Philip Pullman

[Amy Z]

Silveroak wrote:
 
> I am reading John Granger's "The Hidden Key to Harry Potter" and he 
> hypothesizes that JKR based Gilderoy Lockhart on Pullman.

Hee!  This is enchantingly nasty, but what's the basis?  Pullman's 
character flaws seem to be of the curmudgeonly variety, not of the 
vain publicity-seeking Adonis variety.

NB:  Granger is Christian and might take just a bit of offense at 
Pullman's less-than-charitable look at the church, Christian 
theology, and the common exegesis of the Fall.  (I prefer to think 
that Milton and Blake, Christians both, would have cackled gleefully 
at Pullman's heterodox religious views.)

> He also 
> goes on to offer some sharp contrasts between JKR's approach to 
good 
> and evil over against Pullman's. In Granger's view, JKR's is 
*better*.

I beg to differ.  I certainly agree strongly with Pullman's opinion 
as related by GulPlum:  our moral choices are all too often not 
between good and a clear-cut evil, but between two positions that 
both persuasively argue that they are good; and much of the evil that 
men and women do is done in the earnest pursuit of a misbegotten 
ideal.  Almost all of the rest is done with a *patina* of good 
intentions.  But the masquerade takes in even the practitioner, which 
is why it's so tricky to see through.

Amy