[Bêthberry]

This is an interesting approach here,davem, to develop the discussion by comparison with other fantasy writers. However, I think the comparison with Pullman, as represented by the Touchstone article, is perhaps not the only way for a Christian to interpret the Dark Materials trilogy.

I am copying something which Rimbaud sent to some of us, a review of the stage production in London, England of Pullman's trilogy. I think Rimbaud got this from the Guardian but I am not sure. It is written by the current Archbishop of Cantebury, the spiritual head of the Anglican Church and strikes me as being far more astute or perceptive about literature and faith than the Touchstone article, but this is simply my opinion.

'A near-miraculous triumph'

Archbishop Rowan Williams reveals how it felt to see religion savaged and God killed in His Dark Materials

Wednesday March 10, 2004

In the interval of the second part of His Dark Materials, I found myself surrounded by a lively school party from Essex wanting to know what I thought of it so far. Was I shocked? No. But wasn't it about killing God? Yes - but which God is it who gets killed? Is this what a believer would recognise as the real God? This set some animated discussion going: some of the group had noticed the scattered hints that "the Authority" in Philip Pullman's story had arrogated power to himself, or that he was not the actual creator.

And that is the kind of discussion that I think the drama ought to provoke. Nicholas Wright's version of Pullman's story in fact brings into sharper focus some of these issues. It is clear very early on that there is a plan to overthrow the Authority and that the Church is aware of this and determined to prevent it. What takes Pullman a long stretch of very subtle development to uncover is here foregrounded almost at once. But what kind of a church is it that lives in perpetual and murderous anxiety about the fate of its God?

What the story makes you see is that if you believe in a mortal God, who can win and lose his power, your religion will be saturated with anxiety - and so with violence. In a sense, you could say that a mortal God needs to be killed, from the point of view of faith (as the Buddhists say: "If you meet the Buddha, kill him"). And if you see religious societies in which anxiety and violence predominate, you could do worse than ask what God it is that they believe in. The chances are that they secretly or unconsciously believe in a God who is just another inhabitant of the universe, only more powerful than anyone else. And if he is another inhabitant of the universe, then at the end of the day he just might be subject to change and chance like everything else. He needs protecting: churches are there to keep him safe.

I read the books and the plays as a sort of thought experiment: this is, after all, an alternative world, or set of worlds. What would the Church look like, what would it inevitably be, if it believed only in a God who could be rendered powerless and killed, and needed unceasing protection? It would be a desperate, repressive tyranny. For Pullman, the Church evidently looks like this most of the time; it isn't surprising that the only God in view is the Authority.

Like some of the Gnostic writers of the second century, Pullman turns the story upside down - the rebels are the heroes. Unlike them, though, this is all done to reaffirm the glory of the flesh, the actuality of here and now. The Harpies guarding the land of the dead find peace and nourishment only in stories of the actual, the everyday, in the wonder of the utterly ordinary. The scene where Lyra pacifies these monsters (far more frightening in the book than the play, because the book can show how they activate the inner devils of self-doubt or self-loathing) by talking of children's games in Oxford is intensely moving.

The dramatised version also highlights and simplifies the most ambitious metaphor in the books: Dust. Dust is precisely the glory and vitality of the ordinary; if you try to live in more than one world, Dust drains away, from the individual and from the world as a whole. So the knife that cuts doors between the worlds has to be broken. The whole story is about the triumph of Dust, of the glory of the everyday. Dust is threatened from one side by the Authority and the Church, who fear the everyday and its contingency, who fear even more the risk of error and tragedy that are part of the everyday, part of adult experience. They want to prevent real decision-making, with its potential for loss and betrayal. But Dust is also threatened by those who want to obliterate the consequences of once-and-for-all decisions, and once-and-for-all death, by making possible an endless retreat into alternative worlds. Dust is somewhere between repression and empty or uncommitted liberty, a danger to both - between premodern absolutism and the postmodern aversion to history and personal psychology.

Pullman is very much a celebrant of a kind of modernity, in that sense. What he does for the religious reader/spectator is to prompt the question of how this sort of modernity (a word that theologians these days often don't like) may converge with some accounts of what a settled religious life entails: acceptance (not passivity); the monitoring of fantasy for the sake of adult responsibility; but also the sense of hidden glory pervading the environment, the beauty that is open to Christian theoria and Buddhist mindfulness. The life-sustaining energy of being itself becomes invisible, even blocked off and ineffectual, if there is always an escape from the unwelcome here and now, an escape that the human will can manipulate. If anything, Wright's drama, by pushing the characters of Asriel and Mrs Coulter just a bit more towards conventional romanticism, weakens Pullman's unsparing portraits of the moral ambivalence of these liberators. Timothy Dalton and Patricia Hodge turn in what the director calls "high-definition" performances, which I felt made them less interesting, less mysterious.

Repressors and would-be liberators are equally merciless to the individual; that is why Lyra's life is at risk from both sides. As Lyra, Anna Maxwell Martin manages flawlessly the shifting perspective of a child "on the cusp" of adolescence, and the fusion of profound strength with emotional openness that is Pullman's greatest achievement in creating this unforgettable character. Dominic Cooper as Will lacks the stolid, taciturn integrity of Will in the books, but their relationship works on stage.

Overall, the stage version is a near-miraculous triumph. It may well end up with Brook's Midsummer Night's Dream or Nicholas Nickleby as one of those theatrical experiences that justifies the whole enterprise of live theatre in our day. Of course, there are failures. The angels were disappointingly unmysterious, left only with a rather querulous dignity, which didn't allow much room for the seriousness of their mutual love. The death of the Authority lost all its pathos; Pullman manages the remarkable feat of making it both a matter of chance and a moment of disturbing poignancy, all the more poignant for not being fully grasped by the children at first. On stage it was flat to the point of being almost comical. But so much was so well-imagined, not least the realisation of the daemons and the evocation of different universes.

I said earlier that it rather underlined some of the themes in Pullman that should prevent us just concluding that this is an anti-Christian polemic. Pullman's views are clear; but he is a good enough writer to leave some spaces. This is a church without creation or redemption, certainly without Christ; it was interesting that on stage the ritual gesture of the clergy was not the sign of the cross but a sort of indeterminate marking of the brow, as if to acknowledge that this is not simply the historical Church. Pullman's most overt attempt to connect the Church of Lyra's world with ours is in the character of Mary Malone, the ex-nun, whose adventures form one of the main strands (beautifully imagined) in the third volume. Wright removes her entirely - understandably in terms of narrative economies, sadly in terms of the human depth and warmth of the story, and provocatively in allowing that bit more distance between the historical Church and the alternative.

But this should not be read as a way of wriggling out of Pullman's challenges to institutional religion. I end where I started. If the Authority is not God, why has the historic Church so often behaved as if it did indeed exist to protect a mortal and finite God? What would a church life look like that actually expressed the reality of a divine freedom enabling human freedom?

A modern French Christian writer spoke about "purification by atheism" - meaning faith needed to be reminded regularly of the gods in which it should not believe. I think Pullman and Wright do this very effectively for the believer. I hope too that for the non-believing spectator, the question may somehow be raised of what exactly the God is in whom they don't believe.