloved of the gutter press. I would have thought that Pullman was sufficiently sophisticated and intelligent to spot the obvious manipulation, but it's often hard to suppress the desire to say something quotable about something one doesn't like.

The grand irony is, of course, that much of what Pullman says about stories, particularly children's stories, sounds much as though Tolkien had said it. The same professorial false modesty that begins Tolkien's English and Welsh is evident in Pullman's lecture Miss Goddard's Grave, and they agree that no people are entirely good or evil. Aside from religious belief, the two men are really separated by false distinctions, which are all the more strictly enforced by Pullman because of his fear of being too like Tolkien. For example, in an obscure section of his rather pompous and self-important FAQ, he explains his statement that he was not writing fantasy but stark reality thus: "What I mean by it was roughly this: that the story I was trying to write was about real people, not beings that don't exist like elves or hobbits." This is the only voluntary reference to Tolkien that I could find on his site, and it's basically a nonsense. Armoured bears and witches don't exist either, indeed in many ways Elves and Dwarves, which have a literary existence independent of Tolkien, are more grounded in reality than Iorek Bymison. Obviously His Dark Materials isn't actually about those characters, but neither is The Lord of the Rings purely about Hobbits. Speaking of warrior bears, I have my suspicions about the kinship between King Iorek and Tolkien's Beorn, but I can't be certain that they don't simply share a common inspiration. At any rate, both authors believed that a character who was all or part bear should have something of the ursine about him.

So, what does Philip Pullman really think? Who knows? He admits in one published interview to making at least one comment just to be provocative; we know that journalists thrive on conflict, denunciation and indignation and we know that deep down Pullman is more like Tolkien than he might either realise or like to admit. That's a pretty good mixture of reasons why a man who doesn't seem to be particularly hung up on the issue is often quoted on it, particularly as controversy sells books. Big Read or no, His Dark Materials would have passed me by without notice had I not known that its author disagreed with me about Tolkien, and no doubt Random House are well aware of that effect. Then again, no author worth their salt wants to be 'the new Tolkien' or even 'the new Virgil'. A good author, when he thinks about public opinion at all, wants to be thought of as the original of himself. It's useful when seeking that end to express a violent antipathy towards the name most likely to be compared with one's own. In the end it's a form of rebellion, and Pullman is one of many people who likes Milton's portrayal of the arch-rebel Satan. I think that he has a problem with authority of any kind.

Almost certainly Philip Pullman genuinely doesn't like Tolkien, but I think that most of his dislike centres largely on those peripheral issues that always crop up in newspapers. It's not necessary to believe in God to appreciate the moral message of Tolkien's novels, nor is it necessary to believe in absolute monarchy or unimpeachable spiritual authority. Then again, I thought that Pullman's own fantasy hit failed to capture me because of its atheism and republicanism. Clearly there can be no Republic of Heaven, because Heaven is a concept which presupposes the existence and pre-eminence of God. Remove God and automatically one needs a different word for the world of the righteous dead. When the aim of the characters is an oxymoron, it's very hard to take the quest seriously. However, I've no doubt that Pullman thinks much the same of a quest to destroy the chief weapon of embodied evil.

Such niggling aside, I agree with a lot of what Philip Pullman says about a great many things, particularly about education and storytelling. I suspect that Tolkien would have agreed with him as well, and that's probably why it irks me so much to see these comments in print. He may be an agnostic, but Pullman's morals are Anglican morals; he may not believe in kings, but he believes in a good story. Tolkien also believed in the power of good stories. He also believed in intellectual freedom and the value of education. There is not really much to choose between them, with the exception that Pullman has an infinite capacity to bore me. It's a capacity that C.S. Lewis sometimes has, where the moral or message of the story has become apparent in the third paragraph or so, and the rest seems to belabour the point unnecessarily. When the message takes over, it's harder just to follow the story, and if one disagrees with the message then it becomes almost impossible to keep reading. It took me weeks to force my way through The Amber Spyglass, far longer than it normally takes me to read LR, because I was constantly in rebellion against the overpowering message that you can obtain Heaven by force or design it by committee.

Any suggestion of religious disagreement presupposes that Pullman has read enough Tolkien to be familiar with the religious undertones of his work, but I feel that with Pullman as with so many literary commentators, it's really the window-dressing to which he takes exception. Lots of things that don't exist appear in Middle-earth, including the worst faux pas of all, a physical embodiment of evil, and a lot of people feel that this is too simplistic an approach to moral questions. I assume that Pullman's experience of Tolkien was a single reading of all or some of The Lord of the Rings about four decades ago, and he's entitled not to think much of it. I think it's a shame that he allows himself to be quoted talking such rubbish about it, but journalists can be very clever at making someone say what they want them to say, and alcohol is always a useful tool on that sordid quest. There are more reasons than one for taking a fantasy author to the Eagle and Child.