Pullman’s Progress
Philip Pullman’s latest book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, is a retelling of the story of Jesus. It is not a children’s book but it does investigate further the critique of organised religion and clerical cover-ups that Pullman first explored in ‘His Dark Materials’ with its unflattering portrait of god. Pullman apparently decided to write it when asked by the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, why having tackled god, he had neglected to write about Jesus. Nicholas Tucker discusses Pullman’s approach.
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hilip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, published earlier this year, received respectful rather than ecstatic reviews. Those expecting something in the same vein as his
superb trilogy ‘His Dark Materials’ may have been particularly disappointed, given that TGMJ, for the sake of brevity, sometimes reads like an extended theological dialogue. But it was never planned as a follow-up to the actual trilogy. This will occur when Pullman’s long promised fourth volume, The Book of Dust, finally gets finished and published. While there may be no queues at bookshops when this happens, with the disappointing box office take- up of the film version of The Golden Compass failing to provide the additional publicity boost enjoyed by J K Rowling and Stephenie Meyer for their best-selling novels, it remains a widely anticipated event for Pullman’s considerable body of existing fans here and abroad.
TGMJ largely rewrites the story of the New Testament, with Mary now giving birth to twins, one named Jesus and the other Christ. Jesus is both the favourite and the most extravert of the two, becoming a mesmerising itinerant preacher once adult. Christ is a quieter, more secretive character, who early on reckons that his brother could one day found a hugely successful church. But when he suggests that it would be a good idea to concoct some miracles by way of spreading his fame even wider and so speeding up the day when this brand new religion could really take off, his brother rejects the idea with contempt.
‘God will bring about his Kingdom in his own way and when he chooses,’ he replies. ‘Do you think your mighty organisation would ever recognise the Kingdom if it arrived? Fool! The Kingdom of God would come into those magnificent courts and palaces like a poor traveller with dust on its feet. The guards would spot him at once, ask for his papers, beat him, throw him out into the street. “Be on your way,” they’d say, “you have no business here.”’
12 Books for Keeps No.184 September 2010 Crowd-pleasing falsehoods
In ‘His Dark Materials’ Pullman says a number of negative things about organised religion in general and God in particular. But he writes nothing about Jesus himself, and to that extent TGMJ does take the main anti-religious theme of his trilogy on a further step. For in this latest version, Jesus once dead becomes yet another casualty of a clerical cover- up. His life story is cunningly re-crafted by his brother Christ in a series of scrolls mixing truth and the type of crowd- pleasing falsehoods needed for a religion to capture the popular imagination. Christ is helped here by his natural talents for Public Relations and also by regular encounters with a smooth-tongued stranger identified as an angel, though whether good or fallen is an open question. Which is better, he had asked Christ, ‘to aim for absolute purity and fail altogether, or to compromise and succeed a little?’ Christ opts for the second choice. So when he hears Jesus on the eve of his arrest publicly denying the existence of God after failing yet again to get any clear messages from on high, Christ takes on the role of Judas. Betraying his brother to the authorities before he can do any more damage to the faithful, Christ then impersonates him in what came to be thought of as the resurrection. The myth is now ready to run, with Christ now busy putting it all into written form.
But he is never easy in his mind, knowing that before his death Jesus foresaw that any church founded in his name would inevitably become an instrument for evil and oppression. As he put it to Christ, ‘as soon as men who believe they’re doing God’s will get hold of power, whether it’s in a household or a village or in Jerusalem or in Rome itself, the devil enters into them. It isn’t long before they start drawing up lists of punishments for all kinds of innocent activities, sentencing people to be flogged or stoned in the name of God for wearing this or eating that or believing the other. And the privileged ones will build great palaces and temples to strut around in, and levy taxes on the poor for pay for their luxuries.’
The new Republic of Heaven
At the end of ‘His Dark Materials’ Lyra looks forward to leaving behind this sort of false religion in favour of the establishment one day of what she gets to call the new Republic of Heaven. Within this, the good angel Xaphania assures her, she and her beloved Will can help others ‘to learn and understand about themselves and each other and the way everything works, and by showing them how to be kind instead of cruel, and patient instead of hasty, and cheerful instead of surly, and above all how to keep their minds open and free and curious.’ There are no details about how such a society would be governed, however, or whether this type of free society could or would come about within this particular fictional framework.
The angel in TGMJ has a different view of what most people are capable of. For him, ‘in daily life people are tempted by comfort and peace; they are a little lazy, a little greedy, a little cowardly, a little lustful, a little vain, a little irritable, a little envious. They are not good for much, but we have to deal with them as they are.’ No wonder he believes that for any real good to come about it is necessary to have an all-
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