A Facebook discussion that mentioned Tolkien, Pullman, and Rowling led me to write the following comment, which I thought I'd save here for posterity.
I
read Tolkien passionately at 14 or so. When I reread LOTR when I was
about 22, I had just read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" for the second
time. The juxtaposition of Garcia Marquez and Tolkien did not make T
look good; if anything, it made him look terrible. — And when my son and
I read LOTR out loud a few years ago, we eventually stopped, because it
was ... boring. For a while, we entertained ourselves by making fun of
it (everybody getting stoned in Lothlorien, for example), but that got
boring after a while. — The world T imagines (or "bank-robs", to pick up
your phrase) is incredibly impressive, though, as is Pullman's.
I
first read Pullman because I read an article that called him "Rowling
for adults", so I thought I'd check him out. He has much more ambition
than Rowling, and for the most part, he pulls off a lot more. Further,
his Mrs. Coulter exposes Rowling's characterization of ridiculous
characters (Harry's aunt, uncle, and cousins) as well as of evil
characters (above all, Voldemort) as two-dimensional at best.
In
"The Amber Spyglass," though, Pullman exposes a flaw in his plotting.
In the middle of a battle, one character has to explain something to
another for a page or so — and it's clear that the explanation is less
for the character than for the reader. This flaw made me notice
something about Rowling's plotting: she *never* has to explain anything
during exciting passages, because she *always* sets things up earlier.
As a result, the exciting passages never get interrupted by
explanations, but can just be exciting. — Beyond that, though, when she
sets things up earlier, it never reads as "foreshadowing": whatever it
is that is being explained is clearly part of the plot at the moment
when it is explained, and it never comes across as explaining *for the
reader*.
In short, for the creation of a fantasy world, Tolkien. For characterization, Pullman. But for effective plotting, Rowling.
