'Golden Compass' author Philip Pullman inspires thrills -- and wrath
By CLAIRE DEDERERSPECIAL TO THE P-I
A writer sits quietly at his desk. He imagines a little girl. Something about her inspires him. He begins to write. The girl is joined by other characters: an explorer father; an ice-queen mother; a band of sea-faring Gypsies; a polar bear dressed in armor; a witch preoccupied with politics. The man sends these characters racing across the Arctic, up in hot-air balloons, through university halls, and down into abject dungeons. He's a British middle school teacher with a couple of mid-list novels under his belt, and he doesn't know that he's creating a universe that will bring down the wrath of Christians -- and thrill readers all over the world.
Philip Pullman published "The Golden Compass" in 1995. It's the first volume in the richly imagined trilogy of children's books called "His Dark Materials," which includes "The Subtle Knife" and "The Amber Spyglass." The trilogy follows Lyra -- an urchin who lives in a universe not unlike our own -- as she battles the totalitarian forces of the Magisterium, a global religious consortium.
The series has drawn three distinct readerships. It was first picked up, unsurprisingly, by young adults. With her sharp tongue, stout heart and impressive gift for lying, Lyra makes a pretty delicious preteen heroine. She starts life as the ward of Jordan College in Oxford, but her peaceful existence comes to an end when neighbor children begin to disappear. Mysterious adults are snatching kids off the street and spiriting them, it is whispered, to an ominous fortress far in the North. When they take Lyra's best friend, Roger, she decides she must save him. And so her propulsively plotted journey begins.
By her side every step of the way is her daemon, Pantalaimon. The daemon is Pullman's most charming invention. In Lyra's world, each human has a constant animal companion. This daemon is more than a pet; it embodies the human's very soul. For readers not long past the age of horse worship and kitten adulation, the notion of the daemon has proved irresistible.
Word of mouth spread, and adults became avid Pullmanites as well. The New York Times called the books "Harry Potter for grown-ups." Britain's prestigious Whitbread Prize was given to the final novel, the first time the prize ever was awarded to a children's book. Adults have been drawn, in part, by Pullman's gorgeous, imagistic prose. He writes fantastical scenes in a genuinely moving way, as when Lyra tends the wounds of Iorek Byrnison, king of the armored polar bears: "So the small human bent over the great bear-king, packing in the bloodmoss and freezing the raw flesh till it stopped bleeding. When she had finished, her mittens were sodden with Iorek's blood, but his wounds were stanched."
This kind of immediate, detailed writing has converted readers (like myself) who normally won't have anything to do with fantasy.
Pullman also demonstrates an appetite for big, challenging themes. He scavenges mythology and history for material: One page might subtly steal from Oedipus, the next from survivors' stories of the Holocaust, the next from Milton. Pullman isn't afraid to wrestle with the meaty stuff of good and evil, and good hardly ever turns out to be on the side of the church. His villains are religious hypocrites; his heroes are self-determined freethinkers.
This conflict reaches a climax in the final novel, when Lyra achieves her destiny, which involves killing God himself. This last bit of plotting brought Pullman another audience: Christians, who have pilloried the series. Now "The Golden Compass" has been made into a film, and Christians -- or at least their highly vocal, self-appointed representatives, such as the Catholic League -- have undertaken a campaign to boycott the film. (Is it just me, or does the name the Catholic League conjure up some shady, diabolical organization from a 1950s comic book?) They've flooded Amazon and other Web sites with posts, wherein they warn parents that Pullman is an "atheist!" and that in the final novel of the series "the children actually kill God!"
I, for one, find this outcry strangely moving. Not that I agree with these bossy handwringers; quite the opposite. But the fact that they care so much seems to me astonishing. It's a story worthy of Pullman himself: A man alone at his desk conjures a vision of a universe so free and happy that it terrifies perfect strangers.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Class Presentations
I love the presentations I have seen so far in our class. The first group seemed to take a very scholarly approach to Baum and THe Wizard of Oz. I loved the history about why the story starts in Kansas. I loved that there is an animal called a lyger...who would have thought!
THe second group seemed to go more along the lines on what we are doing in our class presentation. That is all I can say so I won't spoil it. If I do have one piece of advice DO NOT EAT BEFORE YOU COME TO CLASS UNLESS YOU WANT TO WEAR IT!
THe second group seemed to go more along the lines on what we are doing in our class presentation. That is all I can say so I won't spoil it. If I do have one piece of advice DO NOT EAT BEFORE YOU COME TO CLASS UNLESS YOU WANT TO WEAR IT!
Class Presentations
I love the presentations I have seen so far in our class. The first group seemed to take a very scholarly approach to Baum and THe Wizard of Oz. I loved the history about why the story starts in Kansas. I loved that there is an animal called a lyger...who would have thought!
THe second group seemed to go more along the lines on what we are doing in our class presentation. That is all I can say so I won't spoil it. If I do have one piece of advice DO NOT EAT BEFORE YOU COME TO CLASS UNLESS YOU WANT TO WEAR IT!
THe second group seemed to go more along the lines on what we are doing in our class presentation. That is all I can say so I won't spoil it. If I do have one piece of advice DO NOT EAT BEFORE YOU COME TO CLASS UNLESS YOU WANT TO WEAR IT!
Jesus and Pullman
Christ is mentioned in passing and the agents of God in the church do wear crucifixes. But there is no discursive effort to engage with Christ in the trilogy. God is not interested in saving people, largely, I presume, because they are not his beloved creation.
The absence of Christ seems a somewhat less scrupulous move of Pullman’s, since saving sacrifice is given considerable prominence in the work. As the story develops, the rebels, the heroes of the work, take on the ‘great enterprise’ of saving people from this tyrant God, and from death (which is his prison-house).
Their leader is Lord Asriel, Lyra’s father, who has often treated Lyra with indifference. Asriel is joined by Lyra’s mother, also long absent from Lyra’s life. Both come to discover Lyra’s importance in defeating the forces of God. And both come to realise that they do in fact love Lyra profoundly. This moment comes in their climactic fight with Metatron, when they further realise that defeating him and stopping him from reaching Lyra will mean sacrificing their own lives. And so that is what they do out of their love for Lyra, so that her work of saving all peoples might be achieved.
Their sacrifice of love is coupled with Lyra’s own sacrifice of separation. Lyra’s parents’ deaths enable her to complete her task of freeing souls from the land of the dead. But to do this Lyra must undergo separation from Pan, her d¾mon (in Lyra’s world humans have a living, speaking manifestation of their soul/consciousness that takes the form of an animal and is called their d¾mon). This is explained as the most terrible, costly separation for someone from Lyra’s world — a great forsaking of relationship — but it ultimately leads to her rescue of souls.
So Pullman ignores Christ, making no effort to address his sacrificial death on the cross out of his great love for us, or his suffering for our sake, paying the price to set us free. At the same time he explicitly denounces Christianity as the cause of our problems: ‘The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all’, Lyra is told (The Amber Spyglass, p.464). And yet without shame he transfers to the rebels a story of their costly sacrifice in the name of finally defeating God and claiming victory over death.
It is true of course that if you strip Christianity of a creator-God, who therefore has no right or place as our judge, then really you have no Christianity at all. For what Christ came to do in being punished for us by that righteous judge would become utterly meaningless. But to say that Pullman’s story is not anti-Christian, merely ‘anti-religious’ will not do. How many children among the general population do you know who have a reasoned grasp of what Christ achieved on the cross to set us free, that they can see an aping distortion of it when it comes along?
The absence of Christ seems a somewhat less scrupulous move of Pullman’s, since saving sacrifice is given considerable prominence in the work. As the story develops, the rebels, the heroes of the work, take on the ‘great enterprise’ of saving people from this tyrant God, and from death (which is his prison-house).
Their leader is Lord Asriel, Lyra’s father, who has often treated Lyra with indifference. Asriel is joined by Lyra’s mother, also long absent from Lyra’s life. Both come to discover Lyra’s importance in defeating the forces of God. And both come to realise that they do in fact love Lyra profoundly. This moment comes in their climactic fight with Metatron, when they further realise that defeating him and stopping him from reaching Lyra will mean sacrificing their own lives. And so that is what they do out of their love for Lyra, so that her work of saving all peoples might be achieved.
Their sacrifice of love is coupled with Lyra’s own sacrifice of separation. Lyra’s parents’ deaths enable her to complete her task of freeing souls from the land of the dead. But to do this Lyra must undergo separation from Pan, her d¾mon (in Lyra’s world humans have a living, speaking manifestation of their soul/consciousness that takes the form of an animal and is called their d¾mon). This is explained as the most terrible, costly separation for someone from Lyra’s world — a great forsaking of relationship — but it ultimately leads to her rescue of souls.
So Pullman ignores Christ, making no effort to address his sacrificial death on the cross out of his great love for us, or his suffering for our sake, paying the price to set us free. At the same time he explicitly denounces Christianity as the cause of our problems: ‘The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all’, Lyra is told (The Amber Spyglass, p.464). And yet without shame he transfers to the rebels a story of their costly sacrifice in the name of finally defeating God and claiming victory over death.
It is true of course that if you strip Christianity of a creator-God, who therefore has no right or place as our judge, then really you have no Christianity at all. For what Christ came to do in being punished for us by that righteous judge would become utterly meaningless. But to say that Pullman’s story is not anti-Christian, merely ‘anti-religious’ will not do. How many children among the general population do you know who have a reasoned grasp of what Christ achieved on the cross to set us free, that they can see an aping distortion of it when it comes along?
Questions about God
The most important of Pullman’s changes (to me) is that God in His Dark Materials is not the sovereign creator of the universe. He is merely the first angelic being who took it upon himself to lay claim to the title ‘God’. This is a catastrophic demotion. God, without any rights to call himself this, is unsurprisingly cast as a usurper, a tyrant, a despot. In fact he is an ageing figure who is reaching the end of his power and who is handing everything over to Metatron, the chief of his army and a terrifying figure. God is not a figure of love or mercy or grace. He is not a God of relationship, as he is absent from human affairs, except in that he opposes any freedom and individual thought because it is a threat to his power. Since he is not our creator, the giver of life, he prefers that humans are benign automatons. Since he is not the rightful judge of the universe, he is a tyrant.
In some respects this is so far removed from the true God that one might well think that this is no God at all. But Pullman explicitly identifies him as the God of Judeo-Christianity: ‘The Authority, God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty — those were the names he gave himself. He was never the creator’, Will is told (The Amber Spyglass, p.33). Pullman wants to have his cake and eat it: to make God no God at all, but label him specifically as the God of the Christian church.
In some respects this is so far removed from the true God that one might well think that this is no God at all. But Pullman explicitly identifies him as the God of Judeo-Christianity: ‘The Authority, God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty — those were the names he gave himself. He was never the creator’, Will is told (The Amber Spyglass, p.33). Pullman wants to have his cake and eat it: to make God no God at all, but label him specifically as the God of the Christian church.
hmmm....
The Amber Spyglass was the first children’s book to win the Whitbread prize; the trilogy came third in the BBC’s Big Read poll. The work continues to do well. Northern Lights was number three in the children’s bestsellers list at the end of 2004. And the two-part stage production is currently enjoying a second run at the National Theatre.
There is no need to ask why it has been so successful. The story is wonderfully inventive, one in which there are parallel worlds full of extraordinary people and creatures. It depicts with brilliant clarity the lives of its two young protagonists — Lyra, a defiant girl with a penchant for lying, and Will, a restless boy who has struggled with isolation and learnt to disguise himself from the eyes of the world. Together, the trilogy explores the theme of childhood friendship and portrays the process of adolescent self-awakening in a way that is as tender as you might find.
If the work has been taken to heart by so many readers, it has also caused consternation among many Christians. This is because the larger story, in which the children become involved, is the battle to overthrow God from his pedestal and establish ‘true freedom’ for all conscious beings. It is a cosmic tale, in which Pullman replays John Milton’s Paradise Lost, where a war in heaven precedes the fall of man, but in such a way that the story is reversed: in Pullman, God loses the war and the fall becomes the rebels’ final triumph.
This theological concern has prompted Christians to be rightly wary of the work. At the same time many like to avoid seeming unnecessarily extreme. We are familiar with books that routinely cause a stir. Is this, for example, like the Harry Potter series, where talk of banning a largely traditional boarding school story seems over the top? Is there more to be worried about in Pullman and, if so, what?
His Dark Materials is indeed some way from the Harry Potter series, taking as it does a theological framework and putting forward explicit, if reductive, views about God, Christianity and the church. The first book, Northern Lights, is a genuinely gripping tale. But Pullman’s agenda emerges here, and then as the books progress, increasingly dominates all that happens.
Christians should be aware of how his trilogy has made widespread and acceptable a version of Christianity that is little more than a caricature. The first of the film adaptations, due for release next year, will undoubtedly refocus attention on the books and add to this.
This article has been prompted by a hope that Christians who do choose to read the work (especially if, for example, their children read the work at school) will do so as critically as possible, aware of exactly how the author pulls off his version of the truth. But it is not my aim to respond to Pullman in an equally reductive manner. Instead, what I think we need to do is ask some straightforward questions of the trilogy and the worldview it offers.
There is no need to ask why it has been so successful. The story is wonderfully inventive, one in which there are parallel worlds full of extraordinary people and creatures. It depicts with brilliant clarity the lives of its two young protagonists — Lyra, a defiant girl with a penchant for lying, and Will, a restless boy who has struggled with isolation and learnt to disguise himself from the eyes of the world. Together, the trilogy explores the theme of childhood friendship and portrays the process of adolescent self-awakening in a way that is as tender as you might find.
If the work has been taken to heart by so many readers, it has also caused consternation among many Christians. This is because the larger story, in which the children become involved, is the battle to overthrow God from his pedestal and establish ‘true freedom’ for all conscious beings. It is a cosmic tale, in which Pullman replays John Milton’s Paradise Lost, where a war in heaven precedes the fall of man, but in such a way that the story is reversed: in Pullman, God loses the war and the fall becomes the rebels’ final triumph.
This theological concern has prompted Christians to be rightly wary of the work. At the same time many like to avoid seeming unnecessarily extreme. We are familiar with books that routinely cause a stir. Is this, for example, like the Harry Potter series, where talk of banning a largely traditional boarding school story seems over the top? Is there more to be worried about in Pullman and, if so, what?
His Dark Materials is indeed some way from the Harry Potter series, taking as it does a theological framework and putting forward explicit, if reductive, views about God, Christianity and the church. The first book, Northern Lights, is a genuinely gripping tale. But Pullman’s agenda emerges here, and then as the books progress, increasingly dominates all that happens.
Christians should be aware of how his trilogy has made widespread and acceptable a version of Christianity that is little more than a caricature. The first of the film adaptations, due for release next year, will undoubtedly refocus attention on the books and add to this.
This article has been prompted by a hope that Christians who do choose to read the work (especially if, for example, their children read the work at school) will do so as critically as possible, aware of exactly how the author pulls off his version of the truth. But it is not my aim to respond to Pullman in an equally reductive manner. Instead, what I think we need to do is ask some straightforward questions of the trilogy and the worldview it offers.
The Subtle Knife
In this, the second volume of His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman continues to develop the grand Miltonic scheme of an emerging masterpiece of modern Fantasy. New characters join the mythically resonant cast of the first novel, Northern Lights (reviewed elsewhere in infinity plus); new worlds are added likewise, fresh contrasts of humanity's innocence and experience; the basis for the Armageddon of the final installment, The Amber Spyglass, is laid. The pace of invention and action does not slacken.
By the end of Northern Lights, it was clear that the trilogy's underlying conflict was between two principles: that of Authority (God, the Calvinistic Church of the Magisterium, inflexible Destiny, dogma, control), personified in the heroine, Lyra's, mother, Mrs Coulter, head of the Church's sinister Oblation Board; and that of Human Free Will (the Promethean or Satanic, the aspiring, the charismatically hubristic), embodied by Lyra's father, the resourcefully and industriously rebellious Lord Asriel.
One of the most impressive features of this book is the manner in which it takes that established opposition and weaves it, complexly, into a wide range of subplots, characterizations, and symbols, so that what is normally the flattest part of a trilogy, the section that must somehow keep the narrative going between the creativity of its opening and the drama of its climax, is constantly fascinating, a set of copiously imaginative variations on simple themes, subtly working together. This orchestration, in musical analogy, marks Pullman as Fantasy's pre-eminent Composer.
And so a symphony of plot elements proceeds. The action moves between three parallel universes: the steampunk milieu of Lyra's version of the Earth, with its scheming clerical bureaucrats and sinister presentiments of catastrophic war; our late Twentieth Century, with its urban hardships and blinkered secular obsessions; and a third alternate world, once a paradise of happiness and moderation, resembling then a full flowering of the potentials of the Italian Renaissance, but now ravaged by soul-eating Spectres, most of its surviving inhabitants orphaned children, in whom the Spectres have no interest. Lyra has fled the first Earth, a boy, Will, the second; they meet in the third, which acts as a sort of crossroads of the multiverse. Both protagonists have animal familiars; both are shadowed by their fathers, whom they have lost, and for whom they must search; both are attached by destiny to artifacts of cosmic significance, Lyra to the golden compass that measures Truth, Will to the subtle knife that can detect and open the gates between the worlds. Joining forces, they develop in tandem, maturing and learning in a deftly rendered harmony, as if they are complementary aspects of a single whole. The implication mounts that this growing-up, the theme of so many YA novels, is in this text the key to the coming to adulthood of the entire human species.
For Pullman is writing a manner of sequel to Paradise Lost. The last war in Heaven, between God and the rebel angels, was, as in Milton's account, lost by the latter tens of thousands of years ago, leading to the enslavement of all sentient beings to the iron Will of God. Now, in Asriel, there is a new Satan, who plans a new uprising. The angels, and their creations (the human species) have a second chance at free choice, free will, which might be understood as true adulthood. As Lyra and Will mature, they mature for all of us. By this token, Pullman's other subplots - quests by various adults, the aeronaut Lee Scoresby's to protect Lyra, the witch Serafina Pekkala's for the same, Will's father's for Will the knife bearer, Mrs Coulter's for the daughter she would kill, Asriel's for victory over the God who restrains him - are mere reflections of the central quest the children undertake. All adults, the world itself: these are also children struggling to grow up. And this has vast ramifications.
The Subtle Knife verges on Science Fiction in its speculative underpinnings. Scientists in our Oxford, helped along by Lyra, determine that the "Dust" the godly Magisterium fears, the dark matter that may constitute the bulk of the universe's mass, is made up of sentient elementary particles; these are, in a nutshell, great hosts of rebel angels, in a continuation of the fusion of theology and physics hinted at in Northern Lights. Matter itself is rebelling against the adamantine physical laws that have restrained its free behaviour - but the Renaissance world invaded by Spectres contains authentic winged angels, and the vampiric Spectres are in turn corrupted angels; so physical particles and spiritual metaphors are one and the same in Pullman's scheme. The Created wish to be free of their Creator, and this applies to every atom as to every thinking being. The Armageddon in The Amber Spyglass will be something to read.
It could be argued that the very setting of His Dark Materials, its range of alternate worlds, is a metaphor for the free will the rebels seek: all options realized, in parallel, rather than the stable monolithic reality Authority desires. Pullman's sympathy certainly lies with the rebellious instinct. But there are very clear hints that he also believes a balance must be struck: his narrative focus is on the striving, unhubristic Lyra and Will, not on their ambitious parents; and the Spectre-afflicted world seems very much like an Eden destroyed by the alchemic meddling that created the subtle knife. Perhaps there are proper limits to knowledge and aspiration; perhaps Authority has a place.
By the end of Northern Lights, it was clear that the trilogy's underlying conflict was between two principles: that of Authority (God, the Calvinistic Church of the Magisterium, inflexible Destiny, dogma, control), personified in the heroine, Lyra's, mother, Mrs Coulter, head of the Church's sinister Oblation Board; and that of Human Free Will (the Promethean or Satanic, the aspiring, the charismatically hubristic), embodied by Lyra's father, the resourcefully and industriously rebellious Lord Asriel.
One of the most impressive features of this book is the manner in which it takes that established opposition and weaves it, complexly, into a wide range of subplots, characterizations, and symbols, so that what is normally the flattest part of a trilogy, the section that must somehow keep the narrative going between the creativity of its opening and the drama of its climax, is constantly fascinating, a set of copiously imaginative variations on simple themes, subtly working together. This orchestration, in musical analogy, marks Pullman as Fantasy's pre-eminent Composer.
And so a symphony of plot elements proceeds. The action moves between three parallel universes: the steampunk milieu of Lyra's version of the Earth, with its scheming clerical bureaucrats and sinister presentiments of catastrophic war; our late Twentieth Century, with its urban hardships and blinkered secular obsessions; and a third alternate world, once a paradise of happiness and moderation, resembling then a full flowering of the potentials of the Italian Renaissance, but now ravaged by soul-eating Spectres, most of its surviving inhabitants orphaned children, in whom the Spectres have no interest. Lyra has fled the first Earth, a boy, Will, the second; they meet in the third, which acts as a sort of crossroads of the multiverse. Both protagonists have animal familiars; both are shadowed by their fathers, whom they have lost, and for whom they must search; both are attached by destiny to artifacts of cosmic significance, Lyra to the golden compass that measures Truth, Will to the subtle knife that can detect and open the gates between the worlds. Joining forces, they develop in tandem, maturing and learning in a deftly rendered harmony, as if they are complementary aspects of a single whole. The implication mounts that this growing-up, the theme of so many YA novels, is in this text the key to the coming to adulthood of the entire human species.
For Pullman is writing a manner of sequel to Paradise Lost. The last war in Heaven, between God and the rebel angels, was, as in Milton's account, lost by the latter tens of thousands of years ago, leading to the enslavement of all sentient beings to the iron Will of God. Now, in Asriel, there is a new Satan, who plans a new uprising. The angels, and their creations (the human species) have a second chance at free choice, free will, which might be understood as true adulthood. As Lyra and Will mature, they mature for all of us. By this token, Pullman's other subplots - quests by various adults, the aeronaut Lee Scoresby's to protect Lyra, the witch Serafina Pekkala's for the same, Will's father's for Will the knife bearer, Mrs Coulter's for the daughter she would kill, Asriel's for victory over the God who restrains him - are mere reflections of the central quest the children undertake. All adults, the world itself: these are also children struggling to grow up. And this has vast ramifications.
The Subtle Knife verges on Science Fiction in its speculative underpinnings. Scientists in our Oxford, helped along by Lyra, determine that the "Dust" the godly Magisterium fears, the dark matter that may constitute the bulk of the universe's mass, is made up of sentient elementary particles; these are, in a nutshell, great hosts of rebel angels, in a continuation of the fusion of theology and physics hinted at in Northern Lights. Matter itself is rebelling against the adamantine physical laws that have restrained its free behaviour - but the Renaissance world invaded by Spectres contains authentic winged angels, and the vampiric Spectres are in turn corrupted angels; so physical particles and spiritual metaphors are one and the same in Pullman's scheme. The Created wish to be free of their Creator, and this applies to every atom as to every thinking being. The Armageddon in The Amber Spyglass will be something to read.
It could be argued that the very setting of His Dark Materials, its range of alternate worlds, is a metaphor for the free will the rebels seek: all options realized, in parallel, rather than the stable monolithic reality Authority desires. Pullman's sympathy certainly lies with the rebellious instinct. But there are very clear hints that he also believes a balance must be struck: his narrative focus is on the striving, unhubristic Lyra and Will, not on their ambitious parents; and the Spectre-afflicted world seems very much like an Eden destroyed by the alchemic meddling that created the subtle knife. Perhaps there are proper limits to knowledge and aspiration; perhaps Authority has a place.
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