The Golden Compass

[yendi]

At least two of you have already posted this link from today's Boston Globe, but it deserves more reading:

BU Visiting Assistant Professor Donna Freitas on the Golden Compass.

Two quotes:

"But to reduce Pullman to these few juicy sound bites is to ignore the whole of a complex, exuberantly curious intellectual who has infused his writing with a complex, crisply rendered theology."

"The book's concept of God, in fact, is what makes Pullman's work so threatening. His trilogy is not filled with attacks on Christianity, but with attacks on authorities who claim access to one true interpretation of a religion. Pullman's work is filled with the feminist and liberation strands of Catholic theology that have sustained my own faith, and which threaten the power structure of the church. Pullman's work is not anti-Christian, but anti-orthodox."

Comments

[eustaciavye.livejournal.com]

Wow. Well put. I should give her a cookie :)

[stevietee.livejournal.com]

Exactly!!

[auryn29a.livejournal.com]

huh. After having just read the entire trilogy, I have to disagree with the article. I never got the impression that Dust is the true God. In fact, it's quite clear that Dust is sin. Dr. Malone asks it what it is when she's hooked up to that machine and it says that it's made of angels who gave intelligence to mankind out of vengeance. And I thought that rocked. And I do not remember Dust being called "she."

I really enjoyed reading these books. The story is complex and it's hard to call any person really good or evil. In fact, the story isn't about a war between good and evil. One of the characters even says it's part of a long struggle between wisdom and stupidity. The Authority wants to keep everyone innocent and docile and easy to control. The rebel angels disagree.

Maybe I just don't see the point in looking for God in Dust. I don't see why there needs to be one.

[ewin.livejournal.com]

Oh, piffle. Pullman himself wouldn't quibble like that. It's RELIGION he's against, not orthodoxy. And it ain't an abstraction he attacks in the books, it's a highly corporeal God Person.

I told my very-Baptist mother that I had no trouble reading the books, as a believer, because frankly once Pullman got to the part about God, I said, "Well, if I thought that's what God was, I'd want Him dead, too." Then I also told my very-Baptist mother that I thought it was an act of purest insanity to make these books into movies, and that if they go beyond the relatively swashbuckling and approachable first novel, I intend to go hide somewhere until the screaming stops.

As a book sales pitch, this has been awesome. But I frankly don't think that Adventures in Preteen Sexuality and How it Saves the Universe from God is an idea whose time is come in this particular culture at this particular time. And I'm also just a little bit sick of all the stupid movies that get made with the uncomfortable sexual bits edited out. We are too squeamish at this time... so why not just leave it a book?