The Golden Compass, part 2

Spoilers, Spoilers, Spoilers:

Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, of which The Golden Compass is the first part, has at its heart a conflict, not between religion and unbelief, but between religious authority and life itself. Pullman’s multiverse–for the books span many universes–finds the forces of reason, knowledge and joy at war with the autocratic Church and its allies. The Church–represented by a version of the Catholic faith, but clearly representing much more than that–is out to destroy all threats to its power, starting with Dust–the mysterious, invisible substance which is drawn to conscious beings everywhere. Children attract some Dust, but only upon puberty is Dust drawn to them as strongly as it is to adults.

The Church sees Dust as original sin and The Golden Compass finds its agents working to protect children from the risk by severing them from their souls. You see, in the world of The Golden Compass souls take physical form as animal companions called daemons. Children’s daemons shift form at will, but when the children hit puberty–as the Dust settles on them–their daemons are transformed into their permanent shape, one which represents who their person will become.

The Church sees a connection between Dust and daemons settling on a single form, and develops a procedure to cut away the daemon, severing children from their souls and protecting them from Dust by making them automatons, capable of following orders but not of independent thought or emotion.

Thus children are protected from the complexities of adult life and are denied their humanity.

It should be obvious now that the Religious Right is in some ways justified in fearing Pullman’s work, as all those who fear to lose their beliefs are threatened by ideas. These novels are not anti-Christian, exactly, but rather they reject the authority of religion to tell us how to live.

The heroes of the novels, Lyra and Will, two children on the verge of puberty, are caught in the midst of a titanic struggle between the Church–servants of the Authority–and the rebels who reject the Authority’s totalitarian agenda.

These novels are, in part, a passionate defense of life itself. Reality is a joyful place, a great interconnected web of matter and consciousness, as Lyra sees clearly without realizing it. Life itself is beautiful, and one need not call on an ultimate power to revel in experience. Which is not to say that there is no suffering: characters die in tragic ways and are often forced to make wrenching choices in a morally complex world. But this does not diminish their experience, but only strengthens it. Anything worth having, we are told, is worth working for, and the great things that make life worth living–wisdom, knowledge, friendship, love–require our complete devotion. Human beings find themselves in a world which is worth having, and so worth fighting for. The enemy are those who tell us the world is evil, that knowledge corrupts, that love is a sin, and that wisdom is indicative of our fallen state.

Pullman posits that life is a glorious experience, the most wonderful one imaginable, and that we must train ourselves to see that, and make our lives and the lives of others worthy of that experience. We must not sit around waiting for the Kingdom of Heaven, but find for ourselves a Republic of Heaven, an enterprise built on knowledge and kindness and love, one built in our world. It is our prerogative and responsibility to be responsible builders and keepers of that kingdom and, as Will and Lyra find out, that is what growing up truly means.

I have never seen in young adult literature a more beautiful and nuanced understanding of reality, consciousness and morality than is found in Pullman’s trilogy. If these are atheist books, they are so because they do not need to posit a god for us to be capable of being fully realized beings. If they are humanist books it is because they recognize our strengths and weaknesses, our moral triumphs and failings, come from our relationships to each other. It is possible, then, to take ownership of our own lives and to become wise, moral actors in a world that demands it of us precisely because no one else can claim it for us. We have what is necessary already inside us, if only we could learn to see it.