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Abstract
Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho was published in the UK by Picador in 1991. The subject of the novel, his third after Less Than Zero (1986) and The Rules of Attraction (1988), became infamous. In summary, it catalogues in frequently banal and occasionally lurid detail the life of Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street yuppie whose narrative is packed with the details of designer clothes, modish restaurants, and the torture and dismemberment of his (mostly) female victims.1 Ellis is an American writer, but the publishing history analysed here is principally of the UK publication and reception of his third novel. Nonetheless, it is worth noting the pre-publication trouble that the book ran into in the US. A report from The Times dated 19 November 1990 picked up the story:
A full-scale storm erupted in Manhattan’s literary village last week when Simon and Schuster, the publishers, decided to scrap the book just as it was about to be sent to the shops, on the grounds that it was just too shocking. Writers cried ‘censorship’, denouncing the publishers for caving in to the pressure of Paramount Communications, their new corporate owners […]
With advance publicity like that it took about a microsecond for Ellis to find a new publisher courageous enough to issue the book.2
The Independent on Sunday maintained The Times’s cynical tone in its report the following Sunday:
The end of the American Psycho saga turns out happy for all, depending on your point of view. Its original publisher are now the proud guardians of taste; Mr Mehta [head of Knopf] is the saviour of freedom of expression; and Mr Ellis is even richer.3
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The Lion and the Unicorn 23.1 (1999) 116-134
Philip Pullman has been described as a storytelling mariner, a Tolkien of our time. He would not be entirely happy with this comparison. He is an outstanding writer for children who has published a diverse range of literature that includes historical and modern thrillers, fairy tales, comic stories, and graphic novels. In 1995 Northern Lights (American title, The Golden Compass), the first volume of his ambitious magnum opus, appeared to widespread critical acclaim and won him recognition as a writer whose appeal is not limited to children. Readers of all ages have been gripped by the multiple levels of engagement and interpretation that this book and its recent companion The Subtle Knife (1997) have offered. Now we await the final part of the trilogy which, Philip has explained, is his version of Paradise Lost for young people.
Earlier this year, we talked to Philip Pullman in the riverside garden of a twelfth-century Oxford pub. It was a place frequently visited by J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and is said to be where Lewis Carroll often entertained the Liddell children. Across the Thames, on a small island, stands one of the last remaining ornamental statues from a former Italian garden. It is a huge imposing lion, believed by some to be the inspiration for Lewis's creation of Aslan. Against the background screeching of strutting peacocks and the sounds of weir water, we talked to Philip about his work and, in particular, the influences, concepts, and central themes behind his trilogy, His Dark Materials. We discussed how the structure and scale of the narrative form he has chosen allows him to explore powerful human themes within its epic architecture.
Philip's belief in the power of stories and the ways in which they can teach us about the world we create, and the morality by which we live, has been an insistent theme in much of his fiction and critical writing. In this conversation, he developed his views on how a single story can encompass issues that seem to transcend time and place. We talked about the extraordinary publishing phenomenon generated by the first two volumes of his trilogy, about the differences in writing for children and writing for adults, about perceptions and representations of childhood, and about the creative influences that have shaped his thinking and inspired his writing.
We began by talking about "grand" or "overarching narratives" and how they can be used to offer certainties and liberating possibilities for the child reader. Philip regrets the reluctance of many contemporary writers to take on such ambitious challenges.
PP: I think the grand narratives aren't so much played out or exhausted in contemporary writing, as abandoned for ideological reasons, because they're felt to be somehow impure or improper. Maybe the whole thing is weakened by a fatal lack of ambition. This is what I find most irritating in my contemporaries among writers: lack of ambition. They're not trying big things. They're doing little things and doing them well.
Q: There are some writers who manage to deal with the "incommensurable," the "unpresentable," the ideas that are just starting to gel, which they bring into consciousness without fully explaining. That's what Philippa Pearce did in Tom's Midnight Garden with the concept of Time. It's what you have done, in terms of the way in which preadolescents suddenly become aware of human sexuality and that loss of innocence which changes the way they perceive reality.
PP: That's the central idea of the whole thing, and of course that is part of what is happening in Book Three. It's my starting point; well, actually, there are several starting points. There's the Milton, which of course I quote and take as my title for the trilogy. There's another influence that planted and watered this particular seed. I first came across -- twenty years ago -- in a copy of the Times Educational Supplement, a translation by Idris Parry of an essay by Heinrich von Kleist, called "On the Marionette Theatre." This essay has subsequently been published in a little Penguin book...
Picador, 1986; first published in the US in 1985) The Rules of Attraction
- Easton Ellis
The Line of Beauty One of the judges, Rowan Pelling, described the difficult decision in her article ‘Only After We Went to the Loo Did the Winner Emerge
- Alan Hollinghurst
The Life of Mary Robinson
- Paula Byrne
Not with a Bang but with a SimperG2 section) She refers to Isabel Wolff’s The Trials of Tiffany Trott (London: HarperCollins, 1998); Jane Green’s Straight Talking
- Emma Forrest
The Time Traveler’s Wife
- Audrey Niffenegger
The American Boy (London: Flamingo
- Andrew Taylor
The Promise of Happiness
- Justin Cartwright
The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea
- Mark Haddon
- M Haddon
The Sixth Lamentation
- William Brodrick
Writing Children’s Fiction: or You Cannot Be Serious The Writer’s Handbook
- Philip Pullman
The Fire-Eaters (London: Hodder Children’s
- D Almond
A Common Wealth of Talent A Celebration of the Booker Prize for Fiction
- A Niven
Does Richard and Judy’s Book Club Guarantee Success for These Ten Titles?
- CR Zafon
Jane Green’s Straight Talking (London: Mandarin, 1997); Kate Morris’s
- Emma Forrest
- K Morris
Jamie Hodder-Williams discussed the label used by Hodder & Stoughton and then taken up by the media. (Interview with Jamie Hodder-Williams.) The Mirror used the strapline ‘Here comes the male Bridget Jones’ in a review of My Legendary Girlfriend
- Mike Gayle
- M Gayle
Writing Children’s Fiction: or You Cannot Be Serious
- Philip Pullman
- P Pullman
A Common Wealth of Talent’, Booker 30. A Celebration of the Booker Prize for Fiction
- Alastair See
- Niven
- A Niven
One of the judges, Rowan Pelling, described the difficult decision in her article ‘Only After We Went to the Loo Did the Winner Emerge
- Alan Hollinghurst
- A Hollinghurst
Ghostwritten (London: Sceptre, 1999)
- David Mitchell
- D Mitchell