Critical Perspectives on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: Essays on the Novels, the Film and the Stage Productions (review)

Philip Pullman’s young adult epic His Dark Materials is textually rich enough to enjoy a steady stream of criticism that parses influences, traces sources, and comments on the social, political, and religious implications of the work. As a modern classic and crossover work, His Dark Materials offers both younger and older readers much to enjoy and contemplate. This collection of essays on His Dark Materials is divided into four sections: “Adversaries and Influences”; “Traditions and Legacies”; “Religion, Sexuality, and Gender”; and “Dramatizing.” Each section promises an enticing variety of topics: considerations of Pullman’s literary influences; connections with contemporary genres (science fiction, steampunk) and with English literature and culture; the trilogy’s revolutionary and less-than revolutionary takes on contemporary controversies surrounding identity as it is understood through religion and sexual orientation; and the challenges and successes of adaptations of the novels for the stage.

As is frequently the case in edited collections, the quality of the essays is uneven. Strong essays seem undeveloped in key places, and weaker essays too often like unedited conference papers or poorly cut excerpts from books or dissertations. Efforts have been made to have the essays “talk” to each other with extensive internal references, but this sometimes has the effect of ignoring more sustained treatments of similar topics and makes the collection seem blinkered to the extensive and valuable work done elsewhere. Moreover, the production values of the text are very poor—every essay has typographical errors, some of which challenge the reader’s interpretive ability, and many essays seem to be missing chunks of text (most egregiously in Steven Barfield’s essay considering His Dark Materials as science fiction, where the bibliography begins with the letter P, and in Sally Munt’s queer theory essay, where the endnotes do not correspond to the numbers in the text). Alternately, some of the bibliographies include references not actually discussed in the texts, and others seem to insert discussions from other contexts, willy-nilly, with no integration of those readings into the overall argument. Despite these drawbacks, the collection offers a few interesting and useful essays about Pullman’s text and its adaptation for the stage.

Of the four sections, the essays in “Adversaries and Influences” seem least new, employing theoretical models familiar to many readers. They cover old ground, revisiting well-established links between Pullman and Milton’s Paradise Lost; Pullman’s antagonism toward the fantasy and theology of J. R. R. Tolkien and especially C. S. Lewis; and the generic orientation of the series to heroic fantasy. Rachel Falconer’s “Recasting John Milton’s Paradise Lost: Intertextuality, Storytelling, and Music” and Phil Cardew’s “‘When I Grow Up I want to Be . . .’: Conceptualization of the Hero Within the Works of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Philip Pullman” draw upon critical expertise outside of children’s literature to consider His Dark Materials in light of Milton’s biography and literary output, and in connection with early medieval literature. Falconer appropriates Stanley Fish’s classic reader-response study of Paradise Lost (Surprised by Sin [1971]) to suggest that Pullman, like Milton, tempts his readers to fall, but unlike Milton does so in order to affirm a fallen world order wherein the pleasure principle must give way to the reality principle. Cardew uses Northrop Frye’s myth criticism to criticize Pullman’s characters as “failed” heroes because they do not become confident and mature adults such as Tolkien’s hobbits or Lewis’s Pevensies. Elisabeth Eldridge’s “Constructions of the Child, Authority and Authorship: The Reception of C. S. Lewis and Philip Pullman” analyzes the construction of Lewis and Pullman as personae in an analysis inspired by Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan. Eldridge considers reviewers’ hostility toward both author-narrators’ seductive/authoritative voices, especially as they oppose those voices to the construct of the...