A labour of loathing

Saturday, 18th January 2003

Peter Hitchens on the worship of Philip Pullman, who has set out to destroy Narnia

Challenged about his assault, Pullman professes enthusiasm for something called the Republic of Heaven, whatever that means. He also says that he draws many of his ideas from Milton's Paradise Lost. No doubt he does, but much of his thinking could also have been taken from the pages of the Guardian, or from politically correct staff-room conversation in a thousand state schools. Among the good characters in his trilogy are gypsies, an African prince, a homosexual angel and a renegade nun who abandons her faith but who willingly obeys orders from another angel (orientation unknown) who speaks to her through a computer screen.

The bad are to be found among the religious, the respectable and the well-off. A particular villain is discovered at his opulent home. Pullman writes with feeling, 'Everything Will could see spoke of wealth and power, the sort of informal settled superiority that some upper-class English people still took for granted.' Pullman has also assailed Lewis for being racist, a charge that simply doesn't stick. One of Lewis's noblest characters is the dark-skinned Calormene, Emeth, while the vilest is the White Witch. He also suggests that Lewis is monumentally disparaging of women. As Michael Ward points out, this, too, is absurd:

Lucy Pevensie is unquestionably the most prominent and morally mature character in the narrator's eyes. Lucy is the first of the children to discover Narnia, and is described as more reliable and more truthful than her brother Edmund. She is the one who most often sees Aslan, the Christ-figure.

His other angry charges against Lewis, that he sends Susan Pevensie to hell because she likes lipstick and nylons, and that he kills all the children because he prefers death to life, are equally questionable.

It is a sore pity that Lewis is not here to defend himself and Narnia against this angry foe and his supporters. In his absence, both sets of books will have to speak for their authors. In an age where most stories written for grown-ups are about nothing very much at all, Lewis and Pullman have addressed the great issues of this time and all time, and both deserve to be read by adults. But Pullman would have made better use of his dark materials if he had sought to co-exist with Lewis rather than to attack him. Narnia may have no weapons of mass destruction, but it has a powerful guardian, and I have a suspicion that it will find ways of defending itself.

Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the Mail on Sunday.