PhilPaine.com

A few years ago, while stay­ing in Prague, my friend Fil­ip Marek hand­ed me a copy of Philip Pullman’s North­ern Lights (the orig­i­nal British title, which was changed to The Gold­en Com­pass in North Amer­ica). He asked if it was good enough to trans­late into Czech. I was delight­ed with it. It was fresh in its approach and imagery, ele­gantly writ­ten, and would fas­ci­nate both chil­dren and adults. How­ever, I fool­ishly put off read­ing the two oth­er books in the tril­ogy until see­ing the recent film remind­ed me to.

The books are good. They may or may not last as lit­er­a­ture, but they are intel­li­gent and emo­tion­ally pow­er­ful. They are also sat­u­rated with 17th and 18th cen­tury ref­er­ences, influ­ences, and images, manip­u­lated with great panache. The Dig­gers, John Mil­ton, William Blake, the Eng­lish Rev­o­lu­tion, are all there. So are the influ­ences of Medieval here­sies and peas­ant revolts, such the Albi­gen­sians and Hus­sites. The books are a feast for any­one with a knowl­edge of his­tory and the­ol­ogy. For chil­dren, the les­son that one must ques­tion author­ity, and look to one’s own con­science is intend­ed, and well-explored. In con­trast to the “King­dom of Heav­en” pro­moted by fig­ures of author­ity, its heroes find them­selves, by the end of the last vol­ume, vow­ing to con­struct the “Repub­lic of Heav­en”. It’s a sort of “Pilgrim’s Progress” of the unfet­tered mind.

For those who are all in a stew about the book being “anti-reli­gious”, I would offer one piece of advice: remem­ber that “Church” is not the same thing as “reli­gion”, and that the polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions that call them­selves “Chris­t­ian” do not prac­tice or teach any­thing even remote­ly resem­bling the teach­ings of Jesus of Nazareth — in fact, they gen­er­ally hate, vio­late, and repress those teach­ings. How many “Chris­tians” have you ever met? I’ve met a few, but the team­ing mil­lions of rant­ing poseurs that fill the church­es are not among them. Pull­man has described him­self as an agnos­tic, but the Chris­t­ian feel­ing in these books is plain to see. They are all about sal­va­tion and con­science, and the meta­phys­i­cal puz­zles of Cre­ation. An actu­al athe­ist would not be inter­ested in these issues. The books are every bit as reli­gious in their incep­tion and exe­cu­tion as the works of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, but from anoth­er angle.