“I hate the Narnia books,” said Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, “and I hate them with deep and bitter passion, with their view of childhood as a golden age from which sexuality and adulthood are a falling away”. [link]

The essay I found most interesting to write last year (and got my highest mark for, too) was one exploring the themes of childhood and growing up in C S Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials – themes that are bound up in their respective understandings of the Fall.

These are big questions about what it means to be human. The Narnia books have been enjoyed by generations; Pullman’s books are some of the best and most popular young adult fiction on the market. Lewis’s books are imbued with his Christian beliefs, while Pullman writes in conscious reaction against this, proclaiming “the Republic of Heaven”.

To read my essay on the subject, click here. I reference one of my previous essays which I’ve also put online on the greatly exaggerated rumours of the Death of the Author.

(Please note that the version currently online is taken from the penultimate draft of the essay, since I did the final draft on the university computers, and so do not have access to while at home. As a result, some of the referencing is incomplete. I hope to fix this in the near future, and if I have time, to expand on certain points where my essay word count constrained me.)