The Atlantic has profiled Philip Pullman with an article by Hanna Rosin called "How Hollywood Saved God" and highlighted its rambling interview with its own contributor Christopher Hitchens, who argues that a straw-man god of his own making is the God of Christendom. Predictably he blames his god-creation for the evils on the face of the earth.
In the fiction realm, it seems that Philip Pullman has defined his work as a counter-creation to others' work. He has been clear that he hates Tolkien's and Lewis's work in whole or in part because they are Christians. And he identifies his work as a polar (pardon the pun) opposite to the two classic writers. (See Rosin's piece).
One very interesting relationship and difference stands out when comparing Lewis and Tolkien with Pullman and Hitchens. Pullman, by his overt attacks on Lewis's and Tolkien's work and C. Hitchens by his citations of Lewis invite the comparison, which I think provides some missing explanatory context. Lewis and Tolkien both served in the British Army in WWI and lived through the Nazi bombardment of Britain.
Pullman and Hitchens did not. Pullman was born in 1946 and Hitchens in 1949. Both men lived in the shadows of Tolkien and Lewis as writers and intellectuals. Lewis served and was injured in the Battle of Arras. Tolkien served in WWI, and lost nearly all of his friends to the war. He was sickened with trench fever or else the world may not have ever known his work.
Pullman would not have cared, apparently, criticizing Tolkiens genius as relying too much on philologic creativity. It is interesting that Pullman, in choosing polar bears to forward his story, happened to choose the same animal which Tolkien wrote to his children about as being Santa Claus's helper who played practical jokes on the elf. It seems as if Pullman's notoriety is negatively linked to the positive good in Tolkien's work. His open resentment of their work defines his career as a contrarian to Tolkien and Lewis.
Tolkien and Lewis both experienced the horrors of war, and the threat of WWII Germany. Their intellectual explorations of good, evil and spirituality are informed by their experience and sacrifice.
Pullman and Hitchens benefitted from the service of such men, yet dismiss their work as lightweight or immoral, as if their experiences informing their intellects were not doubly worthy of honor, but his is somehow enlightened. And this without any falsifiable empirical support for the psuedo-scientific suppositions these men sell.
What I see in Pullman's approach is not unlike that of Hitchens, Dawkins and others: cerebral men of not much courage attacking those whose spirits of courage and intellect together made them pioneers. However, Tolkien and Lewis both gratefully cited their sources and inspiring mentors and did not brag of their war experiences. Comparing the conduct of the men in this battle, the dead beat the living.
I see the atheist / deicidist writers of this lounge-era as spoiled brats precisely because they are not pioneering in their own right, but making their reputation by attacking those of which they are envious. They are harboring grudges against honorable men with spurious, non-falsifiable claims toward straw-man caricatures of others' indisputably substantial work and faith. What is worse is that publishers, editors and profiteers don't seem to appreciate the lesser merit of reactionary and politic literature versus original, self-sustained work.
