Fantasizing It As It Is: Religious Language in Philip Pullman's Trilogy, His Dark Materials

Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials, ¹ has received enthusiastic reviews during the years of its publication; there have, however, been quite other responses from some religious groups. The problem has not been, as in protests about the Harry Potter books, with magic, but with "the Church," unmistakable in the text with its priests, cardinals, Consistorial Court and Magisterium. It is represented as a powerful and ruthlessly repressive organization, determined to root out sin and to control weak human beings for their own good at any cost. When this policy is put into practice by a kind of lobotomizing of the child population, these are just the texts which Roman Catholic churchmen, already troubled with charges of actual child abuse, could do without. More generally, Christian beliefs in God, the fall and the afterlife are all radically called into question, so that even those who effortlessly shrugged off fundamentalist fears about Harry Potter have found this case less easy to handle.

The offense is a surprising one, insofar as the trilogy belongs to a fantasy tradition which has characteristically been sympathetic to the spiritual dimension of human experience and activity. It is replete with wonders like flying mountain fortresses, oracular truth-meters, an Ancient of Days in a crystal casket and a colony of latter-day Houyhnhnms. In its representation of other worlds inhabited by an exotic variety of human and other beings, and the development of their experiences and histories in an extended sequence of texts, it invites comparison with the "high fantasy" works of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and Ursula K. Le Guin. ² In these fantasies metaphysical, religious and moral issues are of central importance, and are realized, accessibly for young readers, through the construction of elaborate "secondary worlds" (in this instance, of multiple parallel worlds) within which great forces clash and the young or socially modest protagonists assume heroic proportions.

In one important particular, however, Pullman breaks with the tradition: in the use of religious language. In his texts there is a much more explicit and extensive use of religious terminology and of specific allusion to Christian institutions and concepts than is usual in high fantasy. Just occasionally in Victorian fantasy for children there are references to saying prayers or "knowing" God, but explicit reference to religious institutions, practices and beliefs disappears almost completely in the works of the fantasists of the 1860s and '70s, Charles Kingsley and George MacDonald. The absence of religious terminology in these texts derives not, however, from the excision of religious themes, but rather from their metaphorical transposition into the landscape, beings and activities of the secondary worlds of the fantasies. So powerful and effective was this innovation in their work that it has continued significantly to shape the genre; there may be thinly-veiled allegory, most obviously in C. S. Lewis's Narnia books, but in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings there is no overt allusion to his committed Roman Catholicism, nor indeed in Le Guin's Earthsea to the Taoist beliefs which underpin her texts. Thus, explicit metaphysical, religious or ideological language characteristically does not appear in high fantasy texts—until, by sharp contrast, in Pullman's narrative Christian terminology and particularly the important institutions and theological concepts of church, God, and fall receive explicit and frequent reference.

What he is about is not far to seek. His bête noire is C. S. Lewis: "I hate the Narniabooks, and I hate them with a deep and bitter passion . . . " (qtd. in Vulliamy 18). The hatred is directed against Lewis partly as an idealization-of-childhood writer, but the vehement attack can be attributable primarily to the fact that in Lewis's narratives allegorization of the Christian story is at its most evidently and cleverly contrived. In The Amber Spyglass, Mary, the children's mentor, is bidden: "'Tell them stories . . . But they...