What was interesting is what Pullman is trying to say about the daemons and the Intercision process… I suspect the after-effects of the process is a parallel to what religious organisations do to young children, albeit not in such a drastic fashion.

I’ll see about discussing it further later on when I’m back.

I felt Narnia was escapist in direct response to the social political climate in which it was written. So… it represented something somewhat understandable at the time, but gratutious and out-of-date now.

Those other series are not about children though. They _are_ about innocents and insignificants, so fantasy symbolism gives us children or hobbits. Crude maybe, but it was early days. I don’t think either of them make great reading now, but both had major significance in their own milleiu.(with Tolkein it’s just that his style really bores me, I know many others don’t mind it)

LotR spawned a whole literary genre – it cleft fantasy from fairy-tale by creating a fully-conceptualised “parallel universe” rather than finding its fantastic elements in the wardrobe or through the looking-glass. Narnia is tremendously abmbitious and (for then, maybe) very well-realised historical allegory, especially with the constraints (then?) imposed by theological subject matter.

Now maybe someone’s going to tell me that there is actually some direct overarching allegorical meaning I’ve missed in His Dark Materials because the plot and characterization seemed so unforced… surely not? No, that would really jar with the theme of denying/mistrusting supreme prescribed truth. It’s a bottom-up book.