What I dislike about the present-tense narrative is its limited range of expressiveness. I feel claustrophobic, always pressed up against the immediate.See Darren Shan's comment on previous entry about Pullman's dislike of the present tense....I want all the young present-tense storytellers (the old ones have won prizes and are incorrigible) to allow themselves to stand back and show me a wider temporal perspective. I want them to feel able to say what happened, what usually happened, what sometimes happened, what had happened before something else happened, what might happen later, what actually did happen later, and so on: to use the full range of English tenses.
Oh....he's calling time AGAIN, is he? Yawn. It's as simple as this, really: while sales continue to support present tense novels/books/writing, Mr Pullman's view will continue to be insignificant. I love fighting snobbery, both inside the literary world and outside it - it's my new favourite hobby. Here's to a new flood of present tense books! In fact, look - shock of shocks - I'm writing one myself, and it's out next year! Gulp...hope the Literati approve...oh, wait - I don't care.
A rather narrow-minded point of view. I'm sorry that Pullman will be missing the delights of, say, David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.