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His Dark Materials Trilogy

Beyond Harry Potter?

HIS DARK MATERIALS Trilogy
(Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass)
By Philip Pullman
Point. £5.99 each

Being a father I have books recommended to me by my daughters as well as EN!

I've just finished Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy which is another best seller in children's/adult fantasy fiction, and advertised as the next step on for Harry Potter lovers ... It is basically an atheist's response to the Narnia stories and The Lord of the Rings, but none too subtle in putting his atheistic beliefs across.

Amanda Craig described this trilogy in the New Statesman as 'The most ambitious work since The Lord of the Rings ... as intellectually thrilling as it is magnificently written.' Like Tolkien and C.S Lewis before him, the author uses fantasy to express his 'faith', but he is far less subtle in his attempts to proselytise, and his worldview is decidedly atheistic.

God is the devil...

The early chapters of Genesis are specifically referred to but reinterpreted. The 'being' people worship as God does exist, though he is not the Creator but rather an angel that has tried to seize power for himself (i.e 'God 'is really Satan). He has been around a very long time but is not eternal. He appears in his youth in the Garden of Eden, walking with Adam and Eve, but by Daniel's time is 'Ancient of Days' and, at the time in which these books are set, has become a shrivelled decrepit being, demented and powerless, artificially kept alive by Enoch (of Genesis 5 and the apocalyptic book that bears his name) whom he had had transported to heaven to act as his regent.

Enoch has now taken control (with Satanic character), but for all his power he has a glaring weakness - his envy of human flesh, flesh which he had once possessed, and then having lost, lusted after (ˆ la Genesis 6), but now resents. This has resulted in an implacable hostility towards the human race with their solid and powerful bodies. His attack is two-pronged. On earth he has set up the church to control and spoil our lives.

The imagery he uses is largely gleaned from medieval Roman Catholicism, with its inquisitions and courts of discipline, but in this parallel world John Calvin was the first pope (after all, who better to represent a repressive spoil sport than the 20th century caricature of Calvin?). Then in the world of the dead, to which all go, he has appointed Harpies to see the worst in everyone, to taunt them with their guilt and feed on their misery. There we find, among many others, martyrs of the Christian church who now realise they had been deceived and monks who refuse to face the truth and insist this shadowy world of nothingness is really paradise.

No rescuer

Instead of Jesus rescuing us from Hades by his death and resurrection we have Lyra and Will, the heroine and hero of the books, leaving their souls behind in order to enter this world and deliver its inhabitants. This they do by telling the Harpies true stories of the wonderful joys of bodily existence on planet earth, stories that feed and nourish them. As a reward the Harpies show them a place where the deceased can rejoin life on earth but only as disintegrated molecules.

Having emphasised that though we are tripartite (body, soul and spirit, the best part being our body, through which we can enjoy the physical world), he now repeatedly tries to convince the reader that there is no greater joy than being dissolved into our constituent atoms in order to float free and become part of everything alive.

Sex better than God

At the end of the book Lyra and Will meet two people who spell out the message of the book. There is a physicist, an ex-nun who explains why she abandoned faith in God (she discovered that falling in love/sex was much more fulfilling) and how physics gives us all the answers; though it's a sort of Buddhist-physics where the unique consciousness of human beings that sets them apart from animals comes from dark matter (a sort of elementary shadow particle).

It was this growth into wisdom and knowledge that the serpent was trying to encourage in the Garden of Eden and that 'God' was trying to prevent. Christianity is at best a glorious mistake that prevents people living life to the full and at worst a monstrous organisation of repression and persecution that burns heretics and witches.

Where is the meaning?

Then there is an angel who gives them the job of evangelising the world with this new gospel of salvation from death through leaving this life with a story to tell to the Harpies. Here then is the way they can find meaning and purpose, by living life to the full and encouraging others to do the same. As for the problem of morality, we do not need a god to tell us what is good and what is evil. That is obvious.

Good is that which helps people, and evil is that which harms them: a rather simplistic solution given that the story has already provided examples of how Lyra and Will set out to help people and only ended up doing them harm.

His arguments against Christianity are largely built on prejudice and misrepresentation. They will undoubtedly influence many readers but for discerning readers it does present a fascinating glimpse of Pullman's own problems with Christianity and his rather inconsistent attempt to stop meaningfulness and morality leaking out of the universe once God is denied.

Alan Black, Wandsworth