Philip Pullman, Boogeyman Du Jour

I got one of "those" e-mails over the weekend. You know, the alarmist ones circulated by either well-meaning or propagandistic Christian e-mailers about the latest horrible threat to all things Christian. This one is about a new movie The Golden Compass, set for December release and starring Nicole Kidman. The Golden Compass is the movie adaptation of the first book in the His Dark Materials trilogy written by children's author Philip Pullman.

The e-mail (with errors included) states that Pullman is "a proud atheist who belongs to secular humanist societies ... hates C. S. Lewis's Chronical's of Narnia and has written a trilogy to show the other side." It continues with "The movie has been dumbed down to fool kids and their parents in the hope that they will buy his trilogy where in the end the children kill God and everyone can do as they please." The alarm culminates with Pullman and the movie-makers "hoping that unsuspecting parents will take their children to See the movie ... then the children will want the books for Christmas. That's the hook. Pullman says he wants the children to read the books and decide against God and the kingdom of heaven."

So competing for our Halloween fright, we have an accusation of a plot by an atheist author and the "liberal Hollywood elite" to infiltrate the minds of American youth with a major studio movie that has a supposed anti-God subtext, released just in time for Christmas. How many buttons can you push at one time?

A Google search of Philip Pullman reveals the literary success of His Dark Materials (information that my bookaholic wife already knew). The protagonist of His Dark Materials is Lyra, who encounters witches, armored bears, an ominous church called the Magisterium, and travel between parallel worlds. The Golden Compass (U.S. title, original British title Northern Lights) won the Carnegie Medal for children's fiction in 1995; The Amber Spyglass, the third book, was awarded both the 2001 Whitbread Prize for best children's book and the Whitbread Book of the Year in January 2002, the first children's book ever to receive that award. His Dark Materials achieved popular acclaim in 2003, and Pullman shared the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for children's literature in 2005.

That search also turned up a New Yorker magazine article from December 26, 2005 with an interesting, deft insight into Pullman's avowed atheism. In it, Pullman is giving a speech at an English university and relates to a tombstone of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century woman who, according to the inscription, "shone with superior Lustre and Effect in the great School of Morals, the THEATRE." Amid chuckles at the thought, Pullman insisted such a notion of the theater wasn't ironic -- “We learn from Macbeth’s fate that killing is horrible for the killer as well as victim,” he said, then read a passage from Jane Austen's “Emma” where the heroine is mortified when Mr. Knightley reproaches her for mocking the babbling Miss Bates. Pullman said scripture need not be consulted, for “we can learn what’s good and what’s bad, what’s generous and unselfish, what’s cruel and mean, from fiction.” The New Yorker also quoted Pullman from an unnamed newspaper column that “‘Thou shalt not’ might reach the head, but it takes ‘Once upon a time’ to reach the heart.”

Such a School of Morals, Pullman continued in his university speech, is inherently ambiguous, dynamic, and democratic -- a “conversation.” Opposed to this ideal is theocracy, which demonstrates “the tendency of human beings to gather power to themselves in the name of something that may not be questioned.” Interestingly, Pullman put Khomeini's Iran and the explicitly atheist Soviet Union together as examples of theocracy. He stated that man's impulse toward theocracy will defeat the School of Morals in the end, then continued “But that doesn’t mean we should give up and surrender. . . . I think we should act as if. I think we should read books, and tell children stories, and take them to the theatre, and learn poems, and play music, as if it would make a difference. . . . We should act as if the universe were listening to us and responding. We should act as if life were going to win. . . . That’s what I think they do, in the School of Morals."

Perhaps Philip Pullman is a boogeyman to some, much like J. K. Rowling became when Harry Potter books got wildly popular and the narrow minded among us thought it all a glorification of witchcraft. But I'd rather believe in Pullman's "as ifs" than Rick Santorum's "thou shalt nots" any day. In a far-too-often cynical world, that spirit of resilient optimism slogging through life's mysteries is sorely needed.