Everyone and their brother has seen the excellent trailer for The Golden Compass.  The movie is based on a book of the same name, by Philip Pullman, which is one part of the His Dark Materials trilogy.

A number of nasty emails have been circulating around my social circle regarding the author and the series; many of them read straight from the snopes.com article on The Golden Compass. While the Snopes article does a good job verifying that Pullman is an atheist and that the His Dark Materials trilogy is somewhat anti-religious, it does not address specific rumors that are being spread about.

So, allow me to rant.

[The Golden Compass] has been written by Philip Pullman, a proud atheist who belongs to secular humanist societies.  He hates C.S. Lewis’  Chronicles of Narnia and has written a trilogy to show the other side.

It’s interesting the tone taken– “proud atheist.”  Why that specific terminology?  What’s inherently offensive about a man who takes a certain appreciation in his stance on his belief system?  I’m a proud writer of science fiction; I’d be a proud Christian (if pride weren’t antithetical to Christian theology).  What this means is that the writer cannot believe that Pullman has the AUDACITY to say “I’m an atheist” in anything above a whisper.  It’s a rhetorical device used to demean the target to the reading audience.  It’s a lame way to go about starting a conversation.

The phrase “secular humanist societies” is also used for that same effect.   One, it conjures up elitist intellectuals; two, it strikes the conspiracy chord in every listeners ear, to put them on the defensive.

About Lewis– lots of writers have problems with Lewis’ portrayal of non-believers in the final Narnia book, ‘The Last Battle.’  Both Neal Gaiman and J.K. Rowling have expressed…well, loathing, for the way that Susan is handled (or mishandled, depending on your interpretation).  I happen to think that all three of them are looking beyond the mark; they carry their arguments and conclusions farther along than what is possible from the text provided to us by Lewis.  BUT I don’t think Pullman wrote His Dark Materials to merely “show the other side” of Narnia.  Narnia is light allegory; one would assume that if he was showing the other side of it, Pullman would write light allegory as well.  But HDM is strict adventure/fantasy.  No allegory.

The movie has been dumbed down to fool kids and parents in the hope that they will buy his trilogy

Okay, this is laughable.  Sure, that’s what PULLMAN hopes.  But the movie was not made to sell books; it was made to sell tickets.  I don’t even think movie executives have the brain power to think in these kind of complexities.  But that might just be a writerly snob talking smack about the industry that’s killing his livelihood… 🙂

…in the end, the children kill God and everyone can do as they please.

Wrong.  Wrong.  Wrong.  The children don’t kill God.  And there is an implicit morality to the HDM universe that is just
as pervasive as that in the Narnia series.  There IS a deep sense of right and wrong.  Whatever else you might label His Dark Materials with, DO NOT, on peril of your molars, label it a morally apathetic work.  Pullman writes deeply about loyalty and sacrifice; he writes strongly about the goodness and potential of human beings.  One of the biggest mistakes that religious folks make is thinking that atheists/agnostics have no moral code.  They do; and it’s usually very similar to ours.  Sure, it may be a little on the libertarian end of the spectrum, but it’s there.

I googled a synopsis of The Golden Compass.  As I skimmed it, I couldn’t believe that in a children’s book part of the story is about castration and female circumcision.

Er…what?  That’s what you get from reading synopses on Google.  This is an example of a certain malicious reading of The Golden Compass transforming itself into a malicious interpretation.  There is no castration or female circumcision in the books.  None.

I don’t agree with Pullman’s conclusions at all.  I think that Lewis actually gave non-believers a fairer reading in his books than Pullman does for believers in his.   At the same time, the vitriol leveled at these books is misinformed, and unnecessary.  My reply to the emails we’ve received on this is, I think, wise:

I really enjoyed the ‘His Dark Materials’ series, despite the very overt themes of anti-traditionalism in the last book.  It’s NOT a children’s series, and I think the publisher made quite a mistake in marketing them as such.  (The first and second books could be children/YA books very easily; by the time the third came out, I’m not sure they could then make the decision to shift to YA/Adult fantasy)

The books address some really great philosophical problems with traditional, orthodox, Nicean/Athenasian Christianity.  Pullman presents a universe in which the Authority/Creator (God), is entirely authoritarian– agency is seen viewed as a detrimental thing.  In Mormon theology, we recognize that Pullman’s Authority is actually more like Lucifer– his plan centers on self-serving aggrandizement.  The protagonists– a young girl and boy– are part of a plan to overthrow the Authority and retain agency in the universe.

From a certain point of view, Pullman’s work is as moralistic as CS Lewis’ ‘Narnia,’ despite the two coming to very different conclusions.  In both cases, they are great stories that give us the opportunity to discuss with our children the problems and viewpoints that the world is almost definitely is going to throw at them.