His Dark Material
Philip Pullman’s, that is. I’ve said for years now that my real disappointment with Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is not that they are anti-Christian (though they most certainly are, whatever waffling Pullman’s currently doing in the media) but that he allows his message to overwhelm his storytelling. John C. Wright has the same notion and has given it a thorough analysis, explain why and where Pullman’s storytelling falls short. (Wright’s a published author himself, BTW, though I’ve not read any of his books. His analysis is cogent, and hits quite a few points I hadn’t considered, and is worth your time if you’ve any interest in the topic at all. And then, there’s this lovely bit of snark from the end:
Nothing I have ever read, not by Heinlein and not by Ayn Rand has been more blatant in dropping the story-telling, and devoting its pages to preaching a message. The writer was drunk on sermonizing. If this plotline was a motorist, it would have been arrested for driving while intoxicated, if it had not perished in the horrible drunk accident where it went headlong over the cliff of the author’s preachy message, tumbled down the rocky hillside, crashed, and burned.
As Wright notes, it would be one thing if Pullman were a bad writer…but he isn’t, and should know better.