The Golden Compass gets yanked in Calgary, too

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.”

Pullman pulled in Peterborough

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?”

The Golden Compass banned by Catholic school board

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.

The Pull of Pullman

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.

His dark vitriol: Pullman on kids’ TV

According to The Guardian, Philip Pullman, bestselling author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, has taken aim at modern children’s television programming.

Pullman castigated broadcasters for sacrificing high-quality programmes in favour of those that yield more marketing opportunities. “Children are regarded by broadcasters as a marketing opportunity at best, a dangerous and feral threat at worst, and an expensive nuisance otherwise,” Pullman said. “This social poison goes much deeper than broadcasting, of course, but it’s particularly visible there.

“There used to be … a sense of responsibility among broadcasters: a feeling that this extraordinary medium … should be used to make things better, richer, more interesting for those who made up the audience – especially for children,” he added.

He won’t get much of an argument out of us about marketing-driven kids’ TV, though we do think it would have been more effective had Philip delivered his rant to, say, Big Bird. Perhaps in song.

Unknown kids’ classics

While announcing the shortlist for the annual U.K.-based Carnegie Medal for children’s writing this week, the organizers also released a list of their top ten favorite titles of all time. According to an article in The Guardian, the list is intended to stimulate the public to vote online – in a poll to celebrate the Carnegie’s 70th birthday – for the ultimate “Carnegie of Carnegies”: a single all-time winner to be announced on June 21.

Because the top ten list is comprised only of previous Carnegie winners, there are a lot of esteemed classics that were ineligible. Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for instance, as well as Tolkien’s The Hobbit, C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, and Lloyd Alexander’s The Book of Three. Also, because the prize only goes back to 1936, beloved older English works like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children have had to be left off, too.

Consequently, Quillblog has to confess that except for Mary Norton’s The Borrowers and Philip Pullman’s relatively recent Northern Lights, we haven’t heard of a single title on the list. Maybe that’s just our narrow Canadian-mindedness, though. If anyone else has read one of ‘em, please feel free to post a review… (And someone has to explain to us why Richard Adams’ fricking awesome Carnegie-winner Watership Down wasn’t included! Scandalous!)

We should be so lucky

The Guardian website features a report on the outrage over the British Competition Commission’s tentative approval of a takeover bid of the Ottaker’s bookstore chain by HMV, who already own the upscale Waterstone’s chain. The merger will give HMV control of 24% of all book sales in the U.K. and an even higher percentage of sales of specialist categories, including literary fiction titles. This has understandably raised the ire of many British independent booksellers, publishers, and authors, including Philip Pullman, who says: “I have had great experiences with Ottakar’s and with Waterstone’s too. But I like the fact that there are two of them.” Many of the fears expressed by those interviewed for the article will be familiar to book consumers in Canada, where up to 70%, depending on who you talk to, of book sales are in the hands of one megachain.

Related links:
Read the article on the Guardian site

Hey, teachers, leave those kids alone

A recent list of must-read books for children compiled by the Britain’s Royal Society of Literature has raised a few eyebrows for its perceived slant toward the unnecessarily highbrow and difficult. The list of 30 titles — chosen by poet laureate Andrew Motion and authors J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman — included such titles as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Hamlet, Paradise Lost, and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. A column in The Times has now called the list to task, claiming that it is exactly this type of prescriptive reading list that scares so many young people away from literature — often for life.

Columnist Carol Sarler claims to be one of those former students who lost her taste for good books after being forced to read so many of them while making her through the British school system of the 1960s. She read the assigned books, did well on her tests and essays, and then never read a work of literature again. Why? “Reading books was … the stuff of school in exactly the same way as was trigonometry or chucking a javelin — and since leaving my esteemed seat of learning, I am as likely to curl up with Jane Austen for the fun of it as I am to flirt with a cosine or risk the wrong end of a spear.” Sarler compares her schooling with that of her daughter’s, whose experience of the more reader-friendly (and much maligned) curriculum of recent years had an unexpected effect: “When child of mine left school she, too, relinquished teenage activities in favour of the new — but, do guess, what new did she find? Why, at the age of 18, there it was, laid out before her: the entirely unexplored landscape of literature, which she swooped upon with what would become and has remained a sincere delight.”

Related links:
Read the op-ed piece in The Times
Read the Royal Society list in The Guardian

The poet laureate’s sense of child’s play

The Royal Society of Literature in the U.K. asked several prominent writers to recommend essential books for schoolchildren to read. Predictably, most of the attention has converged on the list that Andrew Motion submitted: the country’s poet laureate apparently seriously expects boys and girls to kick back over Joyce’s Ulysses, James’s Portrait of a Lady, and Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” among others.

Even under the most liberal definition of “schoolchildren” possible, this seems insanely ambitious. Perhaps it springs from a belief that children are not to be coddled — after all, if stately, plump Buck Milligan doesn’t catch their interest, there’s always a rewarding job in the mines a-waiting. Or perhaps, as his comments on the Guardian site suggest, Motion confuses realistic expectations about what “schoolchildren” would be able to understand and appreciate with “elitism.”

Anyway, kids’ writers Philip Pullman and J.K. Rowling also contributed more reasonable lists, which are also included in the Guardian piece.

Related links:
Click here for the Guardian story

Slouching toward Bethlehem

A proposed anti-hate law aimed at stamping out religious intolerance in Britain has a number of prominent artists and intellectuals worrying that their ability to freely criticize religion will be threatened if the law passes. According to Philip Pullman and Monica Ali, two of the authors of an essay on the Guardian site, the proposed legislation does not distinguish between legitimate criticism of religious ideas and the deliberate inciting of hatred toward a specific faith group. This could open the door to an attack by conservative religious groups on anyone who criticizes their beliefs or agendas. “The inevitable consequence for literature,” Pullman argues, “will be that publishing decisions will increasingly be made not by editors, as they used to be; nor by accountants, as they now are; but by lawyers.”

Related links:
Read the Guardian essay