Actually, in an interview I read, Pullman said that before he wrote the books, he proposed the idea to his publisher as a version of Paradise Lost. He had it in mind from the beginning. The imprints for it are set up from the first book – the notion of dust, the child as prelapsarian figure, the search of the adults to re-gain or at least identify that moment, etc. Of course, in book 2 we get a character named ‘Will,’ too. By the time he comes on strong with it in book 3, there have been all sorts of hints and pushes and proddings towards the structure.

I’m impressed by all of these authors, really. They are so much more talented than I am.

As for the third in the Pullman trilogy, it is my least favorite. A little too didactic at times, I’m afraid. But the world he creates is amazing. I do like the second book, largely because I like the character Will. I wanted to learn more about him. Pullman has written some very good historical fiction – the Sally Lockhart Mysteries. The focus is on an unconventional Victorian girl detective.

My comment about Cooper’s world had to do with the time in which it is set. Harry Potter is more current, more like the world we live in today. Cooper’s England is more distant in that respect. I suspect that affects some younger readers. I think M. T. Anderson also does an amazing job of creating worlds, whether it be in the futuristic Feed, the vampire novel Thirsty, or the revolutionary war era The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing. OK, I like Whales On Stilts! too:-)

Oh, and Greenwitch is my favorite from Cooper’s sequence, too!

And once I twigged (entirely on my own, by the way, but I’ve read interviews that corroborate this) that Pullman was basically ripping on (not ripping off, please note) Narnia, my ability to enjoy his books went way down. The first two are still fun (I mean, come on, polar bears with frickin’ lasers! What’s not to like?) but the turgid philosophy of the third book just turns me off completely.

But the thing is, in Cooper’s world, you really wouldn’t be involved in the struggle of Light and Dark unless you were specifically written into that struggle, if you know what I mean. I don’t get the sense at all that there are secrets under every bush: there’s just the secrets of this specific turn of the wheel of the struggle of Light and Dark. The Light and the Dark don’t feel to me like a parallel secret society, or a mystery that illuminates the ordinary lives. The tie between them and the mundane world is minimal except that if the Dark wins, the implication is disaster for all humanity. (The victory of the Light, on the other hand, appears to be the status quo.)

I think it’s not so much escapism as Rowling allows for what is sometimes called “geek hermeneutics”. Her world is slapdash enough that it needs that kind of involvement, but not so slapdash or derivative that it doesn’t merit that kind of involvement.

It seems to me that your main argument for the superiority of the Potterverse is that it lends itself more readily to escapism; the reader can imagine they’re part of Potter’s world in a way Cooper’s story doesn’t lend itself to. While that’s true, I think it’s a case of judging Cooper for not writing a story she didn’t intend to write in the first place.

I was having this argument with a friend at a con last year, and her argument was much like yours; although she agreed with me that Cooper was a better writer, her argument was that the Potterverse is superior precisely *because* it’s not as well written. Rowling’s tendency to throw in a character or scene willy-nilly (or so it seems to me at times), or to occasionally break Checkov’s Law (the one about the gun on the mantelpiece, not the one about it being better in the original Russian) often weakens the narrative, but that very tendency also allows more opportunities for the reader to find a place they can call ‘home’. Cooper, on the other hand, is retelling and recasting Celtic and Arthurian myth for a modern age; she’s interweaving dozens of legends and stories from disparate mythoses (if that’s not a word, I want it to be) and putting a modern face on something that is as old as, if not older than, time. Reading Cooper I get the sense of a world where there are secrets hidden under every bush– secrets I may not be able to find, but that’s okay, they’re there, and that knowledge brightens my day a bit. Reading Rowling, I get the sense of a world that never quite manages to fit together completely. I’d rather live in Cooper’s world than Rowling’s– in Cooper’s world, I could get on with a fairly normal life 99% of the time; in Rowling’s, I’d always be huddling under the covers trying to figure out which way gravity was going to point when I got out of bed this morning. I’d rather argue about Rowling’s world than Cooper’s, though; Cooper, for better or worse, gives you what you get, and you can’t get no more, where with Rowling, there’s enough holes (but not too many) that you can plausibly argue about the effects of this curse or that spell, or how an economy based on wizardry might operate, or whether or not Harry should (or even could) have done this, that, or t’other thing.

Also, I think _The Grey King_ is a perfect example of Will as a sympathetic character. He’s lost most of his memory and almost all his powers for the vast majority of the book, and even when he does get them back, he’s relatively constrained in how he can use them because of Bran’s attitude towards the Old Ones. That said, these days, _Greenwitch_ is currently my favourite of the series, largely because Gummery and WIll play such an understated (not to say entirely absent) role.

Meanwhile, I’m slowly working my way through the recently released 3-DVD set of Woody Woodpecker cartoons, and others by Lantz. Those were near and dear to me as a kid, more so even than Disney. After all, Disney was only once a week (couldn’t get MMClub on our TV), while Woody was every day. It was to be some time before I realized that his theme song is based on the chord changes to “I Got Rhythm,” as is the Flintstone’s them. That is to say, those themesongs are based on music created by Gershwin and elaborated on by Charlie Parker. Whatta’ pedigree.