In today’s Independent, Boyd Tonkin writes about “Charge or Release”, a campaign of 42 leading British writers who joined the National Council for Civil Liberties earlier this week in opposing British government plans to hold terror suspects for 42 days without charge. Though the bill was rejected on Oct. 14 by 191 votes, there are still plans for a modified proposal. The campaign features a collection of stories, poems, and essays by writers like Philip Pullman, Julian Barnes, and Mohsin Hamid. According to Tonkin:

Now, more than ever, the freedom of the individual against the state needs all the gifted friends it can recruit. But, reading through these heartfelt and eloquent pieces, one assumption struck me hard. Almost everyone discussed the horrors of detention without charge from the point of view of the innocent accused. Fair enough. But the privilege of literature, I always thought, was that it could try to understand – not excuse, and not justify – the guilty as well.

[...]

All honour to the anti-42 days literati for their dramas of victimised virtue. Dostoevsky, I imagine, would insist that they take all these fine ideals, meet the gaze of contemporary terror – and then refuse to turn away.

Two Canadian storytellers and one Nova Scotia literacy group are in the running for the world’s richest children’s literary prize. Ottawa kids’ novelist Brian Doyle, Quebec author and illustrator Marie-Louise Gay, and Read to Me!, a family literacy program, have all been nominated for the 2009 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, worth about $800,000 (or 5-million Swedish crowns).

It’s still too early for the Canadian candidates to get their hopes up, however, as there are 150 other nominees on the list. The winner, whose work “upholds the highest artistic quality and evokes the deeply humanistic spirit that Astrid Lindgren treasured,” will be announced in March, with an awards gala in May. Past winners include Philip Pullman, Maurice Sendak, and Sonya Hartnett.

The international prize was founded in 2002 after the death of Lindgren, creator of Pippi Longstocking.

As we noted in Quillblog last week, British children’s book publishers are gearing up to begin putting recommended age ranges on the covers of all their books. According to a new piece in The Daily Telegraph, however, a lot of big-name authors – led by none other than Philip Pullman – are drawing a line in the sand in protest.

Mr. Pullman told The Daily Telegraph: “I don’t mind anybody having an opinion about my books. I don’t mind a bookseller deciding they are for this age group or that, or a teacher giving one of my books to a child because they think it is appropriate.

“But I don’t want to see the book itself declaring officially, as if with my approval, that it is for readers of 11 and upwards or whatever. I write books for whoever is interested. When I write a book I don’t have an age group in mind.

“I have had letters from children of seven who say they have read all the way through His Dark Materials and they have an astonishing knowledge of it. But not every child is the same. A child of nine might be tentative and unsure about reading, and to give them a book that says 9+ will reinforce their sense of failure. The book should be suited to the individual child.”

Anyone unsure as to whether a particular book is appropriate should ask the bookseller, Mr Pullman said.

Challenging the longstanding myth that everybody loves those cute creatures known as penguins, the American Library Association reports that a children’s book featuring penguins has topped the list of library books the public objects to the most – for the second year running.

The 2005 picture book by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, And Tango Makes Three, is about a family of penguins… with two fathers. At least it’s in illustrious company – other titles on the ALA’s list of challenged books include Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass.

From the Associated Press:

The ALA defines a “challenge” as a “formal, written complaint filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.”

[...]

Overall, the number of reported library challenges dropped from 546 in 2006 to 420 last year, well below the mid-1990s, when complaints topped 750. For every challenge listed, about four to five go unreported, the library association estimates.

“The atmosphere is a little better than it used to be,” [Judith] Krug [director of the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom] says. “I think some of the pressure has been taken off of books by the Internet, because so much is happening on the Internet.”

According to the ALA, at least 65 challenges last year led to a book being pulled.

From the Calgary Herald:

After a hiatus from library shelves, a controversial novel is being welcomed back into Calgary Catholic School District schools.

The Golden Compass, a decade-old novel by Philip Pullman, was pulled from local Catholic schools two months ago as a film adaptation of the story was released in theatres.

Following a review of the book – the first installment in Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy – school board officials have decided to use the novel’s counter-religious themes as a teaching opportunity for Catholic students.

“There is no doubt that the text is harsh in terms of its language about organized religion and that it presents a consistently negative view of church, clergy and faith-based institutions; however, there are glimpses of light with opportunities for positive reflection,” the review stated.

Interesting that the ban is reversed only after everyone has pretty much decided the movie version’s a dud.

From The Baltimore Sun:

Days after its publication, a largely positive review of the film version of The Golden Compass that appeared in Catholic newspapers across the country was retracted this week by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The bishops, who could not be reached for comment, offered no explanation for the decision. But Catholic groups, including the conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, have urged moviegoers to boycott the film, saying the film and the book on which it is based are anti-Catholic.

“Certainly, there was all kinds of speculation from the day it went up [on the Web site] as to whether or not something like this would happen,” said Jim Lackey, general news editor for the Catholic News Service, a wire service run by the bishops’ conference. He was told Monday to remove the review from the service’s Web site.

However, it would appear that the USCCB – or “uscub” (we just made that up) – has as shaky an understanding of how the web works as they do of art. You see, nothing really disappears from the web, so if you’d like to read the Catholic News Service’s review, go here. You can also go to the main page here and watch the review appear and then disappear a few seconds later. Talk about a tease!

Ironically enough, it’s probably one of the few positive reviews the movie got anywhere.

Here is the money quote from the review:

To the extent, moreover, that Lyra and her allies are taking a stand on behalf of free will in opposition to the coercive force of the Magisterium, they are of course acting entirely in harmony with Catholic teaching. The heroism and self-sacrifice that they demonstrate provide appropriate moral lessons for viewers.

And on it goes: another school board has pulled Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass from its shelves following a parental complaint – this despite the fact that the book was published more than 10 years ago, and thus has been quietly corrupting youth ever since.

From The Globe and Mail:

The Roman Catholic school board in Calgary has followed the lead of a Catholic school board in Burlington, Ont., in pulling the children’s fantasy book The Golden Compass off school shelves.

Board officials said their decision followed concern voiced by parents and recent publicity surrounding the release of a movie version of the book, starring Oscar-winner Nicole Kidman.

“Our children are exposed to a wide range of information,” said board spokeswoman Judy Mackay. “One of our responsibilities is to help them understand how that fits with their belief system and to equip them with the skills so that they understand how they can fit that into their own belief system.”

It should be noted that, though these Catholic school boards seem to have the intestinal fortitude of a wounded llama, most Catholics are not quite so easily spooked. From the same article: “Calgary Bishop Fred Henry said there are more pressing issues facing Catholics than debating a children’s fantasy novel.”

In a similar vein, Toronto Star Books editor Dan Smith wrote a brief piece about the book in this past weekend’s edition (not online), stating that: “in our practising Catholic household, The Golden Compass remains a treasured read. It spurs kids to think and question. Good. That’s what great books are for.”

Philip Pullman keeps running afoul of Ontario school boards.

In what is looking like the most effective publicity campaign ignorance can buy, Pullman’s The Golden Compass has been pulled from the shelves of school libraries in two Catholic School Boards in Peterborough, Ontario.* According to the Peterborough Examiner, “all three books in the trilogy were taken from school libraries this month after two parents complained.”

This follows hard on the heels of similar action by the Halton Catholic School board. (More details here.) A boycott of the movie version of the book is being urged by the Catholic League in the U.S.

What’s the author’s take on all this? In an interview with CBC Radio’s Writers & Company this weekend, Pullman said that “the thing they should do if they don’t want people to read the book is to say nothing about it…. If you want people to read a book, then make a fuss about it, make it controversial. Tell your children they are not to read this book under any circumstances. What is more likely to make them go to the shelf and take it down and read it from there?”

Here we go again. From the Toronto Star:

Halton’s Catholic board has pulled The Golden Compass fantasy book – soon to be a Hollywood blockbuster starring Nicole Kidman – off school library shelves because of a complaint.

Two other books in the trilogy by British author Philip Pullman have also been removed as a precaution, and principals have been ordered not to distribute December Scholastic book flyers because The Golden Compass is available to order.

“(The complaint) came out of interviews that Philip Pullman had done, where he stated that he is an atheist and that he supports that,” said Scott Millard, the board’s manager of library services.

It’s not like there’s never a valid reason to keep a particular book out of a school library – no one blinks at the fact that middle-school kids can’t sign out The Story of O, for example – but haven’t school boards been burned enough by this kind of thing to know not to do something so drastic and negative-publicity-generating without a little sober second thought?

Oh well, we’ll let you know when the book is – inevitably – allowed back on the shelves by some red-faced administrators. I’m sure their phone lines are already feeling the burn.

English writer Philip Pullman kicked off the Particles of Narrative children’s literature symposium on Friday by speaking to an audience of about 400 in the University of Toronto’s Earth Sciences auditorium. The audience was a lively cross-section of all ages, including children’s authors, teachers, librarians, university students and professors, Trinity alumni, and a few keen teens. After his talk on the symposium’s theme of examining the elemental particles of story, Pullman patiently signed books for a long line of fans that stretched out of the auditorium and seemed to include half the audience.

The next day, about 175 people gathered in the George Ignatieff Theatre to hear six speakers, among them Kenneth Oppel, Sarah Ellis, Tim Wynne-Jones, and American author Megan Whalen Turner. At the day’s end, Pullman joined the six on a panel that took thoughtful questions from both the audience and from one another. In response to a question from an audience member, Pullman said he’d always thought Lord of the Rings was “trivial” because “no one changes,” but that C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series was, on the other hand, a “serious work” because “it grapples with moral issues” but in a narrow Christian way that he dislikes intensely – a view that drew applause from some in the crowd.

U of T children’s literature professor and frequent Q&Q reviewer Deirdre Baker, herself the author of the YA novel Becca at Sea, organized the conference.