Интересный кусок из интервью New Yorker с Филиппом Пуллманом о том, почему он был лишь временно впечатлен "Властелином колец". При том, что я нежно люблю обоих писателей, было очень интересно почитать.
Пуллман такой говорит:
What I found with fantasy was a way of saying something about being human. And, of course, that’s the dæmon. But I hadn’t been a reader of fantasy. Like everybody else in the sixties, I read “The Lord of the Rings” and was temporarily impressed, but I didn’t read any other fantasy.
И, конечно, журналистка уточняет:
Why do you say “temporarily” impressed?
И вот это дико интересный и необычный ответ, как мне кажется.
Because it didn’t take me very long to see through it. The world of J.R.R. Tolkien is a world without sexuality in it. I can’t help comparing it with Wagner’s “Ring,” a much greater work in every conceivable way, which is actually throbbing with sexual understanding and sexual passion and so on.
There’s none of that in “The Lord of the Rings.” It’s as if they had their children by a courier or something: please send a boy child by Federal Express to Mrs. Blah blah blah. And once you’re aware that that’s missing, you can then see the other gaps in it. He doesn’t do any sort of speculative thinking about what’s good and what’s evil. The only interesting character in that way is Gollum, but it’s not interesting enough. It’s nowhere near as interesting as the books of realistic fiction that I was reading. You read “Middlemarch,” that’s a real story about real human beings. It’s about the kind of things that you know when you’re young and you discover when you’re growing up and you’ll learn when you’re old. But, orcs and hobbits, they don’t tell you anything at all. It’s very, very thin stuff. No nourishment in it.
Полное интервью вот тута, и оно классное очень:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/the-fallen-worlds-of-philip-pullman