Philip Pullman's humanist tales of good and evil are a far cry from C. S. Lewis and A. A. Milne. But to the horror of the Religious Right they are a runaway hit
Special report: George Bush's America
Ed Vulliamy in New York Sunday August 26, 2001 The Observer
Surging sales in the United States of books by Philip Pullman - whose The Amber Spyglass has been tipped to become the first 'children's novel' to win the Booker Prize - are subverting the influence of the Religious Right at the moment of its greatest political triumph.
With the sponsorship of the Bush administration, it has laid siege not only to American medicine, politics and academe - making Adam and Eve scientific fact in Kansas - it has also declared holy war on literature, targeting books written for young people. It has even sought to purge tales of witchcraft and magic from library shelves.
Against this tide of orthodoxy, Pullman's books - almost two million of them - have been selling like the fires sweeping the parched plains of the Bible Belt, a fact that gives him considerable satisfaction. In an interview with The Observer , Pullman, who lives in Oxford, said that the Right was striving to establish a hegemony which was 'orthodox, authoritarian doctrine'.
Published last autumn, The Amber Spyglass is the final book in the trilogy. His Dark Materials , which takes its name from Milton's Par adise Lost and also deals with Creation and the fall of man.
It has been described as the most dense and provocative of the three novels: in its 550 pages Pullman contrasts innocence and experience, good and evil. He redefines Mary as a fallen woman and Eve as the redeemer of men, and presents God as an ordinary angel before killing him. The plot is full of fairytale inventions, with witches, armoured bears, tiny spies who travel on dragonflies, and a 'subtle knife' which can be used to cut windows into parallel worlds.
His sales in America are more than just a literary phenomenon. They are a counter-cultural force. 'My experience of America is that it is a pretty conformist country, and that pressure on young people to go to some kind of church, often a fundamentalist one, can be formi dable,' said Pullman. But touring this land he attracts hundreds of devoted fans to every reading and talk he gives. Pullman says: 'Blake once wrote of Milton that he was a "true poet, and of the Devil's party, without knowing it". I am of the Devil's party, and I know it.'
Pullman's US editor, Joan Slatterly, said: 'We were braced for quite a lot of trouble.' But, says Pullman: 'In fact, I've had very little. The people who hate this kind of thing either didn't write to me or didn't read it.'
Not that Pullman has gone unchallenged, as readers' verdicts show. Amazon's Write Your Own Review noticeboards feature some 800 contributions posted for the first volume alone - The Golden Compass (published in Britain as Northern Lights ).
Some are by parents warning others to keep their children away, calling the books 'satanic' or 'dark and terrifying'. But considerably more come from rebellious readers in rural areas, aged from 11 to post-adolescence, many saying they were advised by parents or teachers not to read Pullman's work but ordered it by internet and were duly captivated. They are also intrigued by how his story views much of what they hear in Bible class through a different, vivid kaleidoscope.
'I'm just as interested in the Creation story as the fundamentalists are,' says Pullman, 'but in the part played by the tempter, who leads us to the kingdom of good and evil, which is wisdom, as an act of kindness towards those beings who had been kept as prisoners by the authority.'
The equation of the tempter with sexuality as self-awareness is as essential to Pullman's message as it is anathema to both the Religious Right and the canon of English children's books still idolised in America. It is a heresy in which Pullman delights as he dismisses the icons of that canon, C. S. Lewis - creator of the Narnia Chronicles - and A. A. Milne.
'I hate the Narnia books, and I hate them with deep and bitter passion, with their view of childhood as a golden age from which sexuality and adulthood are a falling away... I was looking at old copies of Punch , when it was infused by A. A. Milne's influence - all those beautifully drawn pictures of cutie little children that would never grow up, being sweetie little things to their mummies and daddies.'
At their core, Pullman's books are profoundly humanistic, says Slatterly - 'about love, seizing the day and being alive'. Pullman says: 'I find it so heartening to get a good response in America when all the signs are of a hegemony developing from the fundamentalist wing. It just shows there are people willing to explore and be more heterodox in their reading and thinking - that they need a bit of wonder and mystery, rather than orthodox, authoritarian doctrine.
'For all the qualities they have, mine are ordinary children who come to realise that the world is a wonderful place; whose destiny is not their birthright. There are no hereditary traditions or magic wands like in Harry Potter. There is the occult, but not in the sense I see in other books. I don't give people magical powers.'
At the end of the trilogy, love - 'the cause of it all,' says Pullman - is something that has to give way to inevitable solitude. But the compensation for loneliness is in life itself: 'The Kingdom of Heaven was over... we shouldn't live as though it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.'
Meanwhile, the Religious Right is politically rampant. Last weekend John Dilulio - entrusted by Bush to run his 'faith-based initiative', whereby social services would be run by religious charities - resigned. The Right had sabotaged his work - he had not been sufficiently orthodox.