'Spun Candy' anyone?

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Pullman's attitude reminds me very much of Moorcock's "epic Pooh" putdown, and I think both come from a similar place: they are didactic writers, polemicists as much as novelists, and they can't abide the fact that A) Tolkien was not one, and B) what Tolkien "takes as read" in his legendarium (a Deity fundamentally just, hereditary monarchies, a sense that the world doesn't absolutely suck everywhere all the time, and (for Moorcock) not a hint of Marxism) naturally gets their hackles up.

It's hard to understate the degree to which Tolkien's Edwardian Tory Catholicism simply rubs certain politicized literary quarters the wrong way, simply by existing. (Even though, especially if one reads Letters, one finds that his views were not as conventional as appear on the surface; Tolkien was rather Bilbo-ish in that regard).