“There are two great powers,” the man said, “and they’ve been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn from by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.”
– Phillip Pullman in The Subtle Knife
(Normally I try to keep my book reviews relatively free of spoilers so that readers can choose to read the books themselves and still enjoy them after having read my review. However, to do the same for these books would prevent me from saying what I want to say about them, so instead of a review, this post should really be thought of as a kind of analysis. As such, be warned that further reading will spoil the books for you.)
It’s not hard to imagine what went through the minds of the executives at New Line Cinema when they greenlighted the movie version of The Golden Compass that was released late last year. Their film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings had proved to be a tremendous commercial success. Walt Disney Pictures had The Chronicles of Narnia series going for them and Warner Bros. had the goldmine that is the Harry Potter series. The movie-going public clearly has an appetite for the fantasy genre, especially for films adapted from children’s books, so what could be better than the new and popular His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman?
The thing is that His Dark Materials is far from a conventional children’s story. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a more blatantly atheistic story than the adventures of Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry that Pullman has woven, a fact that New Line seems to have realized since the film version has attempted to dilute the anti-religious aspects of the story and actually omits the tragic loss and betrayal that marks the end of the first book in favor of a more uplifting conclusion for the movie. Even with these changes, the film version garnered a great deal of controversy, both from religious authorities who claim that the film would encourage children to read the books and thereby be lead into atheism as well as secularists who objected to the watering down of the original theme and bemoaned it as an infringement on freedom of speech.
Both sides seem to agree on the essentially atheistic message of the books, and really, when you have an author who’s an honorary associate of the U.K. National Secular Society and the character of God in your story, known as the Authority here, turns out to be a fraud who lied to everyone about being their Creator and ends up being a senile and helpless old fool who dies a pathetic and inadvertent death by dissolving in the wind, there’s no reason to doubt that this is atheism with a capital “A”. Want more proof? The all-encompassing and all-powerful church, called the Magisterium in the books, are the primary villains who kidnap children from the streets of cities all around the world, round them up at a concentration camp at the North Pole and perform horrible experiments on them until they die. The concept of Heaven and Hell is a lie told by the Church to control people. In reality, all of the dead are doomed to spend eternity in a dark and changeless underworld, and are only too glad to be returned to the living world and hence oblivion as their atoms quickly dissipate and rejoin the universe.
As refreshing as it is to see the subject of religion being handled so critically in a book series meant for young adults, I have concerns about the depth underneath all the unrelenting criticism. For a start, the serious issue of having faith in religion is given only superficial treatment. The story of Mary Malone, the nun turned scientist who ends up being the catalyst for Lyra and Will’s coming of age, probably comes closest to examining the real reasons for turning away from religion, but in her case, it’s romantic love that causes her to find meaning and happiness outside of devotion to God. This is a valid enough reason for Catholics in the clergy, but doesn’t really apply to anyone else. There is at least one reference to the religious tendency to blind faith even in the face of evidence to the contrary when a dead priest claims that the underworld is really heaven but one needs faith in God in order to experience it but Lyra decides that she needs to trust what her senses tell her to be truth. Still, solid arguments for disbelief in religion are few and far between.
Throughout the books, there are plenty of barbs against religion as an institution. Ruta Skadi, one of the many witches who fight on Lyra’s side, criticizes the Church for oppressing people throughout its history, suppressing all that is good and natural where they can and destroying where they cannot. More generally, just about all of the agents working for the Church are depicted as one-dimensional zealots so secure in their righteousness that harming or even killing innocents is acceptable if that’s what it takes to accomplish their objectives. While it’s entertaining for an atheist to read Christians be cast as the villains of a story, it’s handled too hamfistedly to have any real inspirational value. Phillip Pullman has gone on record as an ardent critic of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, but I have to admit that irrespective of the merits of the arguments for and against the Christian faith, Lewis’ work is far more profound and lyrical, making it a superior vehicle for Christianity that His Dark Materials is for atheism.
Aside from its anti-religious angle, His Dark Materials is subversive in other ways. A solid dose of rebellious anti-authoritarianism can usually be found in every popular children’s book, but Pullman’s trilogy takes it to a daring extreme. Not only do Lyra and Will constantly find themselves being lied to and betrayed by adults they thought they could trust, even the good adults that are firmly on their side consistently look to them for leadership and follow on their initiative. Lyra’s father, Lord Asriel, is a good example. His role in the story, as the general who marshals forces from all across the multiverse to oppose the Kingdom of Heaven, is unquestionably that of Satan or Lucifer to spite the religious, but his plans, ambitious and bold as they are, are far from coherent and ultimately it is the children who do what needs to be done. More importantly, he displays a disturbingly ambiguous sense of morality and again, it is the children who shows everyone what the right thing to do is, though, to be fair, it is rather naughty that Lyra’s greatest talent lies in fabricating elaborate but believable lies.
His Dark Materials inevitably draws comparisons with the Harry Potter series, the only recently written children’s books to have outsold it, and in my opinion, suffers for it. Rowling’s series has earned a secure place as a classic of children’s literature by virtue of the timelessness of the themes it deals with and the skillfulness of its writing, but while His Dark Materials is more ambitious and far darker in tone, there is an awkwardness in its pacing and an inconsistency in its theme that prevent it from being truly great. For all that, it’s a fantastic read with pitched battles involving armoured bears, Swiss pikemen, flying witches with bow and more, wonderfully imagined worlds including one that reads more like something from a science-fiction novel than a fantasy one, an ending that will touch the hearts of many readers and a final lesson that is well worth remembering: that heaven is not some reward to be collected in the after-life, but something that everyone must build and work for, whoever they are and wherever they might be.