While visiting my in-laws most recently, my step-mother-in-law had occasion to be horrified that I’d not read the “His Dark Materials” series by Philip Pullman. “Could I borrow your copies?” I asked. She became, if possible, even more horrified. “No,” she replied, “I read them too often.” Later that day, I had a set of my own.
The first in the series, the Golden Compass is set to be butchered by Hollywood this xmas season. Having read the whole series now, I have no desire to see it (although after finishing the first book, I did want to). I read the first one while in Seattle, finishing it just in time to get off the plane, drive home, and pick up the second: the Subtle Knife. The second book is nowhere near as good as either the first or the third, and probably just serves to set up the events in the third book, but I was bringing it to work, it was so good. I’d sit on my break with my cell phone on my knee so I knew when I could clock back in, and devour it, chapters at a time. One of my bosses caught me reading it and we began to enthuse at each other about how great it was! Both he and I had gotten the feeling early on that Pullman was going to throw us a Christian agenda (not even a thinly veiled one) but later weren’t so sure. Now that I’ve read the last book, I would have ventured that he’s an atheist. Wikipedia says he’s a Humanist (my husband would be proud), and may have written the books as a direct rebuttal of “the Chronic(what)cles of Narnia”.
The third of the series is the Amber Spyglass and sews up the plot ends perfectly. There are some books I’ve read that, when I finish them, I wish for more, even though I know it’s in vain. But this book leaves no question that the story (myth? allegory?) is complete.
The whole series is epic in length as well as in scope. Metaphysics, “experimental theology”, morality, God, angels, the Church, alternate universes, sex, the mind-body soul connection, love, death, rebirth…you name it. And yet it never feels preachy or crowded. By the end of them, I felt as though I’d been given a glimpse at some Truths that I’d never considered before.
Perhaps soon I’ll do a post about that, but for now, I’m going to bask in the glory of being alive, part of the universe, and loved. More than anything else, I brought out a sense of how important conscious beings are to one another. Many books of fiction have changed or shaped my world-view. This one simply reinforced it. Go out and read them. Now!
3 responses so far ↓
1 chanson // Oct 21, 2007 at 2:11 am
with an exciting and complex advneture set in a rich fantasy universe. However, I found his treatment of both theology and sexuality a little clumsy. I talked about this in my review: An Atheist Fantasy? Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” Trilogy.
2 xJane // Oct 23, 2007 at 6:22 pm
this is me responding to your comment/review.
I feel like one of your main points is that he focuses too much God to be an atheist & that the second main point is about sex. So I’ll take them one, two.
I agree that he focuses way on God and, since by the end he does a Nietzsche-esque God-is-dead riff, I can forgive him that. His characters successfully consult the I Ching which is not very conducive to convincing someone that there is nothing out there but us. So, despite his atheist or humanist leanings, I have to agree with you: this book supports spiritualism but not so much atheism. He’s stated that he likes to think of the “Church” in his books as being a metaphor for “dogma” of any kind, but I think that argument breaks down when one goes further and reads of the “Republic of Heaven”. I’m not even sure what a socialist approach to religion would look like. Terry Prachett has a great explanation of gods: that they grow stronger or weaker depending on the number & strength of their believers. From that kind of a definition, I could look at the Republic of Heaven as being a wish for a god that is more subject to conscious thought than the other way around; but that’s an agnostic argument at best.
As someone who came out of a religious background, then, his approach to “atheism” mirrors my own. But it’s an imperfect atheism at best and in-name-only atheism at worst. Personally, I feel like I have to believe that there’s “something else”, but have no problem saying there’s no god. This kind of a work-around might work in the context of his universe, but that doesn’t make him a better atheist. I’m sure Dawkins could give him a lesson or two about atheism.
With regard to sex: It’s very veiled, if there at all. He says they “lay together all night” or something along those lines and that could really mean any number of things. The adult/biblical exegete in me read “lay” as “to know” in the biblical senses. But it may have merely meant that they slept in each others arms, in which case their young love is never consummated. I agree with your disgust at the lack of contraception/discussion of contraception. Part of that I chalked up to the fact that it was “fantasy”, but I don’t know what I might have thought about it had I read it when I was a kid. I find it pretty disturbing that, if it was sex, it happened at the exact time that they both hit puberty. Yes, that’s technically when it’s first possible, but one wonders if either of them were prepared for that. In terms of contraception, I partially don’t expect to have it in any book (esp. any fiction book) and I partially chalked its lack up to “fantasy”, for which I can clearly make many allowances. They don’t even have the same kind of soul, are they really going to be able to successfully have children? What kind of soul would their child have…?
I read it also as a children’s book, for which I can be okay with a lack of sex as well as a lack of contraceptive information. It’s written, in my mind, toward the same kind of age group that reads HP (and I approve of most of your parallels), which could span all sorts of ages but includes very young, precocious children. Now, I cannot use my own experience in sex ed for many things (I lived in a hole for most of my life) and when I was reading at the level where I might have picked this book up, I was waaaaay to early for contraceptive information/discussion. But I was reading books at that time that included some heavy scifi/fantasy sex, some of which included information & some of which did not. Again, I can easily forgive a lot of the “fantasy” genre. I’m not certain where I stand on the issue of contraception in books, but I would probably say that its presence is never worse than its lack. So I can concede to you the point about the sex although I’m not certain yet whether I agree with it.
I loved your review & the discussion that followed, thank you!
3 chanson // Oct 24, 2007 at 4:31 am
I agree with you that Pullman seems like something of a spiritualist, and that that isn’t necessarily in conflict with being an atheist. Many Buddhists are atheists, for example. I’ve learned quite a bit about the range of atheist experience and philosophy since I’ve taken up reading atheist blogs.
Regarding sexuality, I felt like he gave a lot of strong hints that they had sex: The dark matter that represents “original sin” starts to collect around young people just as they hit puberty. Then there’s all this talk about how Lyra will face Eve’s temptation and that the physicist/nun would be the serpent that tempts her — then what the nun does is tell her about romance and sexuality. Then Will and Lyra are making out when the curtain goes down on them, and the next time we see them, they’re “no longer children.” So I think he’s saying that they had sex, but saying it is such a way that if you don’t know about sex, you’d have no idea that it was even in there.
I agree that the reason he was so cautious about sex was that this book is for kids/teens and inhabits basically the same space as Harry Potter in that respect. But I just read a very interesting discussion about this here that makes me that much less willing to accept a complete taboo on sexuality for adolescents while allowing plenty of graphic violence. Personally I’ve always preferred “speculative fiction” that deals more with speculation about how relationships and sexuality might be different in the given fantasy/alien culture, and not at all about the battles.
Again thanks for the interesting discussion points!!!
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