God Knows, Philip Pullman

hen the late Jerry Falwell detected hints of homosexual recruitment in the bouncy manner of Tinky Winky from Teletubbies, a PBS show that my youngest son enjoyed in the late 1990s, I took a closer look at the program and decided that the Reverend and I would just have to agree to disagree about this matter.

Nearly a decade later, upon the opening of the film version of The Golden Compass, the first volume in Philip Pullman’s acclaimed His Dark Materials trilogy, another sound bite–savvy Christian, William Donohue of the Catholic League, urged parents to avoid the movie, and he denounced Pullman as a promoter of atheism and an enemy of the Holy See. Fans of the books, here at the Horn Book and elsewhere, rallied around the English novelist. A Catholic theologian wrote thoughtfully in the Boston Globe about the ways Pullman’s work had strengthened her faith in Christianity.

But I think Mr. Donohue was onto something.

Despite his bombast, irksome overreach, and unnecessary appeal for a boycott of the film (its long, dull stretches were sufficient to discourage most ticket buyers), Mr. Donohue gave a fair reading of the moral and philosophical ambition that animates Mr. Pullman’s trilogy. To find in it no call for young readers to reject the divinity of God and spurn organized religion, especially Roman Catholicism, requires the same sort of literary myopia that mistakes Animal Farm for a barnyard tale.

Michael Dirda, the Washington Post’s book critic and an admirer of the series, wrote that its final volume, The Amber Spyglass, “takes on the central religious tradition of the West and finds it wanting — not only wanting, but downright evil. Think of this trilogy as a counterblast to C. S. Lewis’s Christian science fiction and his celebrated chronicles of Narnia. Pullman is of the Devil’s party, William Blake’s party, and he knows it.”

Another Pullman enthusiast, Gregory Maguire, mused in a review that appeared in these pages in 2000, “I’m tempted to roll up my shirtsleeves, light a cigar, splash some Tokay into a glass, and discuss fine points of reason, fancy, and theology before all hell breaks loose — an amusement that, with the publication of the unsettling third volume of His Dark Materials, just may come to pass.”

But the books themselves produced no cosmic bang, not even much of a whimper, until Mr. Donohue checked the coming attractions at his local multiplex. Why the lull? Perhaps many young readers, like my oldest child, lost patience with the trilogy long before its dramatic dethroning of God. Maybe older churchgoers, like me, were distracted by the cheesier heresies of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. As for well-read children’s book professionals, I imagine that few were worried that the institution responsible for the Counter-Reformation couldn’t defend itself.

FAITH IN THE transformative power of literature runs deep in those of us who work with children’s books, but we don’t like to admit that not all change is for the good. In His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman artfully upends the notion that trust in God is the greatest gift a parent can give a child. For some believers, this is merely fodder for discussion. For others, it is the vilest blasphemy, and gravely dangerous. Have these parents been well served by the alarms of Mr. Donahue?

Hell, yes.

Anne Quirk is the publisher of The Horn Book, Inc.