His Silly Material
The film version of The Golden Compass opens tomorrow, and people have been asking me what I think of all the frothing over Phillip Pullman's anti-religion polemic. I read the books a couple of years ago; I also know a little bit about the history of Christianity. So let me respond here:
- Pullman is not specifically dealing with Roman Catholicism in the stories, neither in the story's politics nor in its metaphysics. The metaphysics are those of Gnostic Dualism, which teaches that a very nasty and powerful-but hardly omnipotent-being called the Demiurge created the physical world as a trap for spirits. The Demiurge has helpers called archons that are basically bad angels with names like Metatron. Pullman calls his Demiurge the Authority, but the Authority is not God as most people define Him. ("Killing God"-what Pullman himself tells us the stories are about-is an absurdity.) Gnostic dualism as a system of metaphysics was tossed out of Christianity over a thousand years ago, though bits of it still stick to our boots as Manichaeism.
- Close readers of Pullman's trilogy may remember that in Pullman's alternate universe, the Protestant Reformers conquered the Roman Catholic Church (instead of fighting it to a draw) and installed John Calvin as Pope. Calvin was a tyrannical megalomaniac, called (even during his own life) "the Pope of Geneva." Pullman's Magisterium is a reasonable guess at what sort of church a psychopath like Calvin would create, with the entire resources of the Roman Catholic Church at his disposal. Pullman has thus created a weird sort of fully imaginary Gnostic sacramental Calvinism as his heavy, and there is so little of genuine Catholicism left in it (some non-Catholic sects have nuns and bishops too) that the accusations of anti-Catholic bigotry are pointless.
With that in mind, Pullman's anti-religion themes are misdirected to the point of silliness. Railing against Christian Gnosticism in 2007 is a lot like trying to organize a present-day protest rally against the Eisenhower Administration-there wasn't a lot of material there to begin with, and hey, it's been over for a long time.
Pullman is a superb writer. The first two books were dazzlingly well done as fantastic literature, and if you decide to read them you should stop there: The third book, The Amber Spyglass, was a total botch, and basically ruins everything the first two books so carefully establish. Interestingly, it's The Amber Spyglass where most of the polemic takes place. I wonder if Pullman got "anti-religion" while working on the first two books and didn't fully express it until the third, when he felt he could get away with it. If so, it looks like the sort of self-indulgence trap that a lot of writers fall into once they become successful.
Railing about religion is the least of it. What really troubles me about His Dark Materials is that it is, in fact, so dark: There is a grimness to the whole business and a casual disregard for human life that was repellent enough to temper my early enthusiasm for the concepts and the writing. The trilogy contains absolutely no joy and nothing like triumph, and at the end of the third volume a huge squirming mass of mismatched pain-soaked themes and metaphysical loose ends descends into terminal incoherence. I wouldn't give it to my own children, that's for sure-at least not until I was absolutely sure that they understood that cynicism is cowardice, and that they had the courage to make their own decisions as to whether life is meaningful or not, rather than take some tenured cynic's word for it.
I will probably see the film, even though the trailers seem dark and muddy and singularly unimaginative. If that's the best they can muster in terms of preview, I'm not sure that New Line Cinema will make their $180M back. I'm also not sure that anybody can see the CGI polar bears and not think of Coca Cola's mascots of several years ago.
Maybe we're all getting a little tired of cinema fantasy and anthropomorphic animals. (I certainly am.) We need another run of good starship movies, but as best I know, there are none on the horizon. How about Ringworld? Marooned in Realtime? Startide Rising? Or Varley's flawed but startling Titan/Wizard/Demon? Is there no escape from witches, magic, vampires, and stylish cynicism? (So much for movies. I'm gonna go read a book.)