This is a really interesting review from the Church Times. It isn't that negative about Pullman really:
Philip Pullman’s accomplishment in this great work is to have wholly reconceptualised the nature and purpose of fantasy. The function of fantasy is no longer to transport us to some unreal never-land — Narnia and Middle Earth remain the most popular destinations — from which we return with a heightened vision of our own real world and our tasks within it.
Indeed... read the article below.
WITH THE publication of The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials is complete, and at least a preliminary assessment of his achievement is now possible.
His Dark Materials is a war story. Crucial to the outcome of the war is the courage and tenacity of two children, Lyra and Will. Lyra’s home is a college in the Oxford of another world, a world both like and unlike our own.
Lyra is a resourceful and mendacious hoyden, running wild across the roofs and through the cellars of her college, driving the dons who are her guardians to distraction. Will is from our world, from somewhere faceless and suburban in the south of England.
The children meet in a third universe to which they gain access, Lyra through a cosmic cataclysm that rips the fabric of the worlds apart, Will through a small window in the air beside the Oxford ring-road.
The war in which the children are caught up is the renewal of an ancient conflict. Before the worlds were formed there was rebellion in heaven, a revolt by the braver angels against one of their own who had conferred on himself the title of Almighty God. That rebellion was put down, and “the Authority”, as he is called in Lyra’s world, continues his malign and despotic reign.
The instruments of his rule in that world are the Church, the Magisterium and the priesthood. These bodies are dedicated to the suppression of every natural impulse, watchful for the least deviation from the truth as they define it, fiercely opposed to all curiosity and free enquiry. Battle is now once more joined as humans, angels and beings from all the worlds make common cause finally to overthrow this immemorial tyranny.
Much of the action of the narrative concerns a mysterious invisible material which appears to gather about individuals as they become adults. This material, known as “dust”, is feared by the Church, which sees it as sinful and seeks to destroy it. The children come to learn that what the Church wishes to master and abolish is in truth “matter beginning to understand itself”. Far from being sinful, it is that which confers on us our autonomy and our capacity for joy.
Lyra, like every individual in her world, is accompanied by her “daemon”. Lyra’s delightful daemon Pantalaimon is an external embodiment of what would be perceived as her soul or spirit, were she a child of our world. Your daemon is your inseparable companion. To be parted from your daemon is to die — a separation which, to fulfil her high destiny, Lyra must herself suffer.
The daemon is only one of Pullman’s many brilliant imaginative constructs. Two others are Lyra’s truth-telling alethiometer, an arcane instrument allowing her to pierce every cloud of deception, and the “subtle knife” entrusted to Will, with which he is able to open a window into any of the countless universes that coexist with our own.
The children prevail. The old enemy is overthrown. The remaking of all things can begin.
His Dark Materials is a war story, but it is also a love story. The golden dust that the Church so fears settles at last on the two children, and, as they become conscious of themselves, they become attracted to each other. But their dawning love is doomed, for they come from different worlds. If this dust, and the Original Goodness it secures, is not to drain away into the primal abyss, the openings in the veils between the universes must be closed. So the children must part, Lyra to her world, Will to ours. The account of their anguished parting is almost more than one can bear to read.
WHAT is to be the Christian response to this work — an epic as vast and ambitious in its scale as The Lord of the Rings, although far removed from Tolkien’s masterpiece in the philosophical presuppositions that undergird it?
Certain reactions are predictable. Some, counting the witches, will pronounce the trilogy demonic. Holy Trinity, Brompton, will no doubt issue a fatwa. A less infantile reaction, but one equally predictable and misconceived, will be that of apologists who will trawl the text for concealed Christian themes. And they will find them.
In the story’s most audacious sequence, the children descend to the realm of the dead to set free the departed spirits. It is here that Lyra is parted from her beloved daemon. The dead are released, though not to some celestial paradise. Their destiny in death — as is ours — is oblivion. But yet the sting of death is drawn. As the ghosts cry before they are gone: “We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves, we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze, we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world which is our true home, and always was.”
What the children achieve is a harrowing of hell. The chapter that offers this vision and hope has the epigraph “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” And already our hearts sink at the sound of the sermons on this episode we are sure to hear.
Another strategy that Christians on the run will be tempted to adopt will be to dismiss Pullman’s depiction of religion and its operatives as absurd caricatures. We have close studies of two priests. The first is an oleaginous paedophile; the second is a rabid zealot who, secure in the grace of something called “pre-emptive absolution”, sets out to murder Lyra.
All the agents of “the Authority” are equally baleful and malicious. But to protest that this is stereotyping at its worst is ill-advised. At least, it is not a defence that the victims of bad religion who somehow survive in the Church will care to mount.
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 the same; and, where the moral base is secure, as in this most wonderful tale it surely is, the metaphysics can look after themselves.
So we mustn’t huff and puff too much when, on page 432 of volume III, we read how “the Ancient of Days” dies, “with a sigh of the most profound and exhausted relief”.
The king is dead, but the hope of heaven is not. Lyra concludes from her adventures that “we have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and brave and patient, and we’ve got to study and think, and work hard, all of us in our different worlds, and then we’ll build the republic of heaven.” The italics are mine. The bold remythologising is Pullman’s.
Philip Pullman’s accomplishment in this great work is to have wholly reconceptualised the nature and purpose of fantasy. The function of fantasy is no longer to transport us to some unreal never-land — Narnia and Middle Earth remain the most popular destinations — from which we return with a heightened vision of our own real world and our tasks within it.
Fantasy, as Pullmann recasts it, is not an alternative to realism but a dimension of it. The imagined worlds of his trilogy are fictional worlds, to be sure; but they are all possible worlds, made of the same stuff as the world in which this review is being written or read.
One of the shades liberated by the children speaks a last word before it becomes “part of the earth and the dew and the night breeze”. “Tell them stories. That’s what nourishes them. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, everything. Just tell them stories.”
“Just tell them stories.” If only we had heeded that wisdom.
[Church Times, 05/01/01, Dr Pridmore]
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