In my last
two posts, I talked about messages found in modern fantasy fiction (Part 1 |
Part 2). It’s no surprise that, just like some mythology and fairy tales,
writers use the fantasy genre to play with—or convey—morals, ideas, beliefs
and objections that they hold.The next fantasy series that we're going to look at places a strong voice for this author's worldview.
Best
selling author, Philip Pullman, best known for his fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials, lays out a clear
Atheist perspective in his books. The first book, Northern Lights (known as The
Golden Compass in America) starts the trilogy off as a nicely
paced, intriguing kind of “children’s fiction”—showing no clear Atheistic
message. However, toward the end of the book, the reader begins to discover
that “the Church” in the story is not a good institution. Also, when the
character, Lord Asriel, discusses the story of Adam and Eve from the Bible with
his daughter, Lyra, his reading of the 3rd chapter of Genesis (with
added terminology to the biblical verses that support the story that Pullman is writing) leads to dialog such
as:
“But...” Lyra struggled to find the
words she wanted: “but it en't true, is it? Not true like chemistry or
engineering, not that kind of true? There wasn't really an Adam and Eve? The
Cassington Scholar told me it was just a kind of fairy tale.”
Lord Asriel
answers Lyra with:
“The Cassington Scholarship is
traditionally given to a freethinker; it's his function to challenge the faith
of the Scholars. Naturally he'd say that. But think of Adam and Eve like an
imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any
concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can
calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it.”
Lord
Asriel’s analogy using the square root of minus one is what Philip Pullman stated
in an interview in regards to his use of angels, ghosts and daemons in his
trilogy:
“I was asked at one point, why do I,
as a rationalist—a person who believes in reason, and all those things—why do I
write about things like ghosts and daemons…
“One way of explaining that, seems
to me, to compare it to what mathematicians do with entities that can’t exist;
like the square root of minus one. Now, there’s no such thing as the square
root of minus one; it doesn’t make any sense—there can’t possibly be such a
thing. And, yet, if you include it in your calculations, you can come across
all sorts of extraordinary things; like the Mandelbrot Set—extraordinary…infinitely
deep and beautiful picture of wondrous complexity, that was there lurking in
the darkness before we came across it. And we didn’t come across it, until we included
the square root of minus one in our calculations…
“What I do when I’m talking about
ghosts and angels and daemons, and that sort of thing, is much the same sort of
thing. I don’t believe in them. No. Of course not. They can’t exist. And yet,
when I put them in my stories I can do things with them.”
By book two
of the trilogy, The Subtle Knife, the
reader discovers that there is a revolt against the “Authority” (God), much
like what John Milton writes in his epic poem, Paradise Lost. Actually, one could say that Pullman is kind of rewriting Paradise Lost, showing fallen angels and
those that follow in the uprising against the Authority as the good guys. The
Church is seen as an institution of the Authority that suppresses free thought and pushes propaganda to keep the Authority in control. In the
words of one brief character in The
Subtle Knife: “There is a war coming,
boy. The greatest war there ever was. Something like it happened before, and
this time the right side must win. We've had nothing but lies and propaganda
and cruelty and deceit for all the thousands of years of human history. It's
time we started again, but properly this time...”
In The Amber Spyglass, the final book in
the series, the reader finds more of a slower paced and longer book than the
first two, and the Atheist view is much more prevalent than before. There are a
lot more messages in the dialog of the characters, and different secular ideas
mixed into the fiber of the story. The words in this book get a lot more
specific, and a lot less subtle.
In The Amber Spyglass, the rebel angel,
Balthamos, talks about the Authority, saying: “The Authority, God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the
King, the Father, the Almighty—those were all names he gave himself. He was
never the creator. He was an angel like ourselves—the first angel, true, the
most powerful, but he was formed of Dust as we are, and Dust is only a name for
what happens when matter begins to understand itself. Matter loves matter. It
seeks to know more about itself, and Dust is formed. The first angels condensed
out of Dust, and the Authority was the first of all. He told those who came
after him that he had created them, but it was a lie.” The book depicts God
as a fraud, and “Dust,” which is a main focus throughout the trilogy, as true knowledge
and understanding.
Another Atheist view is that there
is no life after death; that when one dies, it’s over. Pullman makes this clear in his third book.
In The Amber Spyglass, the two main
characters, Lyra and Will, journey to the “world of the dead” to find Lyra’s
departed friend. When Will asks another character in the story about what
happens in the world of the dead, the character, Baruch, says, “It's impossible to say. Everything about it
is secret. Even the churches don't know; they tell their believers that they'll
live in Heaven, but that's a lie. If people really knew…” While in the
world of the dead, Lyra and Will are trying to free the ghosts from the world
of the dead, and they come across the ghost of a young woman who had died as a
martyr centuries ago. This ghost woman tells the other ghosts around them: “When we were alive, they told us that when
we died we'd go to Heaven. And they said that Heaven was a place of joy and
glory and we would spend eternity in the company of saints and angels praising
the Almighty, in a state of bliss. That's what they said. And that's what led
some of us to give our lives, and others to spend years in solitary prayer,
while all the joy of life was going to waste around us and we never knew.
“Because the land of the dead isn't
a place of reward or a place of punishment. It's a place of nothing. The good
come here as well as the wicked, and all of us languish in this gloom forever,
with no hope of freedom, or joy, or sleep, or rest, or peace.
“But now this child has come
offering us a way out and I'm going to follow her. Even if it means oblivion,
friends, I'll welcome it, because it won't be nothing. We'll be alive again in
a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we'll be falling in the
raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we'll be glittering in the dew under
the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home
and always was.”
There are other direct hits on the
Christian religion throughout the story. In another part of The Amber Spyglass, another character,
who was once a nun and a scientist, tells the children (Lyra and Will): “I used to be a nun, you see. I thought
physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn't any God at
all and that physics was more interesting anyway. The Christian religion is a
very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all.” Later on, a witch tells
the ex-nun of her encounter with a female (rebel) angel: “Her name was Xaphania. She told me many things...She said that all the
history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity. She and
the rebel angels, the followers of wisdom, have always tried to open minds; the
Authority and his churches have always tried to keep them closed. She gave me
many examples from my world.”
The His Dark Materials trilogy brings readers into a grand journey in
the beginning of the series, but by the third book, the message of the author
becomes way too obvious, and way too heavy; weighing the story with more of the
author’s worldview than true storytelling. In the short video below, Philip
Pullman speaks of his intentions with the series.
In my next post, I will conclude
this series on Messages in Fantasy (at least for now), looking at the other
side of the spectrum, with messages in the works of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of
Narnia.
Inspirations of Fantasy
Inspirations of Fantasy
I thought the same thing, the third book, "The Subtle Knife"...not really all that 'subtle'. He is a brilliant, gifted writer though.
ReplyDeleteGranted I agree that a writer should not seek to "preach" in a novel, but tell a story, a compelling story, one that makes the reader keep coming back for more.
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