The Golden Compass and Beyond

Having heard about the eagerness of Christian groups to condemn the upcoming movie The Golden Compass, I set out to read it. Actually, I listened to it, being hooked on Audible. And then I listened to The Subtle Knife and then I listened to the Amber Spyglass. The versions on I got from Audible are narrated by Pullman himself and an ensemble of actors voice the other parts, Lyra and Roger and Will and so on. It is the best audiobook series I've heard. Pullman is a wonderful imaginative writer and his parallel worlds, especially Lyra's world, are inventive and delightful. His use of imagery from the Christian tradition and esp. from Milton, his reframing of the Fall, (and, indeed, of the harrowing of hell), his invention of an alternative from of physics, referred to as "experimental theology," all are extremely clever. The books are not as funny as Harry Potter but much more subtle and sophisticated. Pullman's universe may be without a theistic concept of God but it is a very moral world. One of the things about the books is that it is not always clear to the main characters or to the readers where good and evil lie. Even though in Lyra's world, people's demons often seem to symbolize their inner state (a particularly unpleasant character who steals the alethiometer in the Subtle Knife, for example, has a snake demon), it is still hard to know whom to trust and what to do. And then there are people like Lyra's mother who seem to be transformed almost despite themselves by the power of love.
Even though it is shelved in the Fantasy/SciFi section of the bookstore, the Golden Compass and its sequels depict very real children caught in a very adult world. Each of the books ends with triumph tinged with grief and loss, much like life, without fairy tale endings.
I'm looking forward to the movie even though it always distresses me to see worlds that exist in my head transformed into pictures. A review said that the movie makes Mrs Coulter, whose hair is black in the books, into a bleached blond (Nicole Kidman) and that Pullman himself is so enthusiastic about the way that the film makers have translated his work that he said that it made him realize that Mrs Coulter's hair really was blond, not black as he had originally thought. I am not convinced. But I cannot imagine that such richly imagined world which invites those who enter it with Lyra to see their own world with new eyes could possibly be bad for anyone. The film, apparently, tones down the anti-organized religion themes. But in the books, esp. in the first one, when one reads about "the Authority" and "the magisterium" they represent a way of being church that no one could possibly defend or seriously believe was the church as we know it. Marcus Borg says that when his students tell him they don't believe in God, he asks them to tell him about the God they don't believe in. That God is cruel and capricious and all about judgement and not love or mercy and Borg says that he doesn't believe in that God either. The church and indeed the whole concept of organized religion Pullman casts as the enemy in this book is not the church I know nor the God I know. Indeed my experience of God is much closer to the rich description in book three of Mary Malone's mystical experiences of dust, her sense of being one with all that is, even if the way that I would frame or describe that experience is in theological terms.