You can read part one in this series, on The Golden Compass, here.
You can read part two in this series, on The Subtle Knife, here.
1. The Robinson Fallacy
Marilynne Robinson has an essay called "Puritans and Prigs." In it, she vigorously defends the reputations of Puritans in general and John Calvin specifically, whom she says modern individuals "disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged." The beliefs of Puritans and John Calvin bear little resemblance to what 20th/21st-century people refer to when they chastise "Puritanism" and "Calvinism" in modern society, so, Robinson goes to great lengths to argue, such criticisms are exercises in mislabeling. She goes on to make all sorts of analysis regarding modern morality from this case of mislabeling, which is great, but the obvious response to this essay is, "Sure, but does it really matter what Puritans and John Calvin used to do if the criticisms are responding to the actions those names are linked to now?" In other words, regardless of what John Calvin once did, if most people calling themselves Calvinists do something terrible, it seems beside the point to gripe about the Calvinist label instead of actually addressing the problems in modern Calvinism.
I bring this up not because I want to talk about Marilynne Robinson[1] or Calvinism (although it's worth mentioning that His Dark Materials does reference a Pope John Calvin, which is oh-so-perfect). But what Robinson does with John Calvin in her essay is a nice analogy for what is probably the easiest rebuttal to Philip Pullman's ideas about Christianity: that he gets it wrong. And not just in the details—it's relatively straightforward to argue that he misses the very foundation of Christianity, for out of the detailed metaphysics, dozens of characters, thousand-plus pages, and hundreds of thousands of words of His Dark Materials, there isn't one mention of Jesus Christ. It's very tempting (and for years I did so) to dismiss Pullman's critique of monotheism because of his apparently lack of understanding of the centrality of Christ to one of monotheism's biggest wings. But I want to start out this review by urging against this dismissal. Because as with Robinson, dismissing his views because his vision of Christianity isn't vigorously factual in its theology ignores one of the most urgent messages of His Dark Materials, which is that it's child abuse and oppressive authoritarian theocracy that Pullman sees in Christianity, not Jesus—as damning a critique of organized religion as any apologetic study. A semantic argument is beside the point when there's a social argument being made.
All this is to say that there is much more to Pullman's relationship with Christianity than his simply being "wrong."
2. Plots Upon Plots
Near the end of The Amber Spyglass, the final book in the His Dark Materials trilogy, the nun-turned-experimental-physicist-turned-exposition-device Dr. Mary Malone says, "The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that is all." If you've been paying attention to the subtext of the previous two novels, that statement shouldn't come as much of a surprise, given the decidedly villainous way Pullman has characterized Christian believers. But it's only in The Amber Spyglass that the full extent of that particular characterization of Christianity is laid bare, and even having prepped with The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife beforehand, it's still a remarkable shock to find that the villainy of Pullman's world goes all the way up to God Himself.
With that pull quote (and the help of the fact that the God of Abraham actually dies in this book), the articles practically wrote themselves—Peter Hitchens called Pullman "the most dangerous author in Britain," while Pete Vere called Pullman a "seducer of children" and the novel's plot "blasphemy," adding that "Christians should be offended." It's as easy to characterize Philip Pullman as anti-Christian as it is to declare his view of Christianity "inaccurate," and many other authors have also done so. In fact, Pullman cops to that himself, having once said, quite matter-of-factly, "I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief." The amazing thing about all the anti-Pullman rhetoric in Christian circles is that it's not a baseless or manipulative claim, as is far too common in these "Christians are morally outraged and want to ban this author" kinds of debates; it's simply a quotation of Pullman himself. As he quite readily admits, he is an enemy of the faith.
So that's not really a claim I'll be contesting here. I do think, however, that it does Pullman's work a disservice, as much so as arguing semantics, to, as many do, simply state his stance on Christianity[2] and end the conversation at that. Because while there are many qualities of this bloated, bewildering, occasionally grandstanding, occasionally beautiful novel to discuss, simplicity is not one of them.
Really, I mean it. Complexity is the name of the game in The Amber Spyglass. The book is the longest in the trilogy by a hefty margin (120 pages longer than The Golden Compass), and those pages aren't filled with mindless fluff either; it's all either straight philosophy or unrepentantly dense plot—especially plot. I'm not kidding here, and if I'm making a laundry list of this book's flaws, right there near the top is just how overstuffed the whole thing is. There's an entire subplot involving some vehicle called an "intention craft" whose point I'm still unsure of, and that's to say nothing of the dozens of new characters (and whole species[3]) Pullman adds to this series's already crowded roster. It's cool to see Pullman go full-on Tolkien with unbridled high fantasy world-building, but there just. so. much. I've struggled to sufficiently summarize the previous two novels in these reviews, but with The Amber Spyglass, any sort of comprehensive overview without taking this post to novel lengths itself becomes nigh impossible.
But stripping away every conceivable extremity of this novel, three basic plot pieces remain as the central pillars to understanding what Pullman is trying to accomplish in this series:
First: Lyra and Will's journey into the the underworld—apparently a real place[4] that can be accessed by the Subtle Knife; it's a world created by the Authority (aka "God") to enslave the souls of the dead, and although Lyra has originally purposed to travel here to find and free Roger (whom she does find, in a touching moment, along with Will's father and Lee Scoresby), she's so troubled by these souls in misery that she and Will cut a whole in the world and let all the souls out into the open air, where they each dissolve into Dust and become one with the natural world.
Second: Lord Asriel's battle against the forces of the Authority. God [5] has become old, weak, and senile, and the rule of the Kingdom of Heaven has been assumed by Metatron (who is, in keeping with apocryphal traditions, the angelic form of Enoch after his ascension to Heaven in Genesis). Asriel and Coulter team up to kill Metatron, both losing their lives in the process. In the battle, the glass cage that houses God gets knocked to the ground, trapping the being, and Will and Lyra, just emerging from the Land of the Dead, come across him. They see that he's miserable and, taking pity on him, set him free. God is apparently too fragile to be out in the open air, though, and he promptly dissolves.
Third: The culmination of the entire series and, after the death of God in this same book, the most theologically provocative moment in all of children's literature: Lyra and Will eventually find themselves in a small, natural garden where fruit is growing—basically, the Garden of Eden. They're apparently unaware of this, though, and take to feeding each other the fruit, and as they eat, they both experience a sexual awakening of some sort (it's heavily implied that they have sex, although the language is very much the Hays-Code, curtains-blowing-in-an-open-window sort). In doing so, they inadvertently recreate the Fall of Man, solidifying the end of God's reign over the multiverse.
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| The Amber Spyglass makes no mention of conveniently chaste fig leaves. |
3. Freedom and Materialism
All of this is, of course, appropriately calibrated to transgress most facets of Christian orthodoxy and appall the PluggedIn crowd of cultural gatekeepers. In case you weren't keeping track, that's a rejection of the afterlife, original sin, the sanctity of marriage, and God Himself, all in this one volume. A lot of it is grounded in the series's already well-documented disdain for the ways that authoritarianism breeds human suffering and abuse—time and time again throughout the series, we see characters use obedience to authority as a priority over basic virtue and compassion[6], and The Amber Spyglass finally takes this idea all the way to its fullest metaphysical implications, that concepts like afterlife and original sin represent the adherence to an authority whose subjugation of human life extents to the very foundation of existence. So it's no accident that Will and Lyra accidentally kill "The Authority" just after freeing life from an afterlife and just before recasting original sin as an event of profound freedom and beauty. These two acts are subversions of the fundamental ways by which oppressive authority gains power over humanity, thus ushering in a new age of freedom.
One of the things that makes The Amber Spyglass so thematically rich, though, is that it finally reveals that Pullman isn't a libertarian, not even a moral one. The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife both flirt with the idea that freedom from authority is a moral end in and of itself. We hear a lot of rhetoric about Lord Asriel's "noble" war against the Authority, and it's not that difficult to extrapolate that we're supposed to identify Asriel as a "good guy" simply because of his opposition to "bad" authority (this was one of my critiques of The Subtle Knife, you might remember[7]). The inherent good of freedom is, after all, one of the most common takeaways from the Enlightenment philosophy that Pullman very clearly loves—"man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains," etc. However, when I complained that The Subtle Knife seemed to have forgotten that Asriel was an unrepentant child murderer, I made the caveat that The Amber Spyglass might walk this back somewhat, and that caveat has paid off pretty handsomely, if I may say so, because the Lord Asriel of this novel is a despicable cad who cares very little for life and beauty in light of his obsessive quest for freedom. This is most viciously demonstrated in his attitude toward Lyra, his own daughter; when one of Asriel's battles separates Mrs. Coulter from Lyra, Coulter cries, "What have you done?...She was safe with me, safe, and now where is she?" To which Asriel replies, "Frankly, I don't care." He is more concerned with how his daughter has interfered with his ambitions than with her own safety. His is a battle of ideas completely divorced from any sort of real human meaning. He is most definitely not one of the good guys, and this is made damningly clear by his ultimate fate as essentially superfluous to any of the real victories in the novel; Will and Lyra emancipate the dead, dissolve The Authority, and subvert original sin almost entirely without his aid, and Asriel's ultimate fate places him roughly parallel to his evil authoritarian nemesis, Metatron, as both throw each other into the abyss during a battle of egos[8], a final act of mutually assured destruction by two powers more obsessed with winning than with the value of life. People make a big deal about how this series is about "the murder of God," but they ignore the fact that the figure intent on God's demise neither succeeds in killing The Authority nor is even relevant to God's death.
The ultimate foundation of His Dark Materials is not, as some have said, absolute freedom. Regarding, as one interviewer puts it, the philosophy of "As long as I don’t hurt anyone else...you can just leave me alone," Pullman is clear: "I'm against that."
As becomes clear in this novel, closer to the series's heart is a variation on materialism, the idea that what is most important is the here and now, what can be touched and tasted, not some mystical higher reality to aspire to. This is central to why Lyra and Will must free the souls from the underworld. Their cutting an opening into the open air certainly doesn't do anything to free them on a spiritual level, as each soul essentially faces annihilation when it exits the underworld, dissolving into the air. Eternal life isn't something to aspire to in Pullman's world, and in fact, eternity is quite literally a prison. What's much more important is a reunion with the natural world after death. "You'll drift apart," Lyra tells the souls, "but you'll be out in the open, part of everything alive again." This dovetails with all the idea of Dust, a material manifestation of consciousness (a phenomenon many ascribe to the supernatural), and also with the reinterpretation of the Fall of Man, which is firmly grounded in the material experiences of Lyra and Will as they realize the full extent of what their bodies are built for: the material acts of eating and sex. In Pullman's world, an emphasis on the supernatural is toxic, distancing you from the real consequences of your actions, an idea taken to a grotesque extreme by the Magisterium and the Oblation Board, which actually murders children in the name of a greater supernatural good, and to a slightly less horrifying but still misguided end by Asriel himself, who also murders children as he focuses his ambitions so much on supernatural battles that he completely misses the actual lasting work done by his daughter.
4. The New Republic
Throughout the book, various characters refer to the ultimate goal of establishing "The Republic of Heaven" that will replace the Authority's tyrannical Kingdom of Heaven, and the contrast in the context of the "freedom" discussion is clear—a state ruled by the people and not by an abusive autocrat. But the idea of a republic is also key to Pullman's materialism, and republicanism requires a permanent connection to the material world. "We have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere," one character says, and this seems to be the cornerstone of the trilogy's philosophy, that we should not abandon the material world for some sort of transcendent higher power because there is no transcendence, only the world around us, which, remember, Pullman believes to be "an extraordinarily beautiful place."
This idea culminates in the ending of the series, when, though some (to be honest) convoluted mechanisms, Will and Lyra realize that they must choose to return to their own worlds forever or else forfeit their lives. This returns us back to the idea of His Dark Materials as the anti-Narnia. Pullman once gave this great interview in which he said, "This, incidentally, is one of my quarrels with Lewis: the children in the Narnia books who have gone through all these experiences aren’t allowed to stay in the world and make it better for other people – they’re whisked off to heaven," and, while I'd say he's oversimplifying the Narnia books[10], he's right on Lewis's ultimate worldview that the true home of the human soul is on some high plane, not our world. I mean, The Last Battle ends in apocalyptic fashion with the destruction of the Narnia we know and the revelation that there is a better, truer Narnia more fitting our protagonists, a conclusion that I find both beautiful and traumatic. Pullman resolutely refuses this sort of Neoplatonic eschatology, to the point where he, maybe to a similarly traumatic effect as Lewis, only reversed, insists on landing his characters in their own material worlds where they can make the world better for other people. It's not a happy ending exactly, and in some ways it's rather cruel in how it seems to drive apart Lyra and Will at their moment of peak bliss. But it's the ending Narnia denies, and one that's at least philosophically consistent with what His Dark Materials has been building toward.
That drive to make the world a better place is what ultimately informs both Pullman's materialism and his stance on freedom. Because the material world is important, it should be improved, and it can only be improved by people of their own free will accepting to improve it. And through this lens, His Dark Materials arrives at virtue. In the words of one angel near the end of the book: "By helping [everyone in your worlds] to learn and understand about themselves and each other and the way everything works, and by showing the how to be kind instead of cruel, and patient instead of hasty, and cheerful instead of surly, and above all how to keep their minds open and free and curious... Then they will renew enough to replace what is lost." You look at that passage, and you're one "thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent" away from the Boy Scout Law, and only a few apples short of the full Fruit of the Spirit list. After all that—after fighting the Church and killing God and reappropriating original sin—Pullman arrives right back at traditional virtue.
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| Philip Pullman, basically, at the end of the book. |
5. The Book of Virtues
And, while we're on the subject, it's important to look at how the series gets here. The fight against the Church is in the name of protecting human life and preventing human suffering against needless cruelties like the Oblation Board. The killing of God is the result of an act of compassion—"The poor thing," Lyra cries sympathetically when she comes across the imprisoned God. "We can help you hide," Will tells the Almighty. "We won't hurt you." It's this pity, this kind desire to help a living thing, that causes God to dissolve (in a manner not unlike the souls as they leave the underworld). God isn't murdered; he's cared for[11]. And even the inverted Fall of Man is done as an affirmation of human kindness and affection; it's technically an act of rebellion on the cosmic scale, but Lyra and Will are ignorant of this fact, instead focused on how much they care for one another, the convergence of human affection with the material realities of their bodies and worlds.
This is why I think it's vital not to just end the conversation with a dismissal of Pullman's imperfect encapsulation of Christianity or his anti-Christian rhetoric. It's not as though Pullman wrote this trilogy as some sort of villain, twirling his mustache as he made all rights wrong. He's not a moral relativist or even a nihilist looking to undermine absolute truth or morality as a construct or anything like that. He's someone who, at least in his artistic output, cares deeply for values like love and kindness and compassion and truth and beauty and mercy and camaraderie—values that, if not exclusively Christian in nature[12], are definitely ones that we Christians have to agree that we share with him. Even his fierce critique of the Christian religion is one based not in some abstract antipathy for organized religion but in a righteous anger informed by a love for traditional virtue and the way that some Christian institutions have violated that. Frankly, if Pullman sees a lack of virtue in Christianity, that's a problem with Christianity's loudest voices more than it is a problem with His Dark Materials.
Clearly, as a Christian, I believe in a different source for these virtues—the Kingdom of Heaven/Republic of Heaven dichotomy, of course: is the foundation of our moral frameworks set through divine transcendence or a community of humans working together? Pullman and I likely disagree on metaphysics, but, for all his talk of gods and angels, Pullman isn't really making a metaphysical statement with His Dark Materials. He's making a very roundabout statement of how virtues should inform human freedom within a materialist world. So to quibble with his metaphysics is sort of an exercise in missing the point, and to argue that his moral vision is wrong because it doesn't include God turns us into Marilynne Robinson defending John Calvin.
6. Yeah, but...
Does that mean I don't think The Amber Spyglass has flaws? Of course not. It's riddled with flaws, both philosophical and artistic. For one (and I alluded to this earlier), there's just way way way more stuff going on in this book than there needs to be. Pullman's clearly in love with his own creative potential here, which is sometimes fun to watch, but there's no real narrative need for him to introduce as many new characters, locations, and species as he does. Not only is it occasionally convoluted, but all the noise tends to crowd out the characters we already know and love. To its credit, The Amber Spyglass does a better job of bringing back preexisting characters than The Subtle Knife does (Iorek is back! And the witches, although I was never in love with them to begin with). But the book could have been much more streamlined if Pullman had just figured out a way to make these old friends companions to Lyra and Will this time, too, instead of inventing, for example, the pair of Gallivespian spies who follow the two around for most of the novel (and for whom I have exactly zero emotional investment). And while we're talking about characters, it's also worth griping that the series never quite gets its groove back, character-wise, after the shake toward archetype in The Subtle Knife. There is plenty of excellent character work here, to be sure—Mrs. Coulter has never been better, and her tension between love for Lyra and maniacal power plotting is rich with depth, while the dive into full-on myth in this novel serves characters like Asriel and Will well, not to mention the pair of angels[13], Balthamos and Baruch, who aid Will and Lyra early in the book. However, despite giving her some backstory, Pullman never really figures out how to make Mary Malone work as anything more than a plot device, which is a real liability here due to the sheer number of pages given to her adventures with the Mulefa (another kind of dead-end species I wish had less time). And there's still something a little uncomfortable about how the series treats its female characters. Ever since Will's arrival in The Subtle Knife, Lyra's agency seems to have decreased, and The Amber Spyglass doesn't fix this much, as time and time again, Lyra defers to Will's "better" judgement. And then there's Mrs. Coulter, who I maintain is the series's best character, but it's still an uneasy fact that the trilogy's most powerful woman is also its most villainous.
And while we're on gender, I might as well mention that Garden of Eden scene. As beautifully rendered as it is (some of the best prose in the series, I'd say), I do think it's misguided to make that moment—the moment the entire universe hinges on, apparently—a sexual one. I mean, I get it: it's a coming-of-age that rejects the sexual paradigm the church of His Dark Materials is so obsessed with preserving. But, first of all, sex as the pinnacle of coming-of-age isn't just a tired trope; it's tedious and old-fashioned in a way that feels of that same hippy misguidedness as the idea that taking drugs is somehow a productive act of social reform. Not only that, but it's one of the few times this book lets the idea of transgressing Christianity take precedence over any sort of constructive moral position, and in doing so, it invests in the same Puritanical obsession over sex that Pullman seems so intent on dismissing.
7. In the End
So no, the journey His Dark Materials takes us on isn't perfect, not by a long shot. But something that so often gets lost in these conversations is that, as far as our relationship with the material world goes, Christians and Pullman basically arrive at the same place. It's a place rooted in compassion and decency and the idea that we should care for our fellow humans. And if we can't agree on that as something worthwhile, Pullman was more accurate about Christianity than any of us have been willing to admit.
*****
And that's it, folks. That's the end of my His Dark Materials series, which was far more difficult to write and took way longer to complete than I thought it would be. Thanks for reading all the way through. As you might have been able to tell from these posts, the trilogy was far more complex and flawed than I remembered, but it was also far more beautifully written and dazzlingly ambitious than I cared to notice back in high school, and I still rank it as one of modern YA literature's most significant works. I've enjoyed revisiting these books tremendously, and I hope you've enjoyed taking this journey with me.
Now to get on those prog reviews again (ha...).
Until next time!
1] I'd actually love to talk about Marilynne Robinson, just maybe not in the context of a His Dark Materials review.
2] Or, more precisely, monotheistic religion as a whole, which he believes inevitably "ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don’t accept him [God]."
3] Including insect-sized people called Gallivespians, who have this whole backstory about being persecuted by tall people in their own world, and these utterly strange, elephant-ish creatures called Mulefa, whose main mode of transportation is to ride around on these greasy seed pods, unicycle-style.
4] Complete with its own suburbs. No joke: there is actually a chapter called "The Suburbs of the Dead," although I suppose it should be no surprise that the literal gates of Hell are wreathed in poor urban planning.
5] Who, the angels are quick to point out, is not the creator but simply the first being to have gained consciousness, having then deceived all the subsequent beings into thinking that he created the rest of them. Pullman once named Gnosticism in the same breath as his series, and this is pretty much textbook Gnostic heresy, which is, intriguingly, sort of at odds with the larger materialist bent of the series as a whole (more on that later).
6] Most chillingly in The Amber Spyglass represented by Father Gomez, a character who has performed enough "preemptive absolution" to make murder morally and spiritually neutral in the Church's eyes.
7] Or you might not. I don't know how memorable that post was.
8] Along with, it must be said, Mrs. Coulter, who is painted much more complexly in The Amber Spyglass than she is in the previous two volumes[9] but who still ultimately expends her life in that same battle of wills that wastes Asriel and Metatron.
9] In light of this novel, she's probably got my vote for series-best character.
10] After all, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe ends with the Pevensies ruling Narnia for decades and generally making it a great place before they return to their lives in our world.
11] And as such, His Dark Materials becomes one of the very few fantasy fantasy series (alongside most of The Chronicles of Narnia) that does not force its heroes to violence as a means of achieving victory for the "good guys."
12] In interviews, Pullman fights again and again against the idea that virtue is exclusive to the Christian worldview, and I agree with him.
13] Gay angels at that, and you can practically hear Pullman cackling at his typewriter as he imagines the conservative-Christian outrage.
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