Philip Pullman on C.S. Lewis, Narnia, and Children’s Literature

Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, has spent decades arguing with C. S. Lewis — sometimes against him, sometimes, to a listener’s surprise, alongside him. In this conversation with Alex O’Connor he separates Lewis the critic, whose judgement he trusts, from Lewis the storyteller, whose treatment of children he cannot forgive, and sets out the alternative view of growing up, morality, and belief that made His Dark Materials what it is.

Key ideas

1. Pullman accepts Lewis’s critical judgement even where he rejects his theology. He agrees with Lewis’s claim that ‘a children’s book that’s only enjoyed by children is a bad book’, and with Lewis’s distinction between books with atmosphere — the woods and place-names of Hiawatha — and books built on plot alone. His verdict on Lewis overall: a good critic, but ‘a terrible storyteller’.

2. The core grievance is how Narnia treats growing up, not that it is Christian. Pullman objects to the ending that kills off the child characters — ‘dispatch them in the end as in a railway accident’ — rather than let them mature, and to Susan’s exclusion for developing an interest in ‘nylons and invitations’. As he puts it: ‘Children don’t want to be sent to heaven. They want to grow up and be men and women.’

3. One plot device draws his sharpest anger: the magic apple that cures a dying mother because her son resisted temptation. Pullman calls the implication — that a child’s virtue decides whether a parent lives or dies — ‘a filthy lie’, made worse because children with genuinely dying mothers read it: ‘I hate that. I despise it.’

4. His Dark Materials answers Narnia by inverting the Fall, not by refuting it outright. He confirms the trilogy is ‘to some extent’ a conscious response to Lewis, but says it was never written simply to ‘discredit or topple’ him. Where Genesis treats the entry of knowledge and sexuality as the origin of everything bad, Pullman makes Lyra’s second Fall — self-knowledge, sexual maturity, moral awareness — ‘unequivocally good’.

5. Lewis’s fault is one instance of a wider golden-age sentimentality about childhood innocence, not personal animus. Pullman traces the same idealisation through A. A. Milne’s Punch cartoons of half-dressed children on the beach — images he now finds ‘ghastly’ — as evidence that adults of that era prized children for an innocence and powerlessness the children themselves never wanted.

6. His own working principle is explicitly anti-didactic: ‘I am the servant of the story.’ Persuading readers of a worldview is, he allows, one legitimate reason to write — but not his own; he writes to serve the story as truthfully as he can, a discipline he sets against Lewis’s willingness to bend character and plot to a moral lesson.

Context

The conversation ranges well beyond Narnia: Pullman’s own ‘rose field’ theory of imagination and consciousness (sharpened by reading the philosopher Philip Goff on panpsychism), his deliberate distance from the New Atheists over their dogmatism, and his argument — via Coleridge’s distinction between imagination and mere ‘fancy’ — that AI can imitate but not imagine, since it feels no joy in the making.

See also

• Panpsychism — the episode’s back half turns on Pullman’s ‘matter can be conscious’ argument, drawn from Philip Goff and fused with his own theory of imagination
• Alex O'Connor — host, Within Reason