Youth reading culture!

I've been reading The Golden Compass to the kids lately, and, aside from a rather disorienting in-media-res opening that seems designed more like the beginning of a movie than the beginning of a book, I'm amazed at how good it is. Its explorations of the nature of the soul are very surprising and quite moving, even to me. And when, the other night, while the kids were in bed, I accidentally picked it up instead of the book I had been reading for class, I was struck by a wave of disappointment that I wouldn't get to continue reading alone.

Anyway, my students were a bit bored during the last class of the semester on Thursday, in part because we were discussing The Unconsoled, which only about 5 out of 35 liked. (To me, it's maddening in only the best possible way; to others, it's just maddening.) There's a section in which the protagonist, Ryder, recalls his childhood "training sessions," during which he would challenge himself to resist, while alone, the desire to go to his parents, and instead would endure the pain of separation.

I told my students that this reminded me of the scene in The Golden Compass where Lyra, its protagonist, is challenged by her daemon (in the book, this is a physical manifestation of the soul that takes the form of a companion animal from which a person cannot be separated by more than a few feet) to speak to a frightening warrior bear, and literally drags her into the conversation, causing feelings of deep pain and desolation. Both this scene and its analog in The Unconsoled are about the creation of the self via an intentional detachment from objects of love.

Suddenly the class woke up. They had all read the book, and they all saw the parallel. The rest of the session was actually pretty interesting. When I told Rhian this later that night, she pointed out that, though we were encouraged to read when we were kids, we lacked any real shared literate culture--there were not many seminal books that every smart kid read, and certainly no series as weighty as Pullman's or as widespread as the Harry Potter books. There was, say, the Hardy Boys, but those books kind of sucked, and you didn't go yammering with your friends about them. She argued--and perhaps will do so some more in the comments--that, far from the conventional wisdom that kids today are being devoured by trash culture, they are rather forming a powerful shared literary experience.

Of course, my Cornell students are a pretty rarefied group--they are all smart, and most are obsessive readers. But it seems to me that Rhian's right, that people of college age today are informed by a shared body of actually quite decent books, which they all understand and can talk about, and which form a common intellectual background that they are building on as adults. We had interesting childhoods, but I don't think we had anything quite like that.

The Golden Compass

I took the guys to see this movie today. I have never read Pullman's stuff--he started up too late for me to enjoy him as a kid, and our sons are too young to have gotten into him yet (well--the older one could read them now, actually), and so I am at long last one of those people who saw the movie without having bothered to read the book. And all evidence suggests that the book is better. Which of course is inevitable for any decent book, because it's a book, and a movie is never a better book than a book, unless the book was written expressly for the purpose of getting turned into a movie.

But as a movie, The Golden Compass is pretty decent, and the young lead actress is terrific, and Ian MacKellen is very fine as a polar bear (sorry--an ice bear, which is a like a very large polar bear that talks like Ian MacKellen), which the CGI geniuses have actually managed to make look quite a lot like Ian MacKellen when he talks.

I post about it here though because I read a review of it last week in our local Gannett paper, which utterly trashed it, leaving it with an anemic star and a half. Gannett is not in the business of disliking things--liking them is more profitable for everyone--and so this review, which stressed the "emotional coldness" of the film, struck me as a possible right-wing hit piece aimed at the movie's apparent anti-Christian bias. (And let me say that, yes indeed, it does seem to be pretty unsympathetic to religion, a sentiment Pullman has been more than happy to confirm in interviews.)

And so, hit piece it was, I think. Surely word came down from corporate that The Golden Compass must be snuffed out. Because, although the movie is not great, it's thoroughly entertaining, and posits some extremely interesting fantasy what-if's, most remarkable among them the idea of human souls taking the form of animal familiars. I assume this is straight from Pullman, as it's too smart for a movie otherwise--the implications of this arrangement allow for all kinds of fascinating psychological experimentation. Nicole Kidman, for instance, as Cruella DeVil (or somebody like her), actually abuses her own soul, then tearfully mommies up to it as it whimpers on her shoulder. BAD ASS!

I'm no atheist (agnostic to the core, thank you), but it certainly is nice to see this kind of moral rigor (however smarmily presented) thrown onto a big-screen kids' movie. It's thought-provoking, and the bears are way cool. I believe I will try to get Owen into Pullman ASAP.

Your thoughts?