[In the following essay, Gooderham places the trilogy His Dark Materials in the context of modern works of fantasy literature, noting that although the work has been enthusiastically received by critics and readers, the resistance it has inspired in religious groups can be largely attributed to Pullman's language usage.]

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 Narnia books, 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 need the truth. That's what nourishes them. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, everything’” (455). Lewis draws Pullman's fire not only because he regards Lewis's beliefs to be mistaken, but because he disapproves of his “sneaky,” untruthful indoctrination. Although Pullman is to write deliciously entertaining fantasy, he is nevertheless also determined to call a religious entity or idea by a religious name. In his narratives there is no golden “Aslan,” no “deeper magic than Deep Magic,” but rather a set of unvarnished Christian institutions and concepts: church, God, fall and afterlife. His purpose is radically to reinterpret or demythologize—if not exorcise—them, but, above all, he is going to do this honestly in the overt language of religion. He may be writing fantasy, but he will tell it as it is.

The project is an intriguing one in the history of children's literature. Pullman is a secular humanist: an unsurprising ideological stance amongst modern writers. But he is also an advocate of this stance in intentionally emancipatory writing for children. The content and ambition of his message go quite beyond, for example, allusions to the shortcomings of adults or problems in teenage sexual relationships, now commonplace in realistic fictions for young people. They appear to comprise no less than the deconstruction of the traditional complex of Christian beliefs, values and practices and the construction of an alternative system. Disturbing though some readers may find this, the idea is not altogether new in writing for children. Both content and ambition are not dissimilar to those of the early fantasists, Kingsley and MacDonald. They used the genre to rewrite Christian doctrine for the rising generation: in Kingsley's case, a Christian/Lamarckian evolutionism; in MacDonald's a Christian universalism—interestingly enough, thematically related to the “dust” and “world of the dead” which form two central preoccupations in Pullman's texts.

Just where, then, is His Dark Materials located in relation to the high fantasy tradition in children's literature? While Pullman deploys to the full the conventions of the genre, in respect of its fundamental metaphysical, religious and perhaps even moral underpinning and of the religious language uses which signal this, his writing is markedly different from what has gone before. We need to ask, therefore, about his project and its rationale, its realization in the genre and its deviance from the genre. What are the mutual effects of genre conventions on project and project innovation on genre? I propose to address these questions through attention to the use of religious language in the texts. It confronts the reader, as has been explained, first in the form of vocabulary conventionally foreign to the genre; such surface manifestations, however, only hint at the radical rewriting which is underway. To explore this, three main language uses will be distinguished: the social, the doctrinal and the mythic.³ The first is language about religious organizations and their practices, in this instance what may be described as “church-talk,” ecclesiastical discourse; the second is the language of doctrine, “God-talk,” theological discourse; the third rather differently denotes the archaic metaphorical narrative, myth, in which fundamental beliefs about God/the gods and the world are characteristically encoded. There is an intimate relationship between doctrine and myth, the concepts of the former being developed out of the rich and dramatic narratives of the latter: “Doctrines are an attempt to give system, clarity and intellectual power to what is revealed through the mythological and symbolic language of religious faith …” (Smart 19). I shall, therefore, after considering ecclesiastical language, go on to consider Pullman's fundamental enterprise of rewriting traditional religious narratives through the doctrinal and mythic language uses involved—without, however, necessarily drawing a sharp distinction between the two.

ECCLESIASTICAL DISCOURSE

The first item of explicitly religious terminology that the reader encounters in Pullman's narrative is “the Church.” The organization thus designated reads inevitably as Roman Catholic on account both of the actual institutional terminology (priest, cardinal, etc.) and of that constructed on that model (“Consistorial Court of Discipline,” “Oblation Board,” “pre-emptive absolution”). Through Pullman's quaint imagining of “Pope John Calvin” (NL 31) and the location of the Consistorial Court of Discipline in Geneva (AS 355), however, the Protestant churches are also subsumed into this single organization. Occasional glimpses into the organization disclose college chapels, quasiscientific theology, monastic houses and a disciplined hierarchy; of routine worship, community activities, parish ministers and the appurtenances of the gospel of Christian salvation there is no trace. Pullman thus constructs under the comprehensive term “church” a lean, keen, Talibanlike institution—focused ruthlessly on a single end. Indeed, in a declaration which breaches the division between primary and secondary worlds, “the church” is represented as distillation and summation of all churches, denominations and sects: “‘For all (the church's) history …’” declares a leading witch, “‘it's tried to suppress and control every natural impulse. And when it can't control them it cuts them out … That is what the church does, and every church is the same, control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling’” (SK 52).

Neither such explicit reference to a religious institution nor such negative and absolute judgement has been seen before in children's fantasy literature, and, were this extreme statement not protected by quotation marks, the text would be open to the charge of gross propaganda. There are a number of assertions in Pullman's texts about Christian institutions and beliefs quite uncompromising in their finality: “‘The Christian religion is just a very powerful and convincing mistake. That's all’” (AS 464). All are attributed to the characters in the narrative, none to the narrator, but the cumulative effect, in the mouths of approved characters like the witches and the scientific researcher, Dr. Malone, is determinative in shaping the ideology of the text.

A further narrative strategy contributes to this negative evaluation of Christianity. Ecclesiastical language, familiar to anyone reared in the Christian West, allows “the church” of the fantasy to be related, with deceptive ease, to the actual church organizations of our world—when this must rather be a problematic and sharply contested matter. Pullman's fantasy deploys the device of multiple parallel worlds, one of which is our own (in a realist fiction, this would be protagonist Will's world) but his “church” is located primarily not in this, but in another, slightly different one (protagonist Lyra's). The effect is to constitute “the church,” named and constructed largely out of the ecclesiastical terminology of our world, nevertheless as a fantasy creation, requiring of readers a suspension of disbelief so that it can function as a grotesque antagonist in the plot structure. Away from such a suspension, readers have to return and confront the actual institutions of our contemporary world—of which “the church” represented in the fantasy, if mistaken for these actual ones, can only be regarded as a caricature. In writing for an adult audience no objection can be raised to this; the case, however, is different where the implied audience includes children. The careful reader must recognize and may be intrigued by Pullman's sleight of hand; such narrative tactics must, however, be called into question as liable to lead the young (and naïve of all ages) into a confusion of fantasy with actual organizations—with the effect of unproductive posturing on both sides of the ideological divide.

Of even greater moment for the effect of such language use is the way in which the deployment of ecclesiastical discourse inhibits a fundamental function in the genre. In realistic fictions for children there have long been texts like Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War, which deals with a pupil destroyed by the corrupt regime of a Roman Catholic school. Such a damning representation was initially regarded as inappropriate to children's literature, but it was quickly acknowledged that the type of school represented could be readily accepted as an ironic intensification; everyone knows that this is just the place where this kind of abuse should not happen. Fantasy literature, however, speaks to readers in quite other ways from those of realist fiction. It is not merely that, since the foundational works of Kingsley and MacDonald, explicit ecclesiastical and theological discourse has been foreign to fantasy; rather, that the metaphoric mode, governed by other criteria than those of realistic representation, is characteristic of the genre—and arguably criterial to high fantasy. To represent the oppression of a free spirit, Jan Mark's fantasy fiction, Divide and Rule, uses a manifestly invented archaic institution, “the Temple,” which requires the service of a youth to fulfil the year-long ritual role of “shepherd,” as vehicle to represent the oppression and to open up questions about freedom and abuse. Mark's has a good deal in common with both Cormier's and Pullman's critiques, but the treatment differs insofar it avoids reference to an immediately recognizable institution of our world and thus makes it possible for the abuse of the hero to be read, rather than as a specific attack on religion or on some particular type of organization, in a variety of ways that can make it both meaningful and provoking to all readers. A metaphorical representation, such as Mark's, suggestively opens up a whole range of possible readings, and thus frees readers, whatever their stance and preference, for a more flexible and uninhibitedly critical response. By contrast, the use of an ecclesiastical discourse which ties the reader too closely to the conventions of realism both raises ideological hackles (or provokes unquestioning triumphalism!), and inhibits a free range of imaginative response. It thus undermines one of the most important artistic and intellectual values of the genre.

MYTH AND THEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE 1: THE HARROWING OF HELL

The dimensions of Pullman's narrative are not limited to a struggle between the Church and its opponents; the conflict is rather the grander one that takes place, in the Pauline phrases, “against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness …”. Of the first, grand antagonist in this struggle, his retainer explains: “‘Lord Asriel never found hisself at ease in the doctrines of the church … I think he's waging a higher war than that. I think he's aiming at a rebellion against the highest power of all. He's gone a-searching for the dwelling place of the Authority himself’” (SK 47-48). The Church is merely God's agent on earth, so Pullman enlists Judaeo-Christian myth, in some of its most highly-wrought forms, to amplify the dimensions of his narrative to epic proportions. He focuses in fact on what critical Christian orthodoxy would see as the more bizarre, sectarian and populist forms and aspects of the religion. He makes only oblique reference to the creation myth, but emphatic reference to the fall; there is no attention given to prophetic writing, but an evident appetite for apocalyptic; there is no allusion to the death and resurrection of Christ, central to Christian tradition, but unmistakably to “the harrowing of hell”. I shall examine the use of myth and theological discourse in each of these three aspects, but in reverse order as they present problems of increasing complexity in their language use.

The last of these three aspects of religion refers to the considerable narrative episode in The Amber Spyglass dealing with a visit to the world of the dead which Lyra, the female protagonist, makes to rescue a friend. In the process she finds herself at the head of a grand enterprise to set the myriads of dead free, assuming the Christ-role in an unmistakable “harrowing of hell.” The narrative of the liberation constitutes one of the “mighty works” of Lyra as new Eve. It is also framed as an answer to a fundamental question about the nature of the world of death, “‘even the churches don't know’”; avers one of the angel characters, “‘they tell their believers that they'll live in heaven, but that's a lie’” (AS 35). So Pullman's task is to replace the old myths with a new, more honest story, written to replace the delusion of an afterlife. The father of the male protagonist, Will, explains to him at his dissolution: “‘… we have to build the republic of heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere’” (AS 382).

The story about human life without an afterlife, though it may have a contemporary gloss, is constructed extensively out of the imagery and logic of archaic myth. Pullman draws heavily on both the Greek underworld of “Hades” and the Hebrew “Sheol,” the rubbish dump to which, after lives lived in the presence of God, the dead are consigned to decompose away from that presence. In the world of the dead there is a ferryman to row the dead across the river, there are Harpies in attendance, and the place itself is a huge and desolate remoteness in which wraithlike ghostpeople drift and mill about to all eternity. These elements are far from merely decorative: they furnish Pullman with an imagery and a logic important in the construction of a convincing secular liberation narrative. Indeed, Pullman achieves a powerful and coherent narrative precisely by jettisoning popular notions of the soul living on in a happy afterlife and by returning to older fears of the horror and finality of death—from which only a raising from the dead, a resurrection, can be a sufficient remedy. He describes the world of the dead in graphic contemporary terms as a prison camp—perhaps better, with its grim hopelessness, a concentration camp—suffused, however, with archaic elements which speak to deeply-rooted human fears. From such a ghastly place release, any release, on any terms is infinitely to be desired. So, although the liberation he effects does not take the form of Christian resurrection, these captives do rise up from the underworld, to gain a final breath of the night air, “fresh and clean and cool,” and a sight of the open heavens, as they turn with relief and joy “into the night, the starlight and the air …” (AS 382). The use of this archaic imagery and logic, together with Romantic landscape imagery and the oriental conception of absorption into “the All,” creates a compelling new story—indeed, new myth.

Theological discourse is in the main absent from this construction; certainly, central and contentious concepts like resurrection, immortality, soul, afterlife are neither articulated nor explicated. Only the reference to and assertions about “heaven” constitute an explicit theological use. It forms part of a conceptual rejigging of conventional theological discourse where Pullman turns the Matthean “kingdom of heaven” into “republic of heaven.” The ground for such a use was prepared by nineteenth-century liberal theologians who developed the idea of “building” the Kingdom of God “on earth”—which is, kingship and God apart, just what Will's father advocates! By comparison with the rewritten myth, this manipulation of theological discourse is weak. Apart from the fact that the liberal reading of he basileia tou Theou is now critically discredited, the matching of new-speak “republic” with oldspeak “heaven” is clumsy, if not (by reason of its Semitic provenance) a near oxymoron.

Thus far, what may be observed in these language uses is a contrast between the imaginative reconfiguration of old myth into a new story about life and death and the pressing into use of an outdated version of a theological concept. The mythic use constitutes an effective deployment of the metaphoric mode of the genre in encoding important religious and metaphysical ideas. And the new story, rather than merely captivating readers by its intriguing inventions, encourages the more powerful reading experience of imaginative and speculative response. The case, however, is far different with the theological concept. Here the explicit terminology invites at best a rational and critical consideration—from which it must, in this instance, come off rather badly—and at worst a partisan response, depending on the reader's religious or ideological stance, rather than one which is open and imaginative.

MYTH AND THEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE 2: APOCALYPTIC

Bizarre though the three aspects of religion on which Pullman focuses may seem from the point of view of biblical and systematic theology, their provenance and rationale are clear from the quotation which prefaces the first book of the trilogy and the epigraphs of the chapters of the last book. This array of literary references, drawn mainly from seventeenth- to nineteenth-century English verse, is at its most prolific and significant in quotations from Milton and Blake, and in particular from Paradise Lost. It is from these recensions of the “great code” (see Frye), that the interests, emphases and treatments of theology and biblical myth in the trilogy most importantly derive.

In their development, elaboration and transformation of biblical myth the verse of these two poets provides Pullman with a quarry of materials and ideas for the construction of his vast cosmic landscape, with modes and furnishing in the style of apocalyptic myth. Of particular usefulness are the parallel spheres of heaven/hell, with their angelic inhabitants, and of the earth, with our first parents, in which the two actions, of cosmic war and of human catastrophe, can take place. Pullman's attraction to Milton and Blake derives, however, not primarily from the imageries of Paradise Lost and the prophetic books, but from an ideological affinity with the two visionaries. Although both naturally count, in cultural context, as Christian poets, both produced radical and subversive texts, and it is these which endear them to Pullman: “Blake once wrote of Milton that he was ‘A true poet of the devil's party, without knowing it.’ I am of the devil's party, and I know it” (qtd. in Vulliamy 18).

Pullman's purpose for his young—and doubtless also adult—readers is to dismantle the grand narrative of the Christian religion and to replace it with an emancipatory and “natural” humanism. The demolition and clearing of the ground, cluttered by the Gormenghastly apparatus of religion, is not a task for the humble and meek—to them belongs the subsequent inheriting of the earth—but must be undertaken by agents on a much grander scale. For this the huge cosmoi of Milton and Blake, with their angelic hosts, rebellion and warfare, furnish ideal materials, indeed template, for the construction of an apocalyptic action and for its once-for-all cataclysmic and final destruction. Rebellious and intellectually charismatic Lord Asriel, proud in the imagination of his heart, belongs to the outdated world of theological argument and conflict, just as surely as does Mrs. Coulter to that of the outdated and fanatical church, and Metraton to the bizarre fantasies of outdated apocalyptic imaginings. So, as in the end they clash spectacularly, the whole religious job-lot collapses down into the abyss, pit, final black hole, and the world is cleared, secularized, ready for its new human-scale regeneration.

This is the Grand Narrative to end all grand narratives, the High Fantasy to end all high fantasies, the Eschaton to end all kingdoms of heaven! After this there are just plain human dimensions, human tasks and human stories. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings the new evangel is declared: “‘And then what? … Build what?’” “‘The Republic of Heaven’” (AS 548). “‘If we live our lives properly and think about them as we do there'll be something to tell …’” (AS 521). The apocalyptic drama provides a rich and deep-rooted metaphor, indeed, virtually a new myth, to substantialize the model under construction in the trilogy: that of the radical change from a religious to a secular era. There is no conceptual pointing up of the model in theological discourse; rather the story speaks directly and dramatically as large-scale metaphor, with its religious and metaphysical ideas effectively thus encoded and no need for further conceptual explication or clarification.

This large-scale metaphor does not, however, stand alone. Complementing it is Pullman's bald and uncompromising handling of the concept central to theological discourse: “God.” As in the case of “the Church” and despite the conventions of the genre, frequent and explicit reference is made in the texts to God. Usually this term is used, but the alternative “the Authority” is also widespread. The term is clearly intended to subsume all conceptions of the divine: an angel, commenting on the usurpation of Metraton, declares: “‘The Authority, God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty—these are the names he gave himself’” (AS33). Comprehensive though the list may appear, these names are pretty well all of Semitic provenance, so that—by accident or intent—oriental names for the divine are not included and the very different conceptions in Hinduism and Buddhism thus excluded. Indeed, the figure, God, in the narrative is finally reduced to a mere walk-on part in the apocalyptic drama—and not even that, since he has become so old and decrepit that he has to be carried in—a figure pitiably reminiscent of Hardy's “Godhead dying downwards, brain and eye now gone.”⁴ Finally, he simply dissolves into thin air as he is exposed to the fresh winds of the world.

There have been earlier reconceptualizations of the divine in the high fantasy tradition. This one is evidently very different—apart, however, from one important respect: the rejection of patriarchal and authoritarian attributes, which require of the believer primarily submission or obedience to a prescribed law. In both Kingsley and MacDonald—in the final epiphany of the Water-Babies and the beautiful old grandmother of the Curdie books—patriarchal and legalistic attributes are modified as their conceptualizations take up new feminine attributes and forms. Pullman, however, has no interest in reconstructing a more comprehensively-conceived deity; the whole thrust of his narrative is to reduce this figure to a footnote in the apocalyptic scenario. Uncompromisingly he finally disposes of God by a witty device: a literal enactment of the “death of God.” Nietzsche's graphic parable of the madman who searches for God with his lantern in the daylight, and the considerable theological debate which stems from the idea that “God is dead,” are thus deftly enlisted to endorse the model of the change from a religious to a secular era.

The large-scale apocalyptic metaphor of the narrative is a potent one; such a finale for the deity, however, must inevitably invite the indignant attention of the Catholic Herald and the evangelical pulpit, and responses on the part of readers from the horrified, to the troubled, to the gleeful. It is just these stock and inhibited responses that it has been the virtue of children's fantasy literature largely to avoid. Although occasional crude didacticism and thinly-veiled allegory may still be found, since the innovations of Kingsley and MacDonald, matters of belief, ideology and scientific speculation have, as has been observed, been uncontentiously encoded in metaphorical mode. Indeed, beginning with Kingsley's quaint Lamarckian newts who grow into water-babies, and water-babies who grow into … (or vice-versa!), children's fantasy texts have not infrequently been an important means for the undogmatic mediation of new ideas about the world and human life to the next generation in their early and formative years. In the playspace opened up by the metaphorical mode, such ideas have been protected from being prematurely gunned down by indignant critics and from the unthinking accolades of supporters.

In an important respect, Pullman's texts take advantage of this opportunity. Central to the conceptual structure of the narrative, indeed, encrypted in its title, is the metaphorical concept, “Dust.” In characteristic Pullman style the concept is comprehended in a number of terms: “shadows,” “dark matter,” “Rusakov Particles,” “sraf” (SK 259-60). Although in name it doubtless derives from “the dust of the earth” in the Genesis myth, and certainly from Paradise Lost, Book II, the development of this rich and complex metaphor goes far beyond these origins. It profoundly modifies the ontology implied by the polemical handling of “God” in the texts, functioning as a “connecting” metaphor for “the plethora of seemingly incompatible elements that make up the universe” (Bird 113). Although it appears to comprehend the physical and metaphysical without reference to a supernatural, its metaphorical form means that it can easily be read as close to the ideas of realist thinkers like Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, and especially of process theologians. Norman Pittinger describes

modern man … (as) right in seeing himself as part of a changing, moving, living, active world, in which we have to do not with inert substances but dynamic processes, not so much with things as with events … Whitehead's view that the cosmos is “alive” is basic to the whole enterprise of process thought.”

(98-99)⁵

The ease with which this central metaphor, in a text written by a secular humanist, can thus be read speculatively in Christian theological terms is an index both of its imaginative power and of the genre's facility for stimulating interest and engagement with ideas rather than acrimony.

By contrast, the specific references to God in the texts and the clever representation of his demise serve only to produce a distracting buzz of partisanship and contention. Maybe the theologically literate can appreciate and profit from the different nuances available in the text, since it opens up issues familiar in theological enquiry and debate; the general reader, however, and even more—since the target audience is a mixed one—the young person who is just beginning to ask large questions about God, the universe and whatever, are not so well served. Metaphorical adumbrations which promote thought, sensibility and the exercise of the imagination are fine, but the use of specific terminology and other accoutrements of theological discourse lay themselves open to the charges of confusion, offense and the indoctrination which Pullman so disapproves of in other children's writers.

MYTH AND THEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE 3: THE FALL

After the vaunting ambitions of Asriel, Coulter and Metatron have come crashing down, human life can continue lighter and brighter for the banishing of an oppressive supernaturalism. Characters and readers alike must live in a world where eschatology has been realized and democratized within the plain confines of the secular. Theologically and philosophically, after the death of God, humankind—in the form of two young persons—is left free but alone with the questions: what truth, what morality, what way of life now? Will has received the message: “‘We have to build the republic of heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere’” (AS 382) and, as he now comes into his own, he makes his response: “‘I can't choose my nature, but I can choose what I do. And I will choose because now I'm free’” (AS 440).

Thematically, the last six or seven chapters of the text must thus be devoted to a fleshing out of this new secular condition. Narratologically, we expect this to be done as the epic hero returns from his adventures and conquest and is involved in a last challenge before he is finally recognized and established. Educationally, since in these books for children an Entwicklungsthema (theme of education) has been characteristically spliced into the action, we expect this to be evident also in the conclusion. None of this, however, quite prepares the reader for Pullman's decision to construct an ending by taking up and rewriting yet another major religious myth, but this he does. The strategy is intelligible if ambitious.⁶ He is about establishing the humanistic values of a new, secular world; what more telling material to deploy than the archaic and fundamental myth of the fall of man, with the condition reversed, so that the fall is no longer an indelible mark of human imperfection and incapacity, but becomes a felix culpa marking the essential goodness of our natural capacities?

The myth of the fall, functioning originally as an etiology of the difficulties and pains of the human condition, has been read and deployed in different contexts in different ways. Even in the rationalized and controlled context of theological discourse the focus has varied considerably: the fall as ritual and moral disobedience, the fall as human ambition to play God, the fall as epitome of human tragedy, the fall as sexual, a “weakness of the flesh” … It is this last reading which Pullman takes up for his rewriting, obviously from conviction, but also because it serves a central purpose in his writing these books for children. He has declared his antipathy to C. S. Lewis, et al. “with their view of childhood as a golden age from which sexuality and adulthood are a falling away” (Vulliamy 18). He will rather assure his young readers that “the coming of experience and sexuality and self-consciousness is a thing to be welcomed, because it is the beginning of true understanding, of wisdom. My book tells children that you are going to grow up and that it's going to be painful, but it's going to be good too” (Costa 6).

Whereas in his other uses of myth, Pullman has characteristically deployed a variety of mythical elements freely to construct his new stories, in this instance he tracks the biblical narrative with allegorical closeness, each particular element undergoing a humanistic sea-change. Early in his narrative the principal figures in the story begin to assume their roles. There are intimations and prophecies of a Child who is to come. Not, however, a second Adam for a Christian recapitulation, but a female figure, the girl, Lyra, confessed as: “‘Eve! Mother of all! Eve again! Mother Eve!’” (SK 328). In the new secular economy the boy Will obviously fulfills the role of Adam, but by implication rather than by prophetic or narrative affirmation. The third actor in the drama, the tempter, is in fact a temptress, Dr. Mary Malone. Mary turns out to be a former nun who has relinquished not only her habit but also her faith, and replaced it by becoming a scientist. Giving up her religion has gone alongside the relinquishing of her emotional virginity and the development of her sexuality. The resulting combination of intense, virginal commitment, together with adult sexual experience and high-status knowledge, constitute her a powerful figure as temptress/mentor for the child-Adam and Eve. As the climactic moment approaches the biblical palimpsest is elaborately reinscribed. The context is no longer a God-given paradise, but a creaturely-constructed utopian community. The temptation takes the form of Mary telling the children the story of her awakening from the dream of religion to engagement in adult sexual relationship. The fall event itself is enacted in a sensuous, tasting moment which consummates the children's developing relationship: “‘Lyra took one of those little red fruits … And she lifted the fruit gently to his mouth …’” (AS 491-92). So important is this event that Pullman deploys his central metaphor to valorize it: “The Dust pouring down from the stars had found a living home again, and those children-no-longer-children, saturated with love, were the cause of it all” (AS 497). The myth rewritten thus marks out the intimate personal relationship and sexual fulfillment of romantic love as the acme of relationships in the new secular era.

This last episode is a startling one for readers of high fantasy and of children's books alike. There is clearly a case for the inclusion in fantasy texts with a teenage readership of reference to sexual relationships and other dimensions of human experience that were previously omitted from children's books. These are now very much the stuff of realistic fiction for the young, and have also begun to appear in high fantasy. Ursula K. Le Guin, in her first addition to the Earthsea trilogy, Tehanu, does just this. She includes as protagonist an abused and disfigured child and bulks out the previously and characteristically asexual protagonists of the original trilogy by representing them in a mature sexual relationship. This unforced and convincing representation of adult love contrasts markedly, however, with Pullman's emphatic focus on a first adolescent sexual experience as climax to his narrative. Such a relationship can, of course, be represented simply and effectively; witness Laurie Lee's unpretentious yet felicitous couple of lines in Cider with Rosie: “Rosie was close-up … And it seemed as if the wagon under which we lay went floating away like a barge, out over the valley where we rocked unseen, swinging on motionless tides” (209). Pullman, by contrast, is determined to bring in the heavy machinery of a reconceptualized fall to constitute the event as the defining moment of the text. The effect of this strategy is to require a first, tentative venture into sexual experience to bear enormous, indeed improper, pressure as type of emancipated sexuality.

After the fall section of the text, with its central felix culpa, the plot becomes complex. The children find that the precious dust of the universe is leaking away through openings cut for access between its multiple worlds. To prevent this disaster all openings must be shut up, except one, available either for themselves to continue to have access to each other, or for the dead, who will otherwise have no way of escape from the underworld. If the children choose the latter, they will be separated absolutely and irrevocably. This final section of the text thus rewrites, after the fall, the expulsion from paradise. The new felix culpa must come as a shock to readers, but this further reinscription of the biblical palimpsest must come as an equally if not more disturbing one. At the moment the protagonists move from childhood to puberty in their initial adolescent sexual encounter, there is imposed (not morally and causally, as in the Genesis narrative, but with the force of narrative sequence) an immediate interdict against their developing sexual relationship. For a moment of dreaming innocence they are together; then, thrown into an environmental disaster which shatters their Liebestraum, they are wrenched apart in a permanent alienation.

This is not quite the case, for the children are, in fact, confronted by a choice. Young Will is given the opportunity to exercise the will he so recently discovered as the old order collapsed (paralleling Lyra's earlier choice to go to free the dead). In this context for moral beings there is no choice; the averting of universal disaster and the more intimate compassion for the sad shades of the world of the dead constitute an absolute moral imperative. As Will, now assuming fully the role of second Adam to Lyra's second Eve, bitterly but nobly acknowledges: “there was no arguing with fate …” (AS 522). In this situation it is no longer the third chapter of the Book of Genesis that is being reinscribed, but rather the larger Christian mediation of the myth that is being rewritten. As in that more comprehensive worldview “a second Adam to the fight and to the rescue came” (Newman 354), so here the children are confirmed in their larger roles of redeemer and redemptrix.

This may seem to offer a more comfortable turn of events for the reader. After the awkward break with high fantasy conventions in the felix culpa section, these conventions reassert themselves as the actions of the protagonists conform again to the requirements of the heroic epic. The intimate and sexual may have intruded, but are now comprehended within the heroic⁷; it is not, however, quite so straightforward as this. The intensities built into the narrative by the conjunction, on the one hand, of Pullman's use of child—or, more specifically, newly pubescent—protagonists and, on the other, of the sudden, absolute and emotionally crucifying end to their brief encounter with which he contrives to advance the plot, cannot leave any reader comfortable. Why does he deploy such an excessive device?

Perhaps it is a case of Pullman's determination to bend the old myth to his new secular purposes—and the old myth biting back! Pullman takes unusual care and ingenuity to recapitulate all the elements in the action of the myth: so much so that concepts like allegory and palimpsest are required to give a sense of how closely he works with his material. In the logic of the myth the fall-section is followed, causally, by an expulsion-section and, in Pullman's plotting of the new story, the one again follows the other, although the link is simply that of narrative sequence. The effect of thus retaining the sequence of the elements while, however, transforming their content destabilizes the narrative. In the old myth the glory of an unfallen world is eclipsed by a dark, disobedient deed, followed by the grey dawn of a fallen world. In Pullman's rewriting, however, the glory of creation is subsumed in his reconceptualization of the culpa as a felix culpa, the “natural” consummation of romantic love: the new bright dawn of humanity. The effect on the expulsion which follows, then, is to cast this section of the story into darker shadow—and grim occasions arise where the shadows lie. In simple binary terms, the headier the felicitas, the more awful the alienation.

This binary intensification in the rewriting exposes a deep strain of personal alienation in the text as a whole: Will's parents have for years lived solitary lives, separated by accident; Lyra's have been likewise separated, but in their cases by commitment or, rather, vaunting ambition. Most significantly, Mary Malone, the children's mentor, set up to provide a model for the inexperienced children in their garden of Eden, just made for two, turns out to be very much the contemporary single person! For four years she lived with a partner, “‘But then we decided that we'd be happier not living together … And I've got my work … So I'm solitary but happy if you know what I mean’” (AS 470)! What then happens to the children in their expulsion is entirely in keeping with this strain of alienation in the text—as it is cruelly recapitulated on them. After their finding each other and the momentary consummation of their love, with the immediacy of an extreme moral interdict, they are wrenched apart and consigned, irretrievably, to separate homes and separate futures. The effect of the felix culpa as the tenderest but briefest of encounters is thus, ironically, to expose and foreground the general absence of satisfying intimate relations in the new as in the old era.

More searching in its exposure and expression of the feeling-world that Pullman evokes than the miscellaneous epigraphs of the last chapters of the text are lines from one of Arnold's Marguerite poems:

Yes: in the sea of life enisl'd … / We mortals live
alone …
But when the moon their hollows lights
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing …
Oh then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent;
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent.
… A God, a God their severance ruled,
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.(8)

Rather than the brave new secular world, tempered by a touch of realism, that Pullman proposes for his young readers, it is the longing and anguish of an alienated humanity which reverberates in the ideology of his text.

Attention in the coda of the narrative focuses on the reentry of the protagonists into the conventionalities of their separate homes and futures. Lyra, who has been transformed from “the coarse and greedy little savage” we encountered at the beginning of the narrative, is to have a place at a good girls' school in North Oxford as the first step toward becoming a great academic alethiometrist—a composite of Susan Greenfield, Iris Murdoch, et al. Will, since he began as a fine upstanding young British lad, dealing competently with his incompetent mother, always paying his dues and keeping himself clean, continues so to the end—and we assume, from his now confirmed association with Dr. Mary Malone, that he will become first her research assistant … Despite the “many rules and regulations in (our) world” which may temporarily cause them trouble, Will and Dr. Malone exit to the robust British sentiment, “‘Come on, let's go and put the kettle on’” (AS 539-41). The two young people thus embark on conventionally responsible and useful careers in their respective worlds, and “custom” begins to lie upon them “with a weight, / Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life.”⁹

This settling of the protagonists into the custom of their worlds constitutes a further instance of alienation, not in the sense that their work is uncongenial or uncreative—indeed it is likely to be quite the reverse—but insofar as the focus on the individual career and a life lived in the protection of leafy suburbs so easily constitute marks of social alienation in the contemporary world. Their situations are certainly very far from the promise of libidinal social transformation implied by the felix culpa as type and model for all personal relationships—indeed, since the transforming event takes place in a utopian cradle, for all social relations. In ideological terms such closure endorses a Freudian rather than a Marcusan position with regard to the broader issues of sexual liberation: no “libidinous civilization”¹⁰ here; rather, following Civilization and its Discontents, one powered by young people who, after the first blush of sexual experience, settle for the realism of their mentor's single, sublimated, socially responsible and hardworking way of life.

It is for these reasons that the reference to “republic of heaven” in the last sentence of the text rings hollow. The biblical concept which Pullman takes up early in the text is deployed here, after the principal features and values of the new secular humanistic age have been set out, as a rallying call to those who are to build the new society. In the world of heroic adventure mighty victories have been won; the old Authority has been destroyed and the utopian cradle of the new age—indeed, the whole universe of multiple worlds—has been rescued, as the golden dust streams once again in the firmament. Back home, however, little has changed. The Church has waxed and waned (AS 541), and it is not clear whether this constitutes a continuing cycle or a now-terminal process. Any link, however, of such an institution with social regeneration has been severed as its theological underpinning in the Kingdom of God has had to give place to the secular humanist republic of heaven. Its agenda is set out for young readers: “‘No one could (build it) if they put themselves first. We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and brave and patient, and we've got to study and think, and work hard … and then we'll build …’” (AS 548). The list is so entirely uncontentious that no doubt secular humanists, liberal humanists and Christian humanists can all be comfortable with it. Indeed it might well, half a century ago, have appeared unquestioned on one of the pages of a Narnia book!¹¹ This still life of the last page of the text thus hardly supports “the republic of heaven” as a rallying call.

.....

Up to the last chapters of Pullman's text, the rewritten myths, large-scale metaphors and new stories constructed out of elements of old myth have been congruous with other fantasy elements and effective in their metaphorical function. They signal dramatically and powerfully the end of an old era. The conceptual pointing up of these archaic materials in doctrinal language, as well as the use of ecclesiastical discourse, has, however, usually served, less successfully, to restrict rather than extend the range of possible readings, and worse, to expose the texts to contention rather than the free exploration of ideas.

The last intricate rewriting of the myth of the fall, for all its particular felicities, does not prove as effective as the earlier rewritings of myth. It fails to mark a convincing dawn for the new era. It is not so much that its allegorizing threatens to turn it into a looking-glass image of C. S. Lewis's books, but that here the text speaks with two voices. At the end of the story Lyra sits alone, while “somewhere in the garden a nightingale was singing.” It comforts her to think that in Will's parallel Botanic Garden also the bird will be singing. But this touching item of the final tableau also belongs to the archaic world of myth on which Pullman continually draws, incontrovertibly Arnold's Philomela, with her “wild, unquench'd, deep-sunken, old-world pain” (H. S. M. 219). In the tenderly-written and hopeful surface of the narrative, for his young readers, Pullman thus tells it as he is sure it is; in the deeper ideology of the text, however, the longing and anguish of alienated relationships, heard in the inarticulate groans of the old myths and language of religion, still echo clearly—and less assuringly.

Notes

1. The three volumes of the trilogy—Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass—are hereafter abbreviated NL, SK and AS. Northern Lights was published in the U.S. as The Golden Compass.

2. For “High Fantasy,” see “Children's Fantasy,” in the Encyclopaedia of Fantasy, especially Mike Ashley's section on “Otherworlds.” For discussion of the writers named, see Ann Swinfen, In Defence of Fantasy.

3. These categories are drawn from the model of Six Types of Religious Experience of Ninian Smart (19).

4. Thomas Hardy, “Nature's Questioning,” quoted in Gibson 43. This conception of God also owes much to Blake's “Ancient of Days.”

5. More recent relevant discussions may be found in Holistic Revolution, the Essential New Age Reader, in the extracts from Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, and Danah Zohar.

6. Other treatments of the fall myth worked out in novel-length texts provide interesting comparisons: C. S. Lewis's The Voyage to Venus (Perelandra) (1943), and James Blish's A Case of Conscience (1958).

7. The relationship of heroic action and sexual fulfillment is interestingly established early in fantasy texts: “You may take him home now, on Sundays, Ellie. He has won his spurs in the great battle, and is fit to go with you and be a man …” (Kingsley 326).

8. Matthew Arnold, “To Marguerite, on returning a volume of the letters of Ortis” (H. S. M. 135).

9. William Wordsworth, “Ode,” Stanza viii (Gill 300).

10. For a comparison of Freudian and Marcusan views on sexual repression and emancipation, see Leszek Kolakowsky, Main Currents in Marxism: 3 The Breakdown (402-07).

11. For a critique of this type of closure see the suggestive comparison in Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy, the Literature of Subversion (154f).

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