A Secular Fantasy

The flawed but fascinating fiction of Philip Pullman

Cathy Young from the March 2008 issue

The controversy surrounding The Golden Compass, the recently released screen adaptation of the first book of Philip Pullman’s best-selling fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, was not exactly unexpected. Pullman, a 61-year-old British writer of fantasy and mystery novels for children and young adults, has been dubbed “the most dangerous man in Britain” by Daily Mail columnist Peter Hitchens. He is a self-proclaimed atheist who has referred to himself, tongue in cheek, as being “of the devil’s party.” He makes no secret of the fact that his books are intended as a sweeping attack not only on organized religion but on the monotheistic concept of God.

Yet the world of Pullman’s sacrilegious epic is not a conventionally materialistic one. It includes all the basic elements of Christian theology, from God and angels to the souls of the dead, but in a way that turns the traditional religious viewpoint on its head. The phrase “his dark materials” comes from a passage in John Milton’s Paradise Lost in which Satan contemplates the possibility that God may use “his dark materials to create more worlds”—a reference not only to the multiple worlds of Pullman’s universe but to his retelling of the Miltonian epic with the rebel angels as the good guys.

The film version of the first novel, brought to the screen in December by New Line Cinema and marketed as a Lord of the Rings–style grand epic fantasy, has been scrubbed of explicit references to religion—enough to pacify the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and other mainstream religious organizations. (William Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, unappeased, still called for a boycott.) There is a certain irony to this, since the movie opens on the heels of an atheist revival of sorts, heralded by such recent books as Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.

It remains to be seen whether the two sequels, if they get made, will manage to navigate the dangerous waters of Pullman’s narrative and to translate his anti-religious message into a general anti-authoritarian one without diluting it beyond recognition. In any case, it is a safe bet that the movie, which opened to mixed reviews and a respectable though not spectacular box office performance, will lead to a resurgent interest in Pullman’s books, not only among adventure and fantasy fans but among readers interested in the case against religion and for a secular morality. As a novelist, Pullman may be to militant atheism what Ayn Rand was to militant capitalism: a writer who can convey important ideas through frequently riveting fiction but can’t always stop those ideas from congealing into rigid ideology.

Pullman’s Parallel Universe
Who is Philip Pullman? A Christian-bashing God hater or, as the liberal Catholic writer Donna Freitas has argued, a profoundly unorthodox religious thinker? A propagandist for godlessness or a master of storytelling whose enchantment draws in both children and adults? This much is certain: His blend of fantasy and philosophy has been highly successful. The Dark Materials trilogy, hailed for skillful plotting, exquisite prose style, and imaginative fantastic landscapes as well as challenging ideas, has sold about 12 million copies worldwide. (The Golden Compass, published in 1995, was followed in 1997 by the second volume, The Subtle Knife, and then in 2000 by The Amber Spyglass, which became the first children’s book to win the prestigious Whitbread Prize for literature.) The series has earned Pullman a devoted following among well-educated adults as well as children.

The books’ greatest strengths are several memorable characters—above all the spunky and precocious 12-year-old heroine, Lyra Belacqua, raised as a ward of a college at Oxford—and an equally memorable alternate world. For Lyra’s Oxford is not “our” Oxford. It exists in a vaguely Edwardian-era England that has sophisticated flying craft and research into particle physics, in a world with such countries as Muscovy and Texas—and a powerful, oppressive, united Christian Church whose hierarchy, the Magisterium, is based in Geneva. This world is populated by witches who fly and live for hundreds of years and Arctic tribes of intelligent white bears who wear armor and are skilled metalworkers. Most unusually, every human being in this universe has a “daemon,” a talking animal that embodies his or her soul; their bond is so close that separation by more than a few feet causes agony to both. A child’s daemon can change into any animal, but it “settles” at puberty, taking on a shape that reflects the human’s identity: dogs for loyal servants, birds for free spirits, and so on.

Pullman excels at fleshing out his imagined universe, with its unique technologies, its social rules (there is a strict taboo against touching another person’s daemon), and its linguistic quirks (in Lyra’s English, chocolate is “chocolatl” and electricity is “anbaric power”). He excels, too, at drawing the reader into the story and deftly pulling together seemingly unrelated strands of the plot.

At the start of The Golden Compass, Lyra learns that her uncle, Lord Asriel, is leaving on a polar expedition to study something called Dust—a mysterious substance, invisible to the naked eye, that the Church regards as evil and sinful. This development coincides with a series of kidnappings that claims Lyra’s best friend, Roger, and the appearance of a beautiful aristocratic woman who befriends Lyra and is connected to the abductions. Lyra’s journey to rescue Roger puts her on the trail of a hideous Church-sponsored experiment to keep children pure of sin. It also puts her on the trail of Lord Asriel, who is working on an experiment of his own to open a window into parallel worlds.

As events unfold in the next two volumes, it turns out that Lord Asriel’s real goal is nothing less than to overthrow the rule of God, and that Lyra has a special role in this quest: A prophecy names her as the new Eve, destined to free humanity from the yoke of sin and death. Lyra’s allies on this worthy mission include witches, bears, rebel angels, and two people from “our” London: Mary Malone, a physicist and ex-nun, and Will Parry, a boy Lyra’s age with a unique destiny of his own. After harrowing adventures and great sacrifices, Lyra devotes herself to building a “Republic of Heaven” in her world to replace the false promise of the Kingdom of Heaven. This republic, our young heroes learn, must be based on human self-government rather than divine authority, and on the conviction that we should live life to its fullest in this world rather than aspire to bliss in the next one.

In Pullman’s universe, God, also known as the Authority, is worse than nonexistent: He is a tyrannical fraud. According to Pullman’s peculiar theogony, in the beginning there was Dust, a substance generated when matter develops consciousness. Dust condensed into beings of pure spirit—angels—and the first of them established his dominance over the others by falsely telling them he had created them and the world. (In the final volume of the trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, this entity is explicitly identified as the Judeo-Christian God.) In a similar twist, the afterlife is real, but it’s a bleak, desolate prison camp for the souls of the dead, and true salvation lies in the oblivion expected by atheists. In a powerful sequence deliberately modeled on the Christian story of the Harrowing of Hell, in which Christ descends into the underworld to liberate the righteous, Will and Lyra invade the world of the dead and lead the souls out into a living world where they blissfully dissolve into atoms.

Pullman deserves credit for tackling ideas of this depth and magnitude in his novels, and for his ambitious reimagining of myth and theology (at times bringing to mind Mikhail Bulgakov’s classic Russian fantasy novel The Master and Margarita, with its unique take on the Devil and the life of Jesus). Unfortunately, His Dark Materials suffers from serious flaws both as literature and as a religious critique.

Evangelizing Atheism
While Pullman has said that he is interested in “telling a story, not preaching a sermon,” he slides more and more frequently into preaching as the story goes on. Some of his favorite ideas—for instance, that the human body with its senses is far superior to the fleshless spirit of the angels, or that the best afterlife is to become one with nature—are stated again and again and again and again. The idea that the transition from childhood innocence to adult experience should be welcomed, not feared, is illustrated by a heavy-handed plot twist in which Lyra and Will’s sexual awakening proves to be the key to the world’s salvation. When ideology and literature collide, literature suffers. The Amber Spyglass is not quite on a par with the first two novels: Its new characters and worlds are generally less interesting, far too much space is given to sententious musings about the meaning of life in a post-God world, and eventually you start to feel that Pullman is trying to cram too many messages into his narrative, even if that means unnecessarily dragging it out.

He stacks the deck too. It’s not clear, for instance, why the Authority needs to keep the souls of the dead in such a wretched place and not even bother to reward the faithful. Conversely, to sell the idea that “the sweet and most desirable end” for the souls of the dead is to drift into nothingness, Pullman depicts this dissolution as an ecstatic moment in which the souls’ atoms not only become one with the universe but mingle happily with the particles of deceased loved ones (whom, for some reason, they couldn’t find among their fellow ghosts).

Worse still, Pullman paints every character connected to the Church or religion, from the fascistic zealots of the Magisterium to the crazed monk in the world of the dead who stubbornly believes he’s in paradise, with an antipathy that sometimes recalls Ayn Rand’s demonization of her welfare-state bureaucrats. (In a 2003 interview with the Christian magazine The Third Way, Pullman conceded that this tendency was “an artistic flaw.”) Those on the anti-God side, meanwhile, are judged far more leniently. Lord Asriel, who sacrifices the life of an innocent child to his single-minded crusade, is still a heroic if flawed figure. The witches can be ruthless and vindictive—we learn that one witch queen punished a tribe that failed to honor her by slaughtering the white tigers it worshipped as totem gods—but they are still portrayed sympathetically because they are nature-loving, Church-hating pagans. The double standard grates at times.

When Time Out New York asked him about his anti-religious message, Pullman replied, “The position I’ve always taken is that religious intolerance and tyranny is just one aspect of a wider problem, which is the tendency in human societies toward absolutism.…We have to struggle all the time against that tendency toward wanting the one ‘true’ answer that abolishes all the others forever. That’s true in politics, and it’s true in religion, and it’s true in every aspect of human life.” But Pullman is soft-pedaling his position. His Dark Materials, at least, explicitly singles out religion as the major source of oppression throughout human history. “That is what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling,” the tiger-slaying witch queen says with the author’s obvious approval. In Pullman’s novels, religion is not credited with any positive contributions to human society (whereas, in real history, the Catholic Church played a key role in ending such practices as forced marriage and infanticide) and is blamed for some things to which it has little if any connection (such as genital mutilation intended to prevent sexual pleasure).

Comments

|2.26.08 @ 9:02AM|#

I have yet to finish reading the series, but when reading ideological books (which, I don't do a lot of), I usually wonder why the authors don't make better use of tragedy. Portraying Christians as well-intentioned but misguided types who ultimately end up doing more harm than the good they view themselves as doing would maybe be more effective at getting to a larger audience as opposed to just preaching to the choir (no pun intended).

jj|2.26.08 @ 9:40AM|#

Keep reading, Reinmoose. The first book in the series was phenomenal. Pullman is a talented writer, one of the best in our generation. Towards the end of the second, and into the third, the story turns from valid exploration and criticism of religion to a bigoted, straw man anti-religious rant. It's a sad thing because the author has a real gift.

|2.26.08 @ 10:56AM|#

JJ,

You are right about that. I knocked these books off a while back out of curiosity. Pullman is a talented guy who can write. Ultimately though, I walked away with the feeling that he is just a really nasty person and that the world he created and the story he was trying to tell fell apart under the weight of his polemics and outright hatred of anything religious. It is a shame he is such a jerk and is so incapable of understanding or having any empathy for religion because he could be a lot better than he is. I would say overall if Phillip Pullman is the best atheist writer and thinker the world can produce, then Christians are very lucky in their enemies. I walked away from the series thinking "I am glad I am not an atheist, I might be like Pullman."

Rhywun|2.26.08 @ 11:42AM|#

I'm going to reserve judgement until I read them, but anything that sets off William Donohue has got to be right up my alley.

jj|2.26.08 @ 12:27PM|#

For all his hatred for C. S. Lewis' Narnia series, Pullman's books are full of nods to the stories.

Did anyone notice the similarities between the young female protagonist Lyra and Lewis' Lucy Pevensie. Parallels include: Lyra hiding in a wardrobe, her using magical devices to visit other lands, and a messianic bear that returns to his homeland to claim his kingdom.

Vermont Gun Owner|2.26.08 @ 12:53PM|#

I read The Golden Compass sometime in the 90's and thought it was good. For some reason, I couldn't manage to get more than 50 pages into The Subtle Knife...and I tried 3 different times.

Jumbie|2.26.08 @ 3:15PM|#

The third book was the weakest, for sure.

The second was the strongest with the best, most memorable, villians (which were actually frankenstien creations of humanity with nothing to do with religion.)

economist|2.26.08 @ 4:06PM|#

I can't really talk about ideological literature, considering I've read Atlas Shrugged and Anthem several times each.

economist|2.26.08 @ 4:07PM|#

jj,
I think Pullman meant the parallels as a way to make his series sort of the anti-Chronicles of Narnia.

economist|2.26.08 @ 4:10PM|#

Maybe they'll make a South Park episode where Philip Pullman comes to town to preach atheism (except that they made a similar one featuring a fictionalized Richard Dawkins).

|2.26.08 @ 4:26PM|#

I own all three books, but only read the first two. I agree that Pullman is an excellent story teller and The Subtle Knife is a ripping yarn...but the third book just gets way too heavy and preachy.

I find it interesting that Pullman's books are intended as anti-God or anti-religion, and yet I found so much in them that edified my own faith.

Indeed, I find his argument works better as an attack on certain aspects of the Catholic Church or the Church of England... But I've always thought the the importance of free will was a core tenet of Christian ideology, and I know that's a minority view.

So I can understand the frustration that many atheists feel. They perceive these large religious institutions as the source of great evils, though it can be easily argued that simply any large institution, religious or otherwise, has a propensity for bigotry and indecent behavior.

Which makes the following even more interesting: consider that Jesus intended to overthrow the large religious instutition (that of the Pharisees) of his day, because they had perverted the ideology in order to oppress and control. Later on we see a similar trend occur with the followers of Christ's ideologies.

Marx suffered a similar fate, methinks.

|2.26.08 @ 5:08PM|#

I only read the first book, but I thought even that one was pretty tedious. I got excited to read the series after reading an interview with Pullman, but the book just didn't live up to my expectations.

|2.26.08 @ 5:53PM|#

Us rationalists usually forget that people will grasp on to most anything to deny their eventual non-existence.

Pullman is fighting a stacked deck.

Mad Max|2.26.08 @ 8:22PM|#

Oh, this Pullman guy sounds courageous and daring. I just hope he manages to avoid the Dungeons of the Inquisition.

"The trilogy's main adult female character, Mrs. Coulter, is virtually a cliché of feminine evil . . ."

Who is herself the author of several best-selling books.

Someone Who Doesn\'t Want to L|2.26.08 @ 9:30PM|#

On the plus side, the Nicole Kidman version of Coulter is actually attractive, whereas the real-life version is just kind of creepy.

Quiet Desperation|2.27.08 @ 3:55AM|#

Am I the only person left who reads books for simple enjoyment anymore? Sexist? Class snobbery? For pity's sake, get over yourself. It *is* possible to over think things sometimes.

I loved the books. The world where every one has a silent partner that just quietly hangs around watching them their entire lives until it's time for them to die creeped me out for days. And I totally wanted a daemon, preferably a Pikachu that I could use to shock people who annoy me. ;-)

Some of you think he was too harsh on religion? Are you people on holy crack or something? I didn't think Pullman put steel toed boot into religion's balls quite enough!

LarryA|2.27.08 @ 10:05AM|#

Keep reading, Reinmoose. The first book in the series was phenomenal. Pullman is a talented writer, one of the best in our generation. Towards the end of the second, and into the third, the story turns from valid exploration and criticism of religion to a bigoted, straw man anti-religious rant. It's a sad thing because the author has a real gift.

You nailed it. I'm a Christian. I saw the first movie, which I rated "good, but not Lord of the Rings." When I looked for the books I ran across the controversy and checked them out expecting the anti-church slant. It was there, particularly in The Amber Spyglass, in spades. I have heard better arguments that didn't turn into a tirade.

Indeed, I find his argument works better as an attack on certain aspects of the Catholic Church or the Church of England

And that's the key most atheists never find. My own stories are sometimes anti-church, but they are not anti God. There is a difference.

Jesus intended to overthrow the large religious institution (that of the Pharisees) of his day, because they had perverted the ideology in order to oppress and control.

Bingo. Precisely why the founding fathers set up a secular government for the U.S., with a First Amendment that separates church and state. Believing that I am a child of God makes me a better person, regardless of what atheists think. (For you intelligent atheists, I've heard the arguments. I agree to disagree.) Forcing others to believe in God is just as nasty a concept as forcing others to believe there is no god.

As libertarians we should all understand that it's the "forcing people to do things" part that's evil, not the ideology upon which the force is justified. The rule of "The Will of the People" is no less onerous than the rule of "The One True God."

Us rationalists usually forget that people will grasp on to most anything to deny their eventual non-existence.

True. Including the individual immortality of Earning Heaven, the serial immortality of Justified Reincarnation, the inherited immortality of The Fatherland, and the collective immortality of The Pure Ideology.

And I totally wanted a daemon, preferably a Pikachu that I could use to shock people who annoy me. ;-)

Agreed, except I want a wolf. "Come on, Bitch." Other than it would be a lot harder to actually argue with a daemon than to ignore a conscience warning you that you're about to screw up. Imagine having those conversations where others can hear.

Megs|2.28.08 @ 12:41AM|#

I doubt I'll get around to reading the His Dark Materials trilogy simply because I was so damn disappointed with Pullman's Sally Lockhart trilogy, for a lot of the same reasons people are talking about here. Starts off great - Pullman can be really excellent with really atraditional yet still traditional stories and characters. Then you get hit over the head repeatedly with his ideas and it just sucks. In Sally Lockhart's case, she gets an inbetween the books complete change of heart (what? all the development in a relationship happens when we can't see it??) and in the first book is built up to be this marvelous heroine and capitalist, with a real good eye to describing her business and the challenges - then I got the feeling she had a change of heart just so Pullman could have a former capitalist repent. And she does it for love of a man. Because that's what heroines do - they change the ideas that have made them strong for men, because the man is a writer and philosopher and must be smarter. And she patly renounces violence in the second two books, despite saving herself with it in the first and her disgust being treated there with a very real dualism. So yeah - nuanced, good story devolves into propaganda.

But I do recommend Pullman's The Ruby in the Smoke. Especially to the libertarians. Gun ownership, drugs, capitalism!

Hieronymus Braintree|3.6.08 @ 6:35AM|#

Hey Cathy, I'm a fan and I was worried because I haven't seen you around. Where you been?