Friday Column: Looking Back at His Dark Materials

This week’s Friday Column is written by Pamela Cortland. She writes for Paper Pills and lives in New York City.

With the release of a feature film version set for next Friday, His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman’s acclaimed trilogy, is back in the spotlight. Originally published between 1995 and 2000 and consisting of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, Pullman’s series revolves around a pre-adolescent girl named Lyra, her friend Will, and their epic struggle to destroy Christianity as we know it. Executed as a sort of Paradise Lost in reverse (this time the war against Heaven succeeds, and it’s a good thing), His Dark Materials is about as far away as one can get from The Chronicles of Narnia. So why should anyone care about three fantasy books that debuted more than ten years ago?

For one, His Dark Materials was placed on many of this year’s post-Potter reading recommendation lists--however, Pullman’s series seems to be more lauded than read. True, Lyra Belacqua’s parallel universe is more daunting and unfamiliar than Harry Potter’s affable Hogwarts: Lyra grows up in a college of Oxford, amid scholarly discussions of experimental theology (or, in our world, particle physics). Pullman does not spare us the rigorous religious and scientific debates that frame his novels. The argument in Lyra’s world is, What is Dust? The vestigial evidence of original sin or a benevolent, conscious form of dark matter? Should it be destroyed or preserved?

Already it’s clear that if Harry Potter offended Christians with its inclusion of witchcraft, His Dark Materials must belong to the ninth circle of hell. Unlike in Rowling’s series, the moral of the story does not boil down to “Love surmounts all obstacles.” Or rather, that’s not all. Love does surmount all obstacles, but in addition Pullman offers this: There is no external absolute (i.e. no “Authority,” Pullman’s alias for God) and no afterlife. There is only this life and our point of view. And so we must take advantage of being alive and pursue kindness and knowledge. As one character counsels Lyra, “If [you] live in the world, [you] should see and touch and hear and learn things.” Another character advises, “We have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere.” In other words, we most honor the privilege of being alive by living life to the fullest—a philosophy halfway between the unthinking excesses of hedonism and over-intellectualized Epicureanism. If Harry Potter’s legions of fans do pay heed to book columnists and take a stab at Pullman’s series, they’re in for a heady graduation present.

Pullman's return to the limelight can also be attributed to New Line's release of The Golden Compass, in theaters on December 7th. Starring Dakota Blue Richards, Daniel Craig, and Nicole Kidman, it's clear that New Line is hoping that The Golden Compass will become Hollywood's next big fantasy series. But how does Pullman’s anti-Church rhetoric translate to a blockbuster movie? It doesn't. As Nicole Kidman says in The Atlantic, "It's not an anti-Catholic movie" and "obviously we've watered it down a bit."

But if what Kidman says is true, how can the movie even exist? Over the course of The Golden Compass, and especially over The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, Pullman’s writing turns increasingly anti-Catholic. The Church, he claims, is obsessed with eradicating the stain of original sin. Pullman’s characters go on to claim that the Church advocates physical, if not spiritual, castration in order to hearken back to prelapsarian innocence. In the last book of His Dark Materials, Heaven’s own angels confess that “[God] was never the creator. He told all those who came after him that he created them, but it was a lie. One of those who came later was wiser than he was, and she found out the truth, so he banished her.” And who is this wise woman? None other than Eve, here portrayed as humanity’s liberator and reincarnated in the body of our unknowing protagonist.

In His Dark Materials, original sin is recast as the beginning of humanity’s self-awareness and the birth of independent thought. If that premise isn’t mind-bending enough for you, The Amber Spyglass pulls out all the stops: In the trilogy’s most shocking passage, Pullman depicts God as an aged, half-demented wraith of a being for whom “the most merciful thing, the truest proof of our love for God, [would be] to seek him out and give him the gift of death.” Now, I’m hardly the most devout of Christians, but even I was shaken by that line. If New Line is already censoring The Golden Compass, how do they even hope to produce a second and third movie while keeping the original plot of a righteous war against Heaven even remotely intact?

But maybe Nicole Kidman has a point. In interviews, Philip Pullman reveals himself to be not so much anti-Catholic as anti-zealot. It’s not that ideas of mercy, compassion, and love are wrong, but that any organization that seeks to stamp out or police human passions is wrong. An organization that believes its constituents are inherently flawed from the outset is wrong. That’s why now is the time to come back to Pullman’s trilogy, so that we can assess and analyze for ourselves what and why certain elements are left out of the movie. If the Church is replaced by a Magisterium, a “vaguely fascistic, totalitarian dictatorship,” in the words of New Line’s director of production for the film, doesn’t that point to an industry more concerned with placation and diplomacy than honesty and accuracy? Doesn’t the omission of The Golden Compass’s more inflammatory passages exhibit how little faith Hollywood places in our ability to look past Pullman’s controversial rhetoric in order to parse the meaning behind it?

It’s obvious why The Golden Compass would be watered down for a commercial blockbuster, but what do we stand to lose from all of this? Answering this question brings us to the most important reason for reading (or re-reading) His Dark Materials: Aside from the rollicking storyline, deeply layered characters, and a preponderance of mercenary polar bears, these books startlingly question religion’s authority in our life and ask why we believe what we believe--and whether or not there exists a doctrine more conducive to living a more fulfilling life.

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Comments

[Catherine]

I can see why he would say he is anti-zealot rather than anti-Christian, but the fact remains: he had not one good thing to say about religion or people of faith at all - he communicated his thoughts in a very "black and white" manner, while asking the rest of us to think freely. It doesn't work that way.

Thanks for your thoughts - I've been looking around the web to see what bloggers are saying about the books. I just posted mine as well here if you're interested. I'd love your feedback!

[Catherine]

I can see why he would say he is anti-zealot rather than anti-Christian, but the fact remains: he had not one good thing to say about religion or people of faith at all - he communicated his thoughts in a very "black and white" manner, while asking the rest of us to think freely. It doesn't work that way.

Thanks for your thoughts - I've been looking around the web to see what bloggers are saying about the books. I just posted mine as well here if you're interested. I'd love your feedback!

[noah]

I'd like to contact Philip Pullman, do you have an email for him?

[Barbara Wright]

The Dark Materials series does in fact present a view of the afterlife--for me one of the most touching events in the books. In feeling responsible for her young friend, who lost his life after she took him to her father, Lyra and her companion, Will, actually go to the underworld, find the little boy, and free him along with other dead souls as they choose to follow her through a dangerous passage into the air and sunlight of the living world. This view is not so much Christian as pre-Christian, mythic; it emphasizes the precious quality of life on earth.