My dark materials

Updated below on Tuesday evening.

Oh shoot.  This means I'm going to have to finish reading the damn books.

The movie adaptation of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, the first in the His Dark Materials series, is coming out in time for Christmas and the fake Catholics of the Catholic League are thrilled because it gives them a chance to rant and rail against another secularist assault on religion and to feel discriminated against and persecuted while they go about the business of bullying folks into shutting up and accepting the League's Right Wing authoritarian heresies.

It's probably people like Bill Donohue that Pullman had in mind when he made God the villain of his novels.

Before we go any further, a note to any members of the Media who may be reading.  The Catholic League is not a religious group, it is not a Catholic group, it is a political pressure group pushing a reactionary political agenda that has virtually nothing to do with the teachings of the Catholic Church.   If you feel you need a Catholic to give you a good quote for your story, the Church has people on their payroll who'll be glad to talk to you, and none of them is Bill Donohue.

Alternately, you can call up the theology departments at one of the many Catholic colleges and univerisites and ask somebody there to explain things to you.

You don't need Donohue and his minions for anything.

Thank you.

Now, to continue.

I don't want to read any more of Pullman's books.  I've tried getting through The Golden Compass and I just can't.  The prose is dense, overwrought, and muddy with failed attempts at lyricism.  The characters don't grab me, but I can't really see them through all the words describing them.  I don't know how the average fourteen year old makes it past the first page (actually the average fourteen year old probably doesn't, but never mind), except that I suspect this is what they think grown-up prose is supposed to do, make their eyes cross, and they are excited by the premise, and I don't mean the God is evil part, I mean the young girl and magic polar bear save the world from the forces of darkness part.

But that's just me, except for Camelot, Middle Earth, and Discworld, I've never been interested in stories set in magical alternative universes.  I enjoy the Harry Potter books for my sons' sakes and its their love of the world of Hogwarts that carries me into it.   And I'm pretty sure that my affection for Tolkien is the result of my having read The Lord of the Rings at exactly the one moment in my life when I was open to his conceptions and premises and it was probably all the correspondences to the King Arthur tales that sold me.

That was when I was in 7th grade.

Maybe I'd feel different about His Dark Materials if they'd come out when I was in junior high.

That's not a knock or a dismissal.  I firmly believe in the importance of literature that is aimed at adolescents, and I certainly don't believe that because a work is aimed at adolescents that makes it adolescent.

There comes a time in children's lives when they are ready to move beyond the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew but not quite up to tackling War and Peace and Madame Bovary, when they want and need to start asking the questions that grown-up art asks but haven't yet developed the vocabulary or piled up the experiences necessary to framing those questions in a completely grown-up way.

And the question that Pullman's books tackle is one of those questions.

In a culture that insists on the existence and immance of a benevolent creator god, all intelligent children are eventually going to have to ask, If God is good, and God created the Universe, why isn't the Universe good?  Why is life so full of pain and unfairness and disappointment and death?

And it's going to occur to the brighter ones among them that a possible answer to this question is that God isn't good.

And what if He isn't?

What if He is actually the villain of the story?

What if Lucifer is the hero?

What if Jesus is a rebel, attempting to save us in defiance of his father?

What if the right thing to do, the way to be like Jesus is to be like Lucifer, be like the Devil, and stand against God and the religionists who claim to speak in His name and enforce His laws?

This is a very old question and wasn't introduced into the culture by 20th Century Hollywood Jewish atheists or British novelists.

The Adam and Eve story is meant to head it off by making all the toil and trouble in the world their fault.

Eve's fault.

Well, both their fault, but mostly Eve's.

There's a post in that about how Pullman was right to make the savior of his story a girl.

So I'm not surprised if Christian fundamentalists hate the books.  The preachers maintain their authority over their flocks by claiming to know what God is telling us through the Bible.  If the Bible can be questioned, God's not in any trouble, but the preachers have a lot of explaining to do.

I doubt many young readers finish the books convinced God is a villain and that His churches are evil, but plenty probably come away wondering if God might not be like what the preachers and priests, and their own parents, say He is, and if He's not, they have a right to ask, "Then what gives you the authority to speak on His behalf and tell me what He thinks I ought to think and how I ought to behave?  Why should I listen to you?  Because God says so isn't an answer anymore if you don't really know what God thinks!"

Right Wingers of all persuasions, religious and secular, often seem to have a problem distinguishing between art and real life.  This is because they judge art by how well it conforms to and enforces their view of reality and their view of reality includes an authoritarianism that does not stand up to criticism or questioning.  Art is the same as real life to them because of imagination's power to make people consider alternative realities and that is a real life threat to them.

Catholicism is not a fundamentalist religion and, depsite that nitwit priest who removed all the Harry Potter books from the shelves of his school's library, in principle has no argument with art or with imagination.  The Church's way of dealing with books and movies like The Golden Compass is to encourage parents to think in terms of age appropriateness and to teach where those books and movies diverge from or contradict Catholic belief.

But, as I said, Bill Donohue and his Catholic League are not real Catholics.  They are a legion of political opportunists who support an authoritarian political system that uses fundamentalist religion to manipulate its supporters and give itself power and legitimacy.

Their attack on The Golden Compass is a purely political act and is useful to them most as a publicity gimmick.  They're glad the movie's coming out and at Christmastime too.  They'll be in the papers and Donohue will be on the TV screens from now until the movie opens on December 7.

But also as I said, I can see why real fundamentalist Christians, and even real Catholics, would be worried about letting their kids go to the movie or read the books.

All I can say to them is that there happens to be an average fourteen year old in this house who is deeply religious, a very good Catholic, in fact, and he loves the books.  And as far as I can tell they've done nothing to cause him to doubt his faith.

Of course, his other favorite series of books is the Chronicles of Narnia, which he loved for years before he ever heard of The Golden Compass and which, as far as I've been able to tell, haven't done much to deepen his faith either.

Maybe the two series cancel each other out theologically in his mind.

All I know is that whenever he talks about them he seems mostly interested in the differences in the creatures and laws of physics in their respective magical worlds.

Which is to say he seems to think of both of them as works of fantasy.

Hat tip to Doc Myers by way of our sis Wev, who's handling the blog roundups at Crooks and Liars this week.

Update:  Several commenters have mentioned the article in the December issue of The Atlantic about how God was fired from the role of villain in the movie adaptation of The Golden Compass:  How Hollywood Saved God.

The article's online but for Atlantic subscribers only.  If you're not a subscriber and would like to read it, drop me a line and I'll email it to you.

Comments

[Michael Berry]

I was completely captivated by "The Golden Compass" when I first read it, and "The Subtle Knife" is even better, in my opinion. Sadly, the final volume, "The Amber Spyglass," runs off the rails rather quickly. Still, I was delighted by the series' audaciousness.

What's even crazier about the Catholic League's protests is that, by most reports, the director has effectively neutered the books' anti-religious stance. Tom Stoppard's draft of the screenplay was discarded when the studio became nervous that it was too faithful to the original text. Now, God ISN'T the bad guy in the movie, only some of his misguided minions.

So the zealots won, and they're still bitching. Cripes.

[MaryC]

So the zealots won, and they're still bitching

Well, now the party line is that "Hollywood removed the anti-religious elements from the movie in an evil scheme to seduce parents into thinking that the books are OK so they'll buy them for their kids to read and their kids' faith will be destroyed. And we'll be out of a job."

[MaryC]

So the zealots won, and they're still bitching

Well, now the party line is that "Hollywood removed the anti-religious elements from the movie in an evil scheme to seduce parents into thinking that the books are OK so they'll buy them for their kids to read and their kids' faith will be destroyed. And we'll be out of a job."

[MaryC]

So the zealots won, and they're still bitching

Well, now the party line is that "Hollywood removed the anti-religious elements from the movie in an evil scheme to seduce parents into thinking that the books are OK so they'll buy them for their kids to read and their kids' faith will be destroyed. And we'll be out of a job."

[joanr16]

I've had to hold back some rants of my own, on overhearing my ignorant coworkers spreading Bill Donohue's lies in the company lunchroom. These nasty viral transmissions invariably begin with, "My sister forwarded me an email about how terrible those books are. They're meant to brainwash kids into becoming atheists." Donohue's probably getting a dollar every time someone else becomes infected.

In fact, I've read the entire Dark Materials trilogy several times, own it in hardcover, have given it as gifts... and I still believe in God. The books are not designed to "brainwash" anyone, at least not any more than any other book that has a point of view.

I'm astonished at the fragility of faith among the loud and dimwitted. They are constantly a-tremble with the fear of ideas.

[Doug K]

Actual Christians respond to the trilogy: a review
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=2181

Interesting interview with the author:
http://www.thirdway.org.uk/past/showpage.asp?page=3949

I enjoyed the first two books immensely but thought the third collapsed. The review above seems to me quite acute, pointing out that it was essentially a failure of storytelling.

Our 9-year-old is reading the second book now. He wants to know if there was no God, who made the Big Bang ?
I did my best but I don't think I satisfied him..
He too is having no apparent difficulty distinguishing between the story and the world in which we live.

I wish we could see Tom Stoppard's version.

[Ken Houghton]

Uh, am I the only one who knows that the source for the triogy is John Milton? You know, Paradise Lost, as cited in TOS ("Tis better to reign in H*ll than to Serve in Heaven").

This is the same John Milton whose Areopagitica cited by Saint Ronald Reagan's Minions as one of the templates for Their Master's Voice. If that isn't enough of a pedigree for the Catholic League, it at least should be for any journalist with a brain. (Oh, I forgot--these are the ones covering film, so I just described the null set.)

[Sabutai]

The Atlantic Monthly has a six-page detailing of Hollywood's removal of the soul and spirit that animates these books -- that dealing with theology from a non-theist perspective. The movie version will be similar to telling the story of Narnia, if Aslan doesn't come back to life. It's trying to to do Citizen Kane without the sled. Though this movie would be a welcome to any of the roughly 15% of Americans who are agnostic or atheist, Hollywood ran scared from the Bullies with Bibles. Now nobody's happy.

These three books are the most theologically and lyrically beautiful I've ever read, a series I re-read every year that moves me deeply. Though the Amber Spyglass isn't the most smoothly written of the three, I find the resolution to the series well worth it, and the description of Hell more unnerving than the blood carnival Dante describes. Perhaps I just enjoy a story that looks at the world the way it is, not the way we've been trained to imagine it *should* be and asks the hard questions.

Of course the Catholic League is afraid of the books and films. It challenges people to think for themselves, and stop accepting what the priestly class tells us God is, and start thinking about what God seems to be from our own experience. It's moving from religious mumbo jumbo to our own experience. It's entrusting the individual to make their own judgment on religion.

Though by the time period of these books, God isn't really a villain. He's the tottering figurehead, providing a bare cover for the more ambitious would-be heir.

As for Narnia, Pullman's essay "The Dark Side of Narnia" makes clear his feelings on that. Any perceived similarities between the two series would not please either of the authors.

[joanr16]

Both Milton and William Blake inspired much of the books' ideas and imagery. Blake certainly had his own interesting image of God snf theology.

The haters have a problem with Pullman admitting he doesn't believe in God. Since his personal point of view disagrees with theirs (or at least the one they profess), in their twisted thinking, of course he has to be "brainwashing" and "recruiting" to enhance the ranks of unbelievers. You know, the way gay people do.

[Jaquandor]

I read the first one and thought it OK, but I've never bothered to follow up, and I'm one for whom made-up magical alternate universes are preferable to this real, cruddy universe we live in.

[aaron]

Wow, I cannot believe how sad I am about the demise of the Tom Stoppard script. I usually love everything he touches (but my mom inculcated me with that since she had a thing for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead).

In any case, this whole things reminds me of an article I read in the Partisan Review right before it became defunkt where the author claimed that the greatest threats to great art were the three horsemen of the religious right, commercial consideration, and political correctness. In this case, I guess two out of three ain't bad. Hollywood's commercial concerns killed anything thoughtful coming out of the film due to pressure from the religious right. I think political correctness might affect art in some ways, but I don't think I have seen it (unless not seeing Mohammed on a South Park counts, except that whole event looks increasingly like a publicity stunt). In any case, political correctness strikes me as less salient because anything viewed as politically incorrect now can make the case for "irony." Politically incorrect art is elevated more than not.

Also I had a question to kind of turn the Dark Materials situation back on me. When I worked at an after school program, I discovered I book (Dinosaurs by Design) that had become a favorite of student there. It took me a lot longer to realize than any cognizant person should have the pictures of dinosaurs and dudes walking around was not just creative whimsy but actual ahistorical bullshit. By asking my supervisor to throw it away, was I the same as Donahue on some level? If not, why not?

[aaron]

Wow, I cannot believe how sad I am about the demise of the Tom Stoppard script. I usually love everything he touches (but my mom inculcated me with that since she had a thing for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead).

In any case, this whole thing reminds me of an article I read in the Partisan Review right before it became defunkt where the author claimed that the greatest threats to great art were the three horsemen of the religious right, commercial consideration, and political correctness. In this case, I guess two out of three ain't bad. Hollywood's commercial concerns killed anything thoughtful coming out of the film due to pressure from the religious right. I think political correctness might affect art in some ways, but I don't think I have seen it (unless not seeing Mohammed on a South Park counts, except that whole event looks increasingly like a publicity stunt). In any case, political correctness strikes me as less salient because anything viewed as politically incorrect now can make the case for "irony." Politically incorrect art is elevated more than not.

Also I had a question to kind of turn the Dark Materials situation back on me. When I worked at an after school program, I discovered a book (Dinosaurs by Design) that had become a favorite of a student there. It took me a lot longer to realize than any cognizant person should have that the pictures of dinosaurs and dudes walking around was not just creative whimsy but actual ahistorical malarkey. By asking my supervisor to throw it away, was I the same as Donahue on some level? If not, why not?

(sorry, about seeming double post. I forgot about the younger Mannion audience thing, so I self-censored too late to "malarkey." Please delete first post.)

[SV]

I loved the premise of the first book and the world that it created (Witches and Daemons and Armored Bears - Cool!). I was a little disappointed by the way the second book started to get off-track, but kept hoping the third book would re-capture the promise of the first. Unfortunately, the third book continued the downward trend and was a complete mess.

These are not anti-religion books. They are anti-(Pullman's ignorant caricature of) religion books. "God" is an old guy who lives in the sky and who has been kept in a prison of senility by his followers. (What part of "Omnipotent" does Pullman not understand?) But then in the end everything is made right by an overwhelming mystical force generated by two kids who (apparently for the first time in the history of the universe) go through puberty.

This is beyond bad writing - it's infuriatingly stupid. I wasted my time on three long books for this? I'm not an atheist, but I respect a coherent story with atheism at its core (and have done so, often). These books are don't have a coherent story - they're don't even have coherent characters. The writings wanders all over the place, railing against magical thinking and replacing it with...stupid magical thinking.

The kindest thing you could say is that these books are not anti-religion, they are anti-monotheism and pro-eastern religion. Except I don't think Pullman cared to make the distinction. He was just interested in a 1,000 page rant against people behaving badly who happen to be religious, and blaming their bad behavior on their religion.

And don't even get me started on the wildly inconsistent motives, importance, and influence of the characters who are supposed to be her parents. They are nothing but devices for whatever Pullman needs for them to be at whatever point he pulls them in.

In summary: Don't waste your time.

[Mike]

But that's just me, except for Camelot, Middle Earth, and Discworld, I've never been interested in stories set in magical alternative universes.

So, was this meant to be humorous?

...except for [the Bible, the Talmud, the Koran, and the Mahabharata], I've never been interested in [religious books].

...except for [Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe, and Hercule Poirot], I've never been interested in [mystery novels].

...except for [Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and Kill Bill v1], I've never been interested in [Quentin Tarantino movies].

...except for [preeminent, perhaps even foundational, examples of the class], I've never been interested in [this class of objects].

It just seems like an odd form for expressing the sentiment.

[JD]

I read the trilogy to my elder son when he was nine. We both loved it.

[julia]

That would be not-theologian Bill Donohue of the Heritage Foundation, who somehow managed not to mention our beloved excommunicate mayor's marital difficulties and his support for abortion and gay marriage for six years while he was mining Kerry's underwear drawer for potential lapses in Catholic propriety?

[tdraicer]

Don't like epic fantasy? Try George RR Martin's ongoing A Song of Ice and Fire. But don't read it to the kids-unless they are ready for very explicit sex and violence.