Check your religious baggage at the door…

The popularity of Phillip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials has increased lately because of the release of a movie based on Book I, and as a result of the explosion in mainstream atheist literature (Dawkins, Hitches, Harris, etc.)

The plot of Book III: The Amber Spyglass, rolls along, though slow and dark at times, but Pullman’s greatest triumph is the world he has created, not the storyline. The daemon system, (whereby a human is paired to an animal which acts as an external soul) by this third book has become entirely natural and poignant. The connection between Dust/Original Sin/Dark Matter is stirring, but might not be sufficiently tied together for the casual reader.

The plot so far has carried heroine Lyra and her daemon to a cave where she is being held by her apparently evil mother. Lyra’s friend Will, aided by a knife which can cut through dimensions, comes to her rescue and they set off to find answers to the chaos around them. Lyra’s father, Lord Asriel, is making war upon heaven and the fate of the future world, and all worlds apparently, hangs on the choices made by Lyra, a neo-Eve. Aided by witches and gypsies, Lyra and Will adventure to different worlds including the world of the dead in search for answers.

As for the characters: Mrs. Coulter is so robotically evil and erratic readers are unsure of what to think throughout. Similar inconsistencies with Lord Asriel cause us to shout “Dammit! are these people good or bad!?” But that is probably the question Pullman wants us to wrestle with. Lyra jumps back and forth between being a goofy, bratty kid and a mature serious woman, but again this may be intentional as Pullman has to keep her hovering on the edge of sexual discovery. Will is rocklike and unlikable (though with good cause) but for this reason his expected love for Lyra in the final chapters is somewhat awkward.

Readers of the first two books might remember points here and there where Pullman drives the strangeness of his world home. For example, in Book I where Lyra eats a raw kidney or in Book II when Iorek eats his friend Lee’s corpse. These act as exclamation points that Pullman nonchalantly throws in so the reader might catch his breath and say: ‘Yes indeed, this is a strange world, so different from our own.’ Dr. Mary Malone’s time among mulefa (somewhat of a rip off of Gulliver’s last journey, complete with bird yahoos?) seems to continue this, as a kind of originality/weirdness for originality’s/weirdness’s sake. This compounded weirdness, (having no archetypal root in the reader’s mind), tends to ‘thin’ a story as it goes on, and though you will applaud the originality, I think most will find this story fading faster in memory than comparable fantasies, unless reread at least once.

What lingers however is pure poetry. The final image of Lyra sitting alone in the Botanic Garden knowing Will is doing the same in the overlapping world is absolutely haunting, and it is a cynical son of a gun who can’t shed a tear at such a time. The weird factor plus childlike discovery factor plus the backdrop of abstract philosophy add up to many other beautiful dreamlike images which I feel are the final residual treasures in the series.

Social philosophy:

Readers may note concepts in the book including homosexual angels, few examples of married couples as compared to lovers, a nun who throws her crucifix into the ocean and later moves in with a man, anima/animus ideas etc, and accuse Pullman of having a not so subtle social agenda. Those who rage against the machine often have a tough sell, but Pullman is no more “right” or “wrong” than his critics in this area as these critics will attack his social philosophy with their own religious philosophy. Few will dare to think “beyond good and evil” (“God” bless quotation marks!)

Religious Philosophy:

Numerous fantasy authors attack churches indirectly (e.g. Robert Jordan’s Children of the Light) or do not touch God at all. Others, like C.S. Lewis, supported Christianity by being masterful but ‘original in an unoriginal way’. That is to say, Lewis took something ready made and confirmed it in the hearts of his accepting readers with allegory. Pullman, the anti-C.S. Lewis, throws subtlety and allegory out the window with an all powerful church centered in the money capital Geneva, an assassin priest who performs preemptive penance and, even the suggestion that the church cuts out the sexual organs of children.

Pullman’s slip is identifying the God he is using specifically as Yaweh/Adonnai. This gives the Christian church reason to attack his religious ideas when the core of the book is its philosophical ideas. You could attack Jesus(Da Vinci Code style), the Church(historically or with certain controversies today), Mohammad, Buddha, anyone you want, and make some progress one way or another, bunk and debunk endlessly, though believers and skeptics would multiply. This is why Pullman’s enemies are foaming at the mouth, because they feel they can refute him with substantial argument……..

Abstract Philosophy:

But ‘God’ is simply too abstract to ever be created or destroyed by man’s philosophy or argument. What Pullman has done here is take an entity considered infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, etc and presented him as merely a powerful though mortal imposter. The true question of God is not touched, and even some characters in the book express doubt over the nature and existence of a possible “true Creator” beyond and above the presented imposter. Pullman, wanting to destroy God, has taken the abstract concept of God, humanized and personified it, and destroyed it instead.

Now, within the confines of a story this is no problem, and if the author wants “blaspheme”, more power to him. He can and does score legitimate points off the church, and the concept of a “Republic of Heaven” is too stirring to ignore. But the concept of God taken outside the book, when the story ends and the philosophy continues, is just too weak to stand up. Christians can lose or gain faith in the church or angels or humanity, but would be foolish to lose faith in God over this book. Atheists and giant-killers should look for more potent ammunition.

Note: Book I, The Golden Compass a.k.a. Northern Lights and Book II, The Subtle Knife must be read before reading this final Book in the trilogy.

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