[Reader-list] Author Philip Pullman lays down moral challenge for writers

[Chintan Girish Modi]

From
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/aug/12/books.humanities?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

*Pullman lays down moral challenge for writers*By Angelique Chrisafis, arts
correspondent

The Guardian, Monday 12 August 2002 11.58 BST

With the death of organised religion, British writers have a new moral
burden. Philip Pullman, the award-winning children's author, yesterday urged
writers to tackle the great moral issues of life and death or risk becoming
trivial and unreadable.

Pullman, 55, won this year's Whitbread book award for the final instalment
of the His Dark Materials trilogy, in which he created a parallel universe
ruled by a senile, viciously sadistic deity who has to be deposed in battle
so the inhabitants can join with angels in creating a "republic of heaven".
The Catholic Herald called his books "the stuff of nightmares" and "worthy
of the bonfire". Another critic cautioned: "Christian parents beware."

Pullman, who writes for children but shuns the category, "children's
author", is only outsold by JK Rowling's Harry Potter series and has a vast
adult readership.

Keen to tackle received ideas on religion, he recently called CS Lewis's
highly Christian Narnia books "blatantly racist" and "monumentally
disparaging of children". Such is his hatred of domineering, organised
religion, he has become something of an evangelical atheist.

During a debate on morality in fiction at the Edinburgh international books
festival at the weekend, Pullman warned that in the climate of threatened
attacks on Iraq and the crisis in the Middle East, we live in a Godless and
uncertain age, and unless writers wrestled with the larger questions of
moral conduct, they would become useless and irrelevant.

The author, who writes from his garden shed, said he did not like to be
called a fantasy writer because fantasy was a disappointment.

"It is not that I don't like fantasy, I don't like what it does. Fantasy,
and fiction in general, is failing to do what it might be doing. It has
unlimited potential to explore all sorts of metaphysical and moral
questions, but it is not ... My quarrel with fantasy writing is that it is
such a rich seam to be mined, such a versatile mode, that is not always
being used to explore bigger ideas."

Fiction must return to carrying a "moral punch", unless literature is to
become petty and worthless. This meant examining issues of good and evil,
power, death, paradise and hell. If a book did not deal with death, "to me
it is trivial".

Citing Jane Austen's Emma as a masterpiece of the literary examination of
morality, Pullman said: "Try as hard as you can, you can't leave out
morality from a book. Everything we do, however small, has consequences. The
greatest fiction always has a sequence of actions followed by reactions,
followed by consequences.

"You can't leave morality out unless your work is so stupid and trivial and
so worthless that [nobody] would want to read it anyway."

Pullman, whose grandfather was an Anglican priest, and who stopped believing
in God as a teenager, said: "I am all for the death of God."

But his real bugbear was with the "propensity of human nature" to use
politics or religion to set up one unquestionable truth - "it could be the
Bible, it could be the Communist Manifesto" - and to then knock down all
that went against it. "This is what I am against. Not Christianity, but
every religion and fundamental organisation where there is one truth and
they will kill you if you don't believe it."

Pullman has previously warned that the English literary novel - since the
deaths of William Golding and Graham Greene - has been too queasy about
tackling issues of moral conduct and life and death, leaving the work to
children's fiction.

Richard Holloway, the former bishop of Edinburgh, and once considered
Britain's most controversial church leader, appeared with Pullman to debate
fiction's role in the discussion of good and evil.

He said politicians were abusing their power to create hellish scenarios on
earth and it was right for novelists to explore the concepts of death, hell
and the afterlife.

He said: "In the Middle East, we are delivering each other to hell. If
President Bush unleashes hell on Iraq in the next weeks, it will tell us
something about human nature's capacity for monstrous wrongs. Hell is our
own creation. If we are not careful, we will allow our brothers to deliver
hell on earth to us."

Speaking later at the festival, the author Fay Weldon said younger readers
no longer needed the black and white moral bounds that were imposed on their
parents. "Children today know they are not in the safe environment that all
children's books used to be."

* Will, hero of The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman, talks to an angel
called Baruch*

"And what happens in the world of the dead?" Will went on.
"It's impossible to say," said Baruch. "Everything about it is secret. Even
the churches don't know; they tell their believers that they'll live in
Heaven, but that's a lie. If people really knew ..."
"And my father's ghost has gone there."
"Without a doubt, and so have the countless millions who died before him."
Will found his imagination trembling.