lapsedmodernist | His Dark Materials. Read it.

I was thinking about how the most radical book(s) I have read in the last year is Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. I read the first one, The Golden Compass last summer, but didn't get to the second and the third volumes until the fall. I think it's funny that all these would-be-book-burning fundamentalist groups are all over Harry Potter, but this trilogy seemingly eluded their radar because it would make them foam at the mouth because its underlying philosophy is explicit secular humanism. It has the intelligence, the sophistication and the ethics of a C.S.Lewis work, but Pullman comes to his ethics via a secular cosmology. It's a "children's book," but only in the sense that it's a fantasy with characters who are 13 years old, and there are talking bears, but I would recomment it to any adult and every kid. Philosophical discussions will ensue.

Here are several reasons why this trilogy rocks,

This book that takes place in a multiple worlds and starts out in an England that's half medieval, half-Edwardian (but in possession of electricity and atomic energy), illuminates the history of the Christian Church in Europe as an oppressive, anti-intellectual brutal force

The final battle that is being waged is against the Authority, which is presumably The Lord, except in a twist it turns out that the Lord is merely the oldest of the angels, and has not been authoritating over anything in a very long time, he is completely senile and is literally preserved inside glass to prevent his physical disintegration upon contact with the elements. When said disentegration actually transpires, it's in a quick, off-hand matter, neither of the characters who free the senile, crying man from his glass coffin and watch him gratefully expire realize that it is God.

Heaven is revealed to be a hellish Hades-like world where ghosts stand forever on a gray plane, enveloped in fog and stench, their daemons (see below) gone, with harpies flying over their heads and literally feeding on their sadness, fears, and insecurities. When all the dead are eventually freed from that world they disintegrate into molecules and feel joy at becoming one with the universe.

The two main protagonists are a girl and a boy, Lyra and Will. Both are smart, brave, self-reflexive and concerned with thinking their moral choices through and through. Both are wonderful role models/characters to identify with for the younger readers of both genders, as opposed to Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, which are both fine works, but the protagonists are boys, and if there are any fantasy books with girls as main characters, I can't recall them right now, and boys wouldn't read them anyway.

The concept of the soul is developed in terms of Jungian animus/anima. Everyone has an externalized soul that accompanies them in the form of an animal. These souls are called daemons. Children's daemons change shape, but once they become adults their shape becomes fixed according to their character and personality. The animals are usually of the gender opposite from their owners, except when they are of the same gender, which creates a casual normalization of homosexuality within that world.

Speaking of homosexuality, there are gay angels and they rock. They are gay in that Tragic/epic/Ancient Greek Achilles & Patrocles kind of way and it's as sweet as it is progressive.

And speaking of sex in general, that's what saves the universe, in the end. The whole garden of Eden subtext in the book obviously favors the loss of innocence and Knowledge, reified as sometimes-anthropomorphic Dust, a.k.a. fundamental particles that in Lyra's world are studied by a heretic branch of science called experimental theology. This Dust, according to church theology, is the manifistation of Original Sin. By the end of the third book the Dust is seeping out of the universe and all vibrancy and lifeforce is in decline. It takes the fall of these 13-year old Adam and Eve to stop this exodus of dust. Even though they are denied a happy ending, they get a better one: an idealistic one that is not cheesy and that is faithful to all the rules previously established by the narrative.

Go read it now.