[Hookbill the Goomba]

I read the first of His Dark Materials with no real knowledge of who the author was or what his agenda was. By the end of the first and the beginning of the second book I had a pretty good idea of where he was coming from. Perhaps it is naive of me to, but I slowly began to imagine the books not as a story but as a guy stood on a box shouting about how terrible the Church is. I think there is always a problem with writing a story with an ulterior motive which is where Narnia falters in my opinion. I still find the story enjoyable and will read them again and again. But it is a difficult thing to try and get across a message you feel passionately about without being a little overt in its delivery. You fear the risk of being too subtle with what you see as important.

Tolkien approaches the 'deep questions' in the right way, I think. As Davem pointed out, what people assume to be the 'deep questions' (Is there a God? Which one should we worship? and the rest) were not, in his opinion, the best questions to ask. Like the Zen Monk who thought he had found the ultimate question when he asked 'Who am I?' only to be surprised by the reply from within, 'Who's asking?'
By not directly answering the questions of morality or of an afterlife, Tolkien does something brilliant, he leaves it open to more questions. This makes Tolkien's questions much deeper. They are not simply the acquisition of facts, but a search that the reader, if he or she has a mind to, must wrestle with and think about. It is not simply the authors opinion (although that will come into it) but you are open to disagree. To explain; from a point of morality you cannot say that each character always makes the right decision. Sam's prejudice against Gollum could be seen as either a defect or as an insight given later events. You could also see Frodo's trust of Gollum as blindness or kindness born out of the hope to change him. Tolkien seems to question both stances in the story as it plays out.

One must always remember that Tolkien's world is an imaginary one. Although there may be similarities in behaviour or actions to historical, mythical or Biblical events, it is not simply a re-telling of them. It is Tolkien's story and he no doubt wanted his own imagination to play a large roll in the creation of Middle Earth. This doesn't mean there won't be simelarities, but these can only go so far. The fact that the elves always look back on their ancient heroes and the men on their fatherly figures, we cannot automatically assume that such people are Beowulf, or Abraham or someone, they are not. They are their own characters. It may be that the later characters regard these figures in the same light as one may regard Abraham or Beowulf if you happen to believe in them. The same goes for Eru, in my opinion. The point is not if he is God, but how the characters react to him and his work. As George MacDonald said "Attitudes are more important than facts."

In Pullman's work the focus is on disrupting a system he doesn't like. I have no problem with that, people do it all the time. But he criticizes Lewis for doing pretty much the same thing from a different angle. Two armies may critizies one another, I suppose, and be annoyed when they both use similar tactics, but they cannot criticize the tactics because they themselves are using them. This is where Pullman's argument falters, I think. He dislikes Lewis trying to get a message across through his story, yet this is precisely what he is doing.