To an industry intoxicated with sophisticated visual effects, Pullman’s creations were irresistible. The daemons of the Holy Church functionaries? They tend to be dogs. In Lyra’s world, a child’s daemon can change form-hers can shift rapidly from moth to ermine to rat, depending on her mood-until its companion hits puberty, at which point it settles as a fitting animal. Trust me, in the novels it all hangs together.) Her most intimate relationship is with her “daemon,” a soul that lives outside the body in animal form. (As with most fantasies, any attempt to summarize plot and character edges too close to Dungeons & Dragons. For a time she finds a surrogate father in Iorek Byrnison, a deposed bear king decked out in metal armor who speeds her through one of several parallel worlds. She cobbles together a family from other brave, reckless cast-offs like herself: a kitchen boy a young, runaway murderer gypsies and witches.
Lyra is the anti-Disney heroine: an unruly, unteachable orphan cared for by the university’s dons who spits and lies her way out of trouble.
#The meaning behind the golden compass 2 series#
The series begins in a parallel Oxford, England, at “Jordan College,” where the familiar and the fantastic coexist. But they, like his adolescent readers, get drawn into his world by his fantastic imagination. Many of Pullman’s avid adult fans seek out his books because of his critique of religion. A six-hour London theater production of the books sold out its entire four-month run even before the reviews were published. In 2001, Pullman became the first author to win the prestigious Whitbread Award for a children’s book- The Amber Spyglass, the third book in the series. As he told The Sydney Morning Herald, he was “saying things that are far more subversive than anything poor old Harry has said.
(More on this later.)įour years ago, before anyone worried about marketing a movie, Pullman wondered why his books hadn’t attracted as much controversy as the Harry Potter series-another Hollywood favorite. The final book climaxes, so to speak, in a love scene that could rattle the sensibilities of an American culture that tolerates even Girls Gone Wild, because in this case the girl is still a few years away from college. His death scene is memorable only for its lack of drama and dignity: The feeble, demented being, called “the ancient of days,” cowers and cries like a baby, dissolving in air.
But in Pullman’s version, God is revealed to be a charlatan more pitiable even than Oz. The series builds up to a cataclysmic war between Heaven and Earth, on the model of Paradise Lost (the source of the phrase his dark materials). The series, known collectively as His Dark Materials, centers on Lyra Belacqua, a preteen orphan who’s pursued by a murderous institution known as “the Magisterium.” Or to use the more familiar name, “the Holy Church.” In its quest to eradicate sin, the Church sanctions experiments involving the kidnap and torture of hundreds of children-experiments that separate body from soul and leave the children to stumble around zombie-like, and then die. Pullman’s books have sold 15 million copies worldwide, although it’s difficult to imagine adolescent novels any more openly subversive.
#The meaning behind the golden compass 2 movie#
From the archives: Dispatch: " Compass Without Direction" (December 5, 2007) The movie version of Philip Pullman's Golden Compass creates a luminous fantasy world, but loses the book's magnetic force of meaning.
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