powerful church in charge, even if it means distorting its founder’s main message at every stage.
‘His Dark Materials’ can be read as a retrospective endorsement of all the misgiving felt by Jesus in TGMJ about the dangers of institutional as opposed to personal religion. Pullman has been criticised for ignoring the more positive side of organised Christianity, with no mention of the church’s role in encouraging art and scholarship in his trilogy, let alone the fine examples set by conspicuously good individual Christians at any stage of history. In TGMJ he half meets this argument, with the angel talking about ‘the desire for beauty and music’ while promising that the new church ‘will inspire all these things, and provide them in full measure’. But on the whole Pullman sticks to his previous anti- clerical mode in this new book, following Blake’s
famous
exhortation to ‘Damn braces. Bless relaxes.’ As a humanist as well as an atheist, he is sure that people are better than they have been told they are by their priests over the centuries.
In his public life since writing ‘His Dark Materials’ Pullman has been both vocal and effective in putting this belief in the positive powers of the individual into action. He has publicly attacked the National Curriculum for the crippling effect it was having when it came to its rigid prescriptions on not just what exactly should be taught in English lessons in the classroom but also how. He also spear- headed the successful revolt against the government’s over- anxious and insulting ordinance that every writer visiting schools should first be security checked for any evidence of sexual deviance.
His feelings about some of the potential dangers that followed in the wake of institutionalised Christianity recently found a cautious echo in Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch’s much praised television series A History of Christianity, also available in book form. As MacCulloch points out, the development of Christianity in the East, where for many years it was not taken up by the temporal powers, was a far more openly spiritual process, focusing largely upon the inspiring examples set by individual saints and monasteries. But once political power and religion came together, as they increasingly did in the West, then some of the very abuses Pullman fulminates against did indeed take place, to the lasting shame of all concerned.
Philip Pullman. Photo by Wolf Marloh.
But while Pullman makes a good case against religious excesses, is he over-optimistic about the human capacity to live together in justice and harmony in a world dedicated only to individual intellectual and emotional freedom? In his Sally Lockhart novels set in late nineteenth-century London, it is humans rather than the church who pay workers starvation wages and rent them houses not fit for animals. His Jewish Socialist hero Daniel Goldberg argues for more controls, not fewer, and it is hard to imagine Pullman approving of any modern right wing government’s insistence on getting rid of various public bodies there to improve living standards. Is this a case, then, of a writer eager to condemn the abuse of power by others while approving of the sort of powers he would wish any state to retain for what he sees as the good of everyone? But what if one person’s powers turned out to be another person’s poison?
This question would matter more if Pullman were writing political treatises rather than brilliant novels. But like many other fine authors he is in his imagination a born anarchist, forever talking up the cause of the individual against the state and on the side of the rebel rather than the ruler. This
scenario always has the potential to make for gripping stories as readers and fictional hero meet in the imagination, fighting their battles together. Writing about heroic authority figures is a far harder task, with a notable absence of any inspiring stories featuring local government officials, committees or indeed parliamentarians. And if there are some occasional inconsistencies in this approach, who cares so long as the stories themselves continue to work?
Pullman is also an optimist at a time when teenage literature is leaning heavily towards ever more descriptions of a sick present and a dismal future. Telling readers that they and indeed the whole of the human race could do so much better freed from a sense of sin is surely a message that also deserves to be heard. In TGMJ Christ ends up bitterly divided against himself, half proud of the story he has created about his brother and half ashamed at the deceit involved. Pullman deserves to feel very much more positive about his own literary achievements than that. n
Nicholas Tucker is
honorary senior lecturer in Cultural and Community Studies at Sussex University.
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is published by Canongate Books (978 1 84767 825 6) at £14.99 hbk. The paperback (978 0 85786 007 1) is available in October at £10.99. ‘His Dark Materials’ (Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass) is published by Scholastic.
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