Asking the Great Questions, by Mike Crowl

Late last year two large novels for children appeared. J K Rowling's fourth Harry Potter book, running to some 600 pages, arrived with enormous hype. The other, anticipated by those in the know, was the third book in Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials. It's around 500 pages long. Some Christians have had a field day with Harry Potter's witches and wizardry (in the fourth book, the grisly climax even caused alarm amongst some non-Christian parents). Yet Pullman's trilogy has witches and spectres and grisly battles, too, as well as an Inquisitorial KGB-style 'church,' the source of much evil throughout the series. The trilogy questions generally-accepted theology, but curiously, most Christians don't appear to have caught up with it. Both Pullman and J K Rowling have immense gifts for imaginative writing, for creating fantasy worlds (several in Pullman's case) and for sheer storytelling. Rowling's stories in fact have no real occult/spiritual content: at heart they're boarding-school stories, with loyalty, courage and daring in abundance. Pullman, however, underpins his story with his own theological myth. In an interview with Ilene Cooper, Pullman spoke about it: '[It owes] something to Gnosticism, but it differs in one essential characteristic. The Gnostic world-view is Platonic in that it rejects the physical created universe and expresses a longing for an unknowable God who is far off.  My myth is almost the reverse. It takes this physical universe as our true home. We must welcome and love and live our lives in this world to the full.' Pullman's trilogy takes its name from a line in Milton's Paradise Lost (a seminal work for him). It's the story of Lyra, a girl who's grown up as an orphan in a world with names and places and people similar to ours. However, in this world each human has a 'daemon' - the person's soul or spirit in an animal form - with which they can converse. Lyra's parents ('the parents from Hell,' as Gordon Campbell described them) have wound up on opposite sides of an earthly/heavenly battle. The father aims at nothing less than bringing down God Himself because of the antagonistic attitude of His 'church' to the joys and freedoms of human beings. The mother is a key figure in the 'church,' a woman of immense resource and power. God, however, isn't actually God. In The Amber Spyglass we learn he was usurped by an evil angel: a transformed Enoch (the Enoch from Genesis, in fact). Pullman, in the Cooper interview, says: 'The tradition suggests that Enoch the Patriarch was taken into heaven and transformed into the angel Metatron. He is referred to as the Regent. The word Regent implies someone who rules in the stead of someone who is incapable of ruling for himself. I'm using traditions, but I'm using them in the way Milton, for example, used the angelic traditions and then invented characters such as Beelzebub. As for my view that the rebellious angels are on the side of good and freedom rather than authority, repression and cruelty, again I'm in a long tradition. William Blake consciously and Milton unconsciously wrote about this.' Pullman sees God as having grown older, basing this idea on the Book of Daniel regarding the Ancient of Days. He said in the same interview: 'I'm on fairly solid ground there' - something Biblical scholars might raise their eyebrows at, while literary scholars might disagree with his views on Milton and Blake. The 'Ancient of Days God' appears very briefly in the last book of the trilogy as a Being so fragile a breath of wind blows him away. There's a hint he probably isn't God at all, but an even earlier usurper. For Pullman, both in real life and in his stories, God has long since gone AWOL. One of the female characters says she realised the rules and regulations are only there to keep the system running after he'd left. But if Pullman's spiritual thinking is muddled, he's bang on with his human creations. The trilogy presents two truly heroic children (Will, a boy with as much grit as Lyra, is the main character in the second book), who not only fight enormous personal battles, but (in order to rescue the millions of dead) venture into the realm of Death itself. Pullman, for his own purposes, has us believe the appalling concept that death brings nothing but endless misery, and it's only through the efforts of these children that the dead are rescued and given 'freedom.' At the end, the two children must sacrifice their deep love for each other in order to restore harmony to the countless parallel worlds. Through the course of the books several major characters give their lives for the sake of others, and in the concluding pages two of the worst characters are 'redeemed' by their last great sacrificial act. In view of Pullman's recorded anti-Christian stance, it's unlikely he intends this as a Christian 'laying down of your life for your friends,' yet that's how it comes across. Finally, he revels in the joy of creation - creation itself and its own 'life' are part and parcel of the plot. Milton wrote: 'Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them.' Pullman's trilogy is no exception. How should one 'read' them? As a wide-ranging fantasy in the Tolkien or C S Lewis tradition, where it's possible to ignore the underlying theology? It seems Pullman isn't content for that to happen. Without sacrificing his storytelling, he allows didacticism to surface increasingly as the stories progress. Furthermore, in more than one interview he's made strong comments indicating his intention isn't merely to enthral. In the NZ Listener, he told Gordon Campbell: 'I do feel an enmity against people of the Lewis persuasion, since they declared war on what I feel is right and good and natural. I am not going to hold back when it comes to hitting them. Moral ferocity? Yes, I'd go for that. I'm glad that is being noted. If I am perceived as being anti-Lewis, that's fine by me.' On the other hand, he also says: 'I've never stopped thinking about these great mysteries of Where do we come from? Why are we here? What does it mean to be good? What happens when we die?' John Pridmore, reviewing the last of the three books in the Church Times, is more generous to Pullman than Pullman is to Lewis. 'The only Christian response to this work is to read it once more. The metaphysical premises of the great myth Philip Pullman has created are not those of the Christian story. But long ago George MacDonald taught us that the moral laws of all the universes are all the same; and, where the moral base is secure, as in this most wonderful tale, it surely is that the metaphysics can look after themselves.' Pullman might easily be condemned by those whose t heological equilibrium he upsets. Yet the value of these books is that he does aim to prove the 'great mysteries.' His answers may not be to everyone's taste; nevertheless he writes with extraordinary skill, verve and compassion. Hopefully, as a result, his readers will be prompted to search deeper for Truth themselves.

The trilogy of His Dark Materials consists of: The Northern Lights [known as The Golden Compass in the US], The Subtle Knife, and, The Amber Spyglass.

This article first appeared in the monthly magazine, Tui Motu Interislands, 2001 [Back to article]

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