Sooo, a friend of mine, from Oxford no less, highly recommended the His Dark Materials trilogy (which includes The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Something Else) a while back. I have fond memories of children's fantasy lit. Tolkien, Lewis, L'engle, what have you, and I gave some feint interest and shrugged and went on with my life. Then, I bought a book by an old professor and friend, Doug Thorpe, who for me represents a worldview, a time and place of searching, and some proximity to truth. In the book, he has an essay that recounts a camping trip with his wife and daughter during which they discuss the books, the symbolism, its relevance, and I was slightly more intrigued. I didn't want to settle for the movie experience, so sure enough I read the thing, right after re-reading the Hobbit. I had some awkward experiences reading the Hobbit, including shortness of breath, for reasons difficult to describe. I had some memory not only of the story, but in the way I read it the first time, that is, as an 11 year old or so. I had vivid memories of not visualizing the scenes for long stretches and penetrating no further than the printed page, and being bored. Now, going back into a state of childhood ignorance even for a few seconds at a time, just that sense memory, touched some kind of primal fear. On top of that, I'm sure this is the experience of many of my High School students and I feel I have my own mountain to climb. At moments like these I simply want to curl up in a fetal position with some hot cocoa and listen to the rain patter on the roof, but I live in LA, so there is no rain, nothing to till the dry dusty soil, or the dry dusty soul. But anyway, another point to be made is that the reading level of much of the Hobbit is roughly 3rd or 4th grade, spot on for my 11 year old self, but sort of disappointing now. Two many real world referents for a fantasy (the names of the trolls, for example), and a kind of latent classism in the portrayal of the villains. The tone of the whole book is excessively childish until the Riddles in the Dark chapter, when Tolkien finds his voice, which doesn't really come into fine focus until toward the end of the book, where we begin to get lush, detailed descriptions. In more ways than one, this really provides the set up for the Lord of the Rings, not just in terms of story and mythology, which doesn't even quite line up, but in terms of Tolkien teaching himself how to write and finding his voice. Phillip Pullman, by contrast, is an accomplished modern author, who knows how to weave a story together. As much as the story follows the hero's journey formula almost self-consciously, there's good stuff here. Pullman, an English professor in England, posits a kind of poetic worldview, in which symbols and their interpretation lead to truth. Lyra's process may be a kind of divination, and so have parallels to, say, shamanism, but it also parallels the process of close reading. In literary criticism, you let the interrelating symbols of a given text suggest an underlying meaning. The compass also has gears and levers, suggesting that, for Pullman, science can be put to use in service of truth (unlike, say, Tolkien, a sort of Luddite) I haven't finished the series of course, but there is some hint of gnosticism, certainly an anti-organized, oppressive religion message, God does appear, but he is apparently "an aged, spent force" to quote Thorpe. Pullman has received flak for his religious views and the movie was heavily edited to mitigate the criticism, or was it? On a figurative level, the Magisterium still resembles a state church. Yet many of the practices for which they are criticized are hardly modern, such as castrating children to sing for God in the choir, such as abducting children in medieval times. Certainly the church has perpetrated acts of evil over the centuries. I do believe Pullman does the Church some disservice in highlighting a few abominable practices and pretending this encapsulates the church as an institution. One easy counterexample is Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams praising the work. The desire of the establishment to suppress "dust" and Lyra's intuition that it is a good thing, suggest it is itself embodied physical human experience, sensuality, for some, that which makes us essentially human. This is, if anything, a deeply humanist voice. And even if it were blatantly anti-Christian, why silence and suppress, why not engage and respond? This suggests, as Roger Ebert points out, an insecure faith. Why do we treat new movie releases as if they wield some all-persuasive power? If we develop critical skills, we can engage it, taking the good, leaving the bad?
Anyhoo, I'll have to wrap this up later.
links to consider
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=16-08-042-f
http://www.powells.com/authors/pullman.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21595083/
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/enc/stories/s510312.htm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/03/17/bodark17.xml
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