he has a strong anarchist streak and is deeply hostile to the Christian pastoral fantasy tradition of JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. His own fantasy writing has always delighted in ambiguity, in contrast to the nursery-school morality of much of the genre. In a 1978 essay he skewered The Lord of the Rings, calling it "Winnie-the-Pooh, posing as an epic." He derided Tolkien’s "petit bourgeois" artisan-hobbits, who are portrayed in the novel as a "bulwark against chaos", standing for "solid good sense" against the evil industrial-worker orcs. Tolkien’s work, he writes, is nothing more than "a pernicious confirmation of the values of a morally bankrupt middle class", something not so far from the fascism he had agitated against as a young activist.
When Hari Kunzru met Michael Moorcock | Books | The Guardian
