The greatest puzzle of all

Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials, is one the best works written in English in my lifetime.

Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials, is one the best works written in English in my lifetime. He is a truly great storyteller, and the details of his myth, as well as the rich gallery of characters, live forever in the reader’s memory. It upset many religious readers, especially in America, because of the fact that the central villainy of the Gobblers, child-stealers controlled by the Magisterium, are a Blake-inspired vision of Church Christians. (And rather a prophetic picture of what is now revealed on a daily basis in the papers about the activities of the Roman Catholic clergy).

No reader of his trilogy will be surprised by the fact that in his latest book, in which Pullman retells the narratives of the Gospels (apocryphal and canonical), he departs from Christian orthodoxy in a very Blakean direction. Jesus is the heroic visionary who gets crucified for his bold and liberating preaching. Christ is his rather sinister elder brother. In Pullman’s version, he is the elder brother in the prodigal son (old St Joseph is the father) who resents the favour given to the sibling who has broken all the rules. Jesus is born as a result of his 16-year-old mother, Mary, allowing an ‘angel’ into her bedroom while her elderly husband is absent. Christ is the ‘religious’ one who has yielded to all the temptations of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. Lurking in the Garden where his brother’s crucified body is stolen from the Tomb, ‘Christ’ — before it is yet light — bumps into Mary Magdalen, and tells her that she must not touch him because he has not yet ascended to the Father.