[books] The lost children — more on Philip Pullman from the Sunday Times. ‘…he can’t say all the classic children’s books perpetuate unblemished childhood. What about Enid Blyton’s Famous Five who often unearthed adult wrongdoing? Here, Pullman makes a remarkable confession: such realism is taboo today. “You can’t have your heroes and heroines going off by themselves to camp on an island. The publishers wouldn’t let you do it. There are all sorts of health and safety problems, paedophiles and goodness knows what else. The fear is that children are so stupid they’ll copy what they see in books. “So in order to give children adventures now, you either have to set it in the past when that sort of thing was allowed, or in another world where the rules are different. But you can’t do it realistically.”‘ [via Haddock]
More On Philip Pullman
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2001 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Books.
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