Don't Worry, You Can Take the Family

The Golden Compass

The New York Sun, December 7, 2007

It is a measure of the genius of the British novelist Philip Pullman that when, less than 30 pages into his book "The Golden Compass," 12-year-old Lyra Belacqua angrily objects to the refusal of her (supposed) uncle Asriel to take her to the frozen, fabled northlands, most readers will understand and agree with her. "I want," protests Lyra, "to see the Northern Lights and bears and icebergs and everything." And so, you just know, do you. Disappointingly, despite some excellent special effects (the bears, a race of gigantic, heavily armored ursine warriors, have to be seen to be believed) and a remarkably assured performance by the no less remarkably named Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra, the new film by Chris Weitz based on Mr. Pullman's novel never manages to generate, or satisfy, that same sense of anticipation.

In part, this was inevitable. When it comes to conjuring another world, the very literalness of computer-generated imagery can conspire against it, especially when it has to compete with author-generated imagery such as this:

…The main interest of the picture lay in the sky. Streams and veils of light hung like curtains, looped and festooned on invisible hooks hundreds of miles high or blowing out sideways in the stream of some unimaginable wind…

When Mr. Pullman is good, he is very good. The film, by contrast, is just okay.

Mr. Pullman also doesn't patronize. He doesn't think of himself as a "children's writer," with all the title can sometimes imply. His portrait of that other, parallel world, is a fascinating, glittering, mixed-up what-might-have-been of ancient and modern, of Charles Dickens, of H.G. Wells, of the brothers Grimm, of the "Edda," and of who knows what else. It is heavily layered, marvelously complex, and described throughout with a madcap erudition that adds to its magic. The movie, however, is far simpler, dumbed-down, even.

This, too, was probably inevitable, both for reasons of pacing (only so much detail can be packed into two hours) and, more critically, commerce. "The Golden Compass" is being marketed as a holiday movie appealing to all youngsters, not just the early-to-mid teenagers who were the original novel's natural readership. It also has to be, to use the dread euphemism, family friendly. Thus, for example, the book's references to castration have been, well, cut, and, in recognition of the fact that butchered tykes haven't been Christmas fare since Herod, so have (more or less) its dead children. Overall, the film is more upbeat than the novel, and its characters less morally ambiguous.

This may relieve some parents, but it doesn't excuse the performances turned in by some key cast members, notably Nicole Kidman, a peculiarly stiff and dismayingly unconvincing principal villain, and the unforgivably hokey Sam Elliott. As aeronaut Lee Scoresby, Mr. Elliott is meant to be this movie's Han Solo, but he comes across as Colonel Sanders with a six-shooter. Then there's Daniel Craig, an oddly bland Asriel, but the blame for that lies with the script, not 007.

Fortunately, these weaknesses are offset by Ms. Richards's Lyra, who is sly, determined, awkward, and brave, a character with just the right hint about her of the first, and finest, of such heroines: the little girl who tumbled down a rabbit hole one-and-a-half centuries and one dazzling imagination ago. And Ms. Richards is not alone. In particular, she is ably assisted, both in her mission (like many works of fantasy, "The Golden Compass," which is the first installment in a trilogy, revolves around a quest) and in helping the movie along by Jim Carter, who is impressive and imposing as John Faa, Lord of the Gyptians.

The Gyptians are a half-tolerated, half-outlawed people who have managed to retain a degree of independence in the constricted, caste-hobbled, and authoritarian England of Pullman's vision. That's no mean feat: The country, and much of the world, is dominated by the sinister Magisterium, an organization determined to enforce its own brand of ideological conformity. Revealingly, Christopher Lee, saturnine and urbane, is its First High Councilor. Sadly, we don't see that much of him. For a fuller idea of the Magisterium's nature, we have to look to Simon McBurney, who is painfully watchable as the insinuating and shifty Fra Pavel. Pavel is a sort-of-priest with more than a suggestion of the Inquisition about him. He's also a reminder of why Mr. Pullman has so enraged such dime-store Savonarolas as the Catholic League (boycott the movie!), Focus on the Family (boycott the movie!), and the Halton (Ontario) Catholic District School Board, which has pulled Mr. Pullman's books from its library shelves for "review."

This is absurd, but predictable. Mr. Pullman is a dogmatic, rather insistent, and very public nonbeliever, and, like most preachers, when it comes to the topic of the big man upstairs, he's a bit of a bore. Mercifully, there's little of this in the first novel (and almost nothing in the film), but the trilogy as a whole does end badly, not only for God, but for the reader, its literary merits overwhelmed by its author's lunatic-on-the-subway determination to get his atheistic message across again and again and again. For this reason, the filmmakers' decision to make the Magisterium much less of a representation (or caricature, take your pick) of the Catholic Church bodes well for the sequels to come.

To be sure, Mr. Weitz's Magisterium still has a whiff of cloister and incense about it, but that's beside the point. It is principally attacked not for what it believes, but for how it believes, for its insistence that it has sole access to the truth, and for its intolerance of dissent. Its scheme to, quite literally, reduce most of mankind to the level of children — pliable, credulous, and incapable of self-determination — makes good sense both as drama and, yes, as warning. We live, after all, in an era when religious fundamentalism is on the march in our world as well as in Lyra's.

Sunday School for Atheists

National Review, March 25, 2002

The His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman was, some said, the moment that literature for the young finally came of age. On January 22, Philip Pullman, a children's writer (although he objects to that label), was awarded Britain's prestigious Whitbread prize for the final installment of his best-selling His Dark Materials trilogy. In the opinion of the judges, The Amber Spyglass was Britain's book of the year. It was an unprecedented honor for a work aimed at younger readers, but Pullman is a man who must be getting used to praise, and not just in Britain. His writing has been described as "very grand indeed" in the New York Times, while reviews in the Washington Post have included adoring references to the "moral complexity" and "extravagant . . . wonders" to be found in Pullman's work.

There can, indeed, be little doubt that the first book in the trilogy. The Golden Compass, is a masterpiece, a sparkling addition to the canon of great children's fiction that leaves poor Harry Potter helplessly stranded in the comparative banality of his Platform 9-3/4. Within the time it takes to read his first few, skillfully drawn pages, Pullman takes us into a beguiling parallel universe. His spikily endearing heroine, 11-year-old Lyra, lives in an England that is a curious blend of the Edwardian and the modern. It is a place where the boundaries between what we would think of as the natural and the supernatural are blurred, no more distinct than the fraying edges of the alternate realities that Pullman describes so well. In Lyra's world every person has a daemon: a companion in animal form, part soul, part familiar spirit. There are witches in Lapland, and the most feared warriors in the North are a rampaging race of armor-clad bears, ursine Klingons who have fallen into decadence under the rule of a corrupt and vicious usurper.

In constructing this captivating, fascinating fantasy, Pullman has pillaged the past and looted from legend. He is a magpie of myth, an author whose work borrows from saga, folklore, and some delightfully obscure parts of the historical record, and, oh yes, he can write.

Lyra raised her eyes and had to wipe them with the inside of her wrist, for she was so cold that tears were blurring them. When she could see clearly, she gasped at the sight of the sky, The Aurora had faded to a pallid trembling glimmer, but the stars were as bright as diamonds, and across the great dark diamond-scattered vault, hundreds upon hundreds of tiny black shapes were flying out of the east and south toward the north. "Are they birds?" she said. "They are witches," said the bear.

That literature of this, well, literacy is being written for the young (Pullman's target audience begins at around 11, Lyra's age) is wonderful. And finding a large market for it in this grunting, ineloquent era is little short of a miracle. More than a million copies of Pullman's books have been sold in the U.S., and the same again in his native Britain.

Their author, however, would be a little uneasy to hear the use of that word "miracle." For he is, alas, a man with a message, and by the end of the trilogy the message has drowned out the magic. Narrative thrust is abandoned in favor of a hectoring, pontificating preachiness-—which has itself probably played no small part in the rise of Pullmania among the chattering classes on both sides of the Atlantic.

Pullman, you see, is a man with an apse to grind. He hates the Church, and he hates it with a passion. This is an unusual fixation for someone from the scepter'd isle; most of the English are rather relaxed about religion, tending to lack strong views about the matter one way or the other. Our predominant faith is a benign, "play nice" agnosticism, vaguely rooted in the Anglican tradition. Metaphysical debate is as foreign to us English people as a sunny day in November.

Philip Pullman is made of more strident stuff. He wants, he once told the Washington Post, "to undermine the basis of Christian belief." This is an immodest ambition even for a winner of the Whitbread prize, and the rationale behind it seems crude, no more sophisticated than that of the high-school heretic, and gratingly simplistic from such a clever writer. The history of the Christian Church is, Pullman intones, a "record of terrible infamy and cruelty and persecution and tyranny." True, to an extent; but the full story is a little more complex than that. It is no surprise to discover that C. S. Lewis is a particular bogeyman: Pullman claims to hate the Narnia hooks "with deep and bitter passion." Among other offenses, Lewis apparently celebrated "racism [and] misogyny"—a choice of thought crimes that reveals the supposedly skeptical Mr. Pullman as a loyal follower of a very orthodox form of political correctness (the inquisitorial piety of our own time). PC's dismal spoor can be found throughout his books, a spot of class hatred here, a little global warming there.

And, above all, there is his omnipresent attitudinizing vis-a-vis religion. It's not so much the role of a wicked Church that is the problem (malevolent clergymen with twisted creeds are nothing new in fiction), but the tiresome little lectures that come with it. So, for example, in The Subtle Knife a speech attacking the sinister Church of Lyra's world becomes an attack on all churches everywhere: "Every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling." There is plenty more of the same, crude, nagging, and bombastic, its form objectionable, whatever one might think of the content. In writing his tales of Narnia, C. S. Lewis may also have been a man on a mission, but at least he had enough respect for his readers to prefer allegory and parable to assertion and propaganda. It is worth remembering that, compared with Pullman, Lewis was writing for a much younger audience, children of an age at which it is quite possible to read and reread the Narnia adventures and miss most or even all of the Christian references; aged eight or nine, I did. Nevertheless, Lewis was content to leave his message oblique; Pullman never allows his readers such freedom.

Despite these concerns, the second book. The Subtle Knife, remains imaginative and alluring if less startlingly original than its predecessor, and still able to survive increasing amounts of its author's pedestrian philosophizing. By the end of The Subtle Knife, however, it is becoming painfully apparent that Pullman's overall theme (basically, a variation on Paradise Lost) is unlikely ever to soar; a devastating weakness in a work that, like many epics, is structured as a quest. The Amber Spyglass, the allegedly grand finale of the series, is intended to bring resolution, but it is difficult to care. The object of Lyra's quest remains (at best) obscure and (at worst) highly pretentious, an unholy grail that simply does not engage the imagination.

When I asked 11-year-old Holly, the daughter of some friends, what she thought of these books, she said that they were "well-written." The story itself didn't quite catch her attention.

Dust is to blame; The Amber Spyglass is a book in which, despite some sporadically spectacular passages, any real sense of excitement is, quite literally, ground into Dust. Scattered over page after wearying page, this endlessly discussed "Dust" is the substance that represents consciousness in Pullman's universe, but it runs the risk of inducing unconsciousness in his youthful and, doubtless, exhausted readership.

And there is, unfortunately, no escaping it. For there is Dust to be found in every nook and cranny of this wordy, wordy, wordy culmination of Pullman's three-volume morality play, which is, at its core, nothing less than an assault on the notion of Original Sin. In the end, the assault takes very literal form: After a battle that rather uneasily combines elements of Star Wars with the Book of Revelation, God (or, at least, an entity who is clearly meant to the the Christian God) is overthrown, the underworld is liberated, and a "Republic of Heaven" is proclaimed.

The true nature of this apparently marvelous republic is never made clear. It may be the materialist heaven on earth, but there are also hints that it could be the New Age's goblin-infested alternative, that empty-headed, shallowly superstitious zone where everything, and nothing, is sacred. It makes for a somewhat frustrating conclusion to this very frustrating trilogy, a flawed, fascinating creation of great promise that is eventually brought down by its tendency to go too far—much like naughty old Adam himself, as Philip Pullman would never say.