I feel validated for loving mcgilchrist's master+emissary now. Haven't read HDM in a looong time now, but it was formative for me, especially the bittersweet ending. The symbols and talismans captivated me.
Looking back, it's still masterful how it hangs together. As YA fiction, it has to be about blossoming sexuality. Monkey as id, relationship with animal as childhood-level affection, catholic repression in the first book (literally locking the animals away), then fighting god, overthrowing the authority figure to move into a mature understanding of love. The knife and universes as a metaphor for decision-making and branching lives (literally named Will).
Plus the ending dovetails wonderfully into the actual lived experience of the author, who spent all that time building a fantasy and has to let it go.
And I love the concept of the aliens in the last book, that use coconuts as wheels and travel on natural highways.
Is it? I can think of several counterexamples right off the bat: heroin to former addicts, alcohol to alcoholics, in general all addictions. Former cultists may have some valid disparagements to say about the cult they belonged to, all the more valid for their actual experience. An abused spouse is entirely correct in disparaging the person they loved before, especially when speaking to other potential victims.
Perhaps you shouldn't disparage the act of loving itself (though still debatable in the cult and addiction examples), but never changing your mind about the object/person/group you loved in the first place is naive.
Did you... read the article? He is clearly not advocating for never changing one's mind, and neither am I. And I don't think advice has to never have counterexamples to be useful, as most people are reasonably adept at understanding that things have contexts.
The line you quoted from Pullman includes an absolute in it - 'never'. Thus it's completely valid to bring counter-examples against it when people then promote his line as 'good advice'. If he'd said something like "I generally prefer not to disparage things that I once loved, even if I now no longer do", then I doubt people would take any issue with that statement.
We are not engaging in programming here; this is more akin to poetry. That something is good general advice is not changed if there are some exceptions. Indeed, every bit of pithy general advice I can think of has important unstated exceptions and concomitant counter-examples.
It is valid to bring counter-examples as part of a discussion, and I did not say otherwise. But I don't think it's "valid" to take a sentence, go off half cocked, and take it to an absurd and erroneous conclusion that contradicts the author's plain intent. If I'm highlighting a particularly valuable part of the article, I don't think I should have to quote the whole article in a comment just to prevent somebody taking it over-literally and out of context.
And I will note that what you did in rewriting the generalized statement is exactly how most people understand apparently most absolute statements. Nobody thinks that "a stitch in time saves nine" is literally asserting a precise 9x relationship between maintenance effort and waste avoided. It can be fun to be over-literal as part of making a joke, but when it is only in the service of misunderstanding the actual point, it's just tedious and annoying.
Quick reply to point out that the saying you referenced is "a stitch in time saves nine" and not "a stitch in time always saves nine". By including never in what he said, Pullman was being unnecessarily bombastic, in my opinion, especially when there are egregious counter-examples to what he was saying such as having loved a person who did you a tremendous harm (some sort of abusive relationship) and then, following his advice, remaining silent about that harmful person because your love was 'once real'.
As a programmer, I understand why programmers are prone to tediously over-literal thinking. Sometimes I do it myself. I just don't think it's helpful here.
In the case of heroin addiction, it is never love. It is a sickly, abusive Stockholm Syndrome relationship where you may be infatuated with the drug. You may even lust for the drug. But it is never love, because the feeling diminishes faster and faster with the years, hitting lower and lower peaks, all while demanding more and more of the user. You get to the point where you’re simply injecting just to feel sane, not to even feel normal but rather tolerable.
Very mild reminder on what the forum guidelines [1] have to say about this line (and only issuing the reminder because you've used it twice in succession).
> The book I discovered later in life
The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist, published in 2009. In this and his later book, The Matter With Things, McGilchrist investigates the extraordinary difference between the characteristic modes of perception, cognition and response of the two hemispheres of the brain. It’s like coming across an entirely new colour.
This book sounds interesting, brought to mind The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_...). This year I saw this book at Half Price Books and, primed by Westworld quickly bought and read it. It wasn’t good: interesting premise argued in a just so way without much substantive evidence.
> The books I am currently reading
… Dick Davis’s translation of the Shahnameh
Shahnameh had and continues to have enormous cultural influence not just in Iran but in all neighboring cultures, perhaps akin to the Bible in Western tradition. Davis’s new translation converts the couplets in prose, with some parts kept in poetic form, is highly accessible and praised (https://www.npr.org/2006/03/29/5309016/new-translation-of-pe...). I suggest complementing the reading with miniatures of key scenes you can find by googling or you may forego a full translation and go with the abridged but fantastically illustrated book by Hamid Rahmanian (https://www.amazon.com/Shahnameh-Persian-Kings-Illustrated-S...)
The importance of Origin of Consciousness is not its author's throwaway theory. It is, rather, that the questions he raised and failed to answer to anybody's satisfaction, including his own, still have no answer, decades later.
Incidentally, a scholar of ancient Greek I consulted read it and said he was dead wrong about the evolution of emotive terminology.
The book is worthwhile just for its opening chapters which outline the various perspectives on consciousness prior to the point it had been written. Some of which have been obfuscated in summary since.
Yeah, I think it's an excellent book of exploration and speculation. Whether his hypotheses are true is an entirely different question, but one that doesn't interest me very much for that book.
Middlemarch is also my favorite classic novel. So many good observations there. One of my favorite quotes, "But we all know the wag's definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance." (I was in Kyrgyzstan at the time). I definitely fall into that category, but a bit intentionally less so than before reading this.
I interpret it as meaning someone who goes way out of their way to feed hungry people on other continents but won't spare a penny for someone at their doorstep. Admittedly that could be way off.
Not necessarily, it could still be a square of the distance. From the data presented you cannot tell if it's linear, square, cubic or any other relation, just that it increases with distance.
Middlemarch started serial publication in 1871. So George Elliot gets to allude to telescopic philanthropy, confident that her audience will be familiar with "the wag's definition of a philanthropist" and get her dig.
A recurring theme in English literature of roughly that period. A Mrs. Jellyby in Dickens's Bleak House leaves her children unwashed and malnourished while she dictates letters promoting some notionally charitable project in progress on a distant continent.
I don't know the book, but I assume the criticism is that a rich person can give money to alleviate suffering, but by the same token their wealth means they will not have to experience the suffering intimately. The richer they are, the more money they can give, and, also, the more remote the suffering.
Why edit the Guardian title from the original? Isn't the fact that it's Philip Pullman being quoted that gives the quote depth and resonance and even more meaning than its unattributed version above?
>I also removed the author name from the title. For the most part, we keep author names out of HN titles. It's a trick I learned from pg for keeping the focus on content rather than personalities. Of course there are always exceptions.
—dang, April 2, 2014
>Generally we remove author names from titles.
—dang, June 12, 2021
In this case, the content of the title gains its power from the author.
>Of course there are always exceptions.
This should be one of those exceptions and Philip Pullman's name restored to the title as originally published.
I agree that it should have been included, as the article is much more about 'the books of his life' than this one particular book. I expected to read more about Middlemarch but it ended up just being a single paragraph about the quite common experience of Middlemarch being 'a book for adults'.
And I personally wouldn't have clicked through or opened the thread if Pullman's name had been in the title (I dislike him as an author and as a public opinion sharer). I found the rest of the article uninteresting and uninspiring (and the experience with MM so commonly expressed to now be mundane).
In saying that about Middlemarch, he may also be alluding to Virginia Woolf's famous comment that the book was "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people."
A personal tangent. In the spirit of the OP, I guess.
I read Justine (1st book of the Alexandria Quartet) back in my early 20s, circa 1993.
The way I found it was utterly weird. I was helping my dad sort out his old stuff my mom wanted him to throw away, mostly lots of yellow late 50s early 60s notebooks from his college. And some old English books. And Justine. My dad said he couldn't remember where he got this book, and said somebody must have given it to him back in the 60s, and he never read it.
I've never heard of it or Lawrence Durrel, but I knew about Gerald Durrel due to My Family and Other Animals which was something that recommended for kids around the early 80s, I guess, and I think I even read it when I was much younger.
I assumed Justine was a dime detective or spy novel, since I knew that's the stuff my dad likes. Or some biography. Nothing too literary for him, thank you very much. He asked if I wanted to read it or he'd throw it away. I looked at the blurb, which didn't tell me much, shrugged and said ok. I was between books. The book was a 60s printing, yellow pages, somewhat disintegrating, but all pages were intact.
So I read it. It was tough. But I persevered. And I liked it. Very much. Well, the sex scenes were kinda shocking but by that time I've read more explicit ones.
And to my surprise I discovered that the science fiction novel Icehenge, by Kim Stanley Robinson, which I read and re-read and re-read 7 years prior at even a more impressionable age, was very much a tribute to Justine. At least its middle part. It even includes a science-fiction in-universe pastiche of Cavafy's The City.
Icehenge and Justine remain sort of embedded in my brain. As Cavafy's "The City" in Durrel's translation (attributed to one of the fictitious characters in the novel itself) , which in my opinion is the best translation. I'm able to recite it by heart to this day, and there are days when I'm highly tempted to print it and hang above my desk at work. But I wouldn't like the questions. I think.
I've wanted for 20 years now to read the rest of the Alexandrian Quartet, but I've never gotten around to it. Swamped by school and then by work and then by family. Maybe someday. And maybe I'll be disappointed.
As for His Dark Materials. I read it too, but didn't like it, something didn't click. Except The Golden Compass which was good.
Slightly off-topic, as it isn't mentioned in the article, but I recently read (well, audibled)
Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson
which Philip Pullman has described as "the best thriller I’ve ever read" and thought it was stunning in the audio version.
As an espionage chase against a (timely) Arctic landscape, with a can-do engineer/academic as hero, I reckon it will appeal to a lot of HN thriller fans.
Also slightly off-topic: I was wowed by the scope of His Dark Materials, and then was progressively disappointed by each subsequent installment.
Read the first volume and stop: he never again achieves the magisterial Armored Bears.
His angels, first conceived as cognizing architecture, devolve to petulant whiners by the end. It seems like he lost all interest after the first volume, but had contracted for a number of words to deliver, so did.
I have middlemarch on my shelf right now. It arrived a week or two ago after I learned a writer I like considers it one of his favourite books. I will probably get to it after Delillos underworld, didions play it like it lays, and knolls favourite sister
Middlemarch is also my favorite classic novel. I didn't get anything out of Underworld (or White Noise). Don't understand why they're so acclaimed. Curious if you end up the same.
I read Mason and Dixon and half of Gravitys Rainbow. Brilliant author but too dense and too, eh, Pynchony, for me. I liked Marquez best of that era. That said I've more or less stopped reading fiction, feel like after hundreds of attempts I have yet to find anything life changing enough to be worth the investment.
Thanks for yr response. I've read Pynchon but not DeLillo, which is why I asked the question.
> That said I've more or less stopped reading fiction, feel like after hundreds of attempts I have yet to find anything life changing enough to be worth the investment.
This was interesting. I'm not going to argue against you stopping reading fiction because I don't see reading as a necessarily 'virtuous' activity. I think there can be value in it but there can be value in doing other things instead. I personally feel that I have come across a number of books in my time that were somewhat 'life changing' but I never read in a quest to find such books; my reading has always been done for experience/curiosity.
Feel free to read DeLillo (obviously). I'm really curious what the fuss is about. I found the characters drab, the style uninspiring, the themes mundane. There must be something there but I didn't get it.
If I did, I think I would try Ratner's Star, as that seems his most interesting novel (at least in what it attempted, whether successful or not). But I'm in no hurry.
Coding? I started contributing to google's quantum computing libraries last year (they did not create a wormhole) and now moving on to compiler development.
I’ve listened twice now to the wonderful audiobook narration of Middlemarch by Juliet Stevenson. Highly recommended. Maybe someday I’ll get around to reading the novel in print.
> The books I could never read again: Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet ... found the mixture altogether too rich
That's pretty rich in itself, coming from the author of "His Dark Materials," which whether you like it or not, is so metaphorically and allegorically over-rich with respect to the author's obvious angst and disdain for Catholicism specifically, and organized Christianity generally, as to be ... well, almost un-rereadable by any thoughtful person.
I’m genuinely troubled by the implied suggestion that thoughtful people should avoid, or be put off by works they either disagree with or find uncomfortable, or might dislike for any reason. Anything can be read and analysed by a thoughtful person.
I visited a relative in hospital recently and found myself listening to the audio of a super-trashy TV show a patient in the next bed was watching. It was fascinating. The acting was wooden and stilted as though being read out from the page, the dialogue was so direct and explicit it was painful “You know why I hate him so much, because he cheated me out of my inheritance!”. It was almost Mexican soap opera level. And yet it was captivating, because I found myself wondering about the business model that produces such material, who the audience is, what it’s like to be an actor on a drama like that. Even if something is terrible, there’s so much to analyse to discover why it’s terrible, and why some people might like it anyway.
That was a bit of a switcheroo. Starting off exhorting us to not dismiss creative works just because they might seem lowbrow, and then revealing that the "entertainment value" you got from a soap opera was to try to imagine how anyone could profitably produce such rubbish! :-D
I’m not in any way struggling to imagine it, and I’m not at all dismissing it, that’s not what I mean at all. There is no switch. Clearly people do produce content like that and it has a ready audience. I have no problem with that, it gave me a newfound appreciation for the dynamics that make such material successful and its economics.
The switch I was trying to describe was from an appreciation of the content as a consumer of it - to appreciating its existence as an external observer of the process that created it. There is an implicit dismissal of the content itself in the second one, that I found funny. I was trying to be lighthearted, anyway... :-)
I consider myself a thoughtful person and I enjoyed reading HDM as recently as 2020 ;) There is no need to broadly insult everyone who likes a book. Each to her own.
Having said that, I felt ‘the golden compass’ holds up much better than the sequels — better character development, less didactic, amazing word building.
There are some misfires. And though I assume you meant to say "world building", the word building is a particular weak point. He decided that, in an alternate history where the word for electricity derived from the Arabic word for amber rather than the Greek one, it was perfectly plausible for the modern form of an original "anbar" to be "anbar". That can't happen.
If you want to see a series of novels with strong word building, check out Katharine Kerr's Deverry series. ;D
I didn’t feel that she was devoted to him. She was someone experiencing a first love, she’d been through a lot, she was losing the ability to read the alethiometer, and Will had the knife.
You cut out the rest of the sentence which I think is important "but I shall never disparage anything I once loved, because the love was real."
I actually had trouble reading the His Dark Materials trilogy because I was so unfamiliar with some of the details of Roman Catholicism until some people helped me with it but it's no different to me than almost any other fantasy/science fiction where the religious stuff comes to the fore ala A Canticle for Leibowitz or the Dune series. I had more issues where there are several points in the His Dark Material trilogy where in lieu of showing or plot actions illustrating something there are long exposition dumps that are disguised as overheard conversation which felt like a crutch.
> other fantasy/science fiction where the religious stuff comes to the fore ala A Canticle for Leibowitz or the Dune series
My feeling is HDM is to Dune what Eragon is to Lord of the Rings. The former in these comparisons don't apply much imagination to their real-world influences.
The latter in these comparisons are still clearly inspired by real-world themes and tropes, but they're more imaginative in how they combine and diverge from their inspirations, probably owing to a richer depth of experiences and influences that the respective authors had been exposed to.
> My feeling is HDM is to Dune what Eragon is to Lord of the Rings.
This is an interesting comparison. I have not read Eragon, but I have read reviews that say it's a transparent reskinning of Star Wars. Assuming that's true, the form of an analogy between Eragon and Lord of the Rings would be
Eragon : Lord of the Rings :: Star Wars : The Sword of Shannara
But that's one of those somewhat-malformed analogies where the relationships cross the :: instead of mirroring each other to either side of it. Like "Shakespeare : Tolstoy :: Romeo and Juliet : War and Peace"; there isn't actually a relationship between Shakespeare and Tolstoy, but if you have three of the elements, you can force the fourth.
I’m more concerned about the fact the three books barely hang together into a single narrative than that he’s determined to ape CSLewis in the opposite direction.
(For the record, I consider Lewis the better writer, but grief the “Simple Christianity” can get a bit much at times.)
I also found His Dark Materials a lot harder to read the second time, when I was in my 20s, compared to the first time I read it in my teens. That said, I have to admit he's grown up a lot further since then; his new series, The Book of Dust, which is set 12 years earlier is a lot more mature in its themes.
I don't think the entire Book of Dust trilogy will be in the past. La Belle Sauvage is, but The Secret Commonwealth followed an older Lyra to the steppes.
I mean, have you read Durrell’s Alexandra Quartet? It definitely has a sort of melodramatic angst to it akin to the tone of Twilight. I like it regardless, but I definitely can understand the his opinion.
Dunno what I’d think if I reread them now, but when I was 8 I (1) devoured the whole trilogy for the characters/worldbuilding and (2) didn’t notice the religious metaphor. Seems like this might be the way to evaluate a kids’ book?
There are processions of angels bearing the corpse of a dead god. The alethiometer is specifically stated to function through divine grace. It's not so much a religious metaphor as an out-and-out religious story. What's not to notice?
I have read HDM a number of times, as a child and as an adult. As an adult I noticed the points you're making and had to read around them a little. I still love the books and have learnt many things from reading them.
Impressive ego that you consider yourself the archetypal “thoughtful person” and can determine what all other “thoughtful” people will or will not enjoy.
Seriously, though, I agree, the phrasing I used was a little over-wrought itself. My apologies. My point really was that if Pullman believes that Durrell's book was "too rich" to be re-read by him, he should understand that the limitations in Durrell's work that lead him to that conclusion are over-present in his own His Dark Materials.
Fair enough, but I wasn't commenting in any way on religion, but on the over-wrought quality of Pullman's allegory. At least, that was my intent. Apologies to all if I missed fire.
For what it's worth, I'm a curmudgeonly atheist who found that HDM steadily decreased in quality over the course of the three books as it ramped up the anti-religious emphasis. It's definitely not the case that the only people who find it annoying are those who feel that their own religion is being attacked.
Also chiming in to say that while I can appreciate your concern that walnutclosefarm's comment may have had the potential to kick off a 'religious flamewar', I don't see their comment as being in that vein. I saw it as a criticism on the quality of Pullman's writing only.
Looking back, it's still masterful how it hangs together. As YA fiction, it has to be about blossoming sexuality. Monkey as id, relationship with animal as childhood-level affection, catholic repression in the first book (literally locking the animals away), then fighting god, overthrowing the authority figure to move into a mature understanding of love. The knife and universes as a metaphor for decision-making and branching lives (literally named Will).
Plus the ending dovetails wonderfully into the actual lived experience of the author, who spent all that time building a fantasy and has to let it go.
And I love the concept of the aliens in the last book, that use coconuts as wheels and travel on natural highways.