The quote "My books are about killing God" is from a 2003 interview with
the Sydney Morning Herald. Here's the link:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/12/1071125644900.html
Anne-Marie Gordon
agordon@livoniacsd.org
Library Media Specialist
National Board Certified Teacher
Livonia Primary School, Livonia, NY
http://classrooms.livoniacsd.org/agordon
http://squareone.pbwiki.com
>>> "Brown, Linda" <lbrown@JONESVILLESCHOOLS.ORG> 10/29/07 11:53 AM >>>
I received the warning email from my sister. I asked if she had read
the books, and of course she hadn't. I've read all three. After seeing
the claim that Pullman reportedly said that his books are about killing
God, I looked at every interview transcript I could find that featured
direct quotes from the author. None that I saw featured that line. As
a Christian, I'm still not sure why some other Christians are threatened
by works of fiction. I would think the chance to discuss religious
themes and ideas would be welcome, but maybe that's just me.
I prepared a synopsis of excerpts from several interviews, some of which
cover the religious question and sent that back to my sister. I
challenged her to forward the information to as many people as she sent
the warning. My hope is that maybe somebody will read the books and
make their own, informed decision. The excerpts are below if you're
interested. (I didn't cite sources because I thought I was only sending
the excerpts to a relative, not a professional group.)
Linda Wilson-Brown
Teacher/Librarian
Jonesville High School (MI)
lbrown@jonesvilleschools.org
Philip Pullman: "The trilogy known as HIS DARK MATERIALS didn't have
that name in my mind from the start. In fact it didn't have a name at
all; it was just 'the big book'. When I'd finished the first volume and
was talking about it with David Fickling, my British publisher, we tried
various names and couldn't find one that worked. I knew that the trilogy
needed a name, and that each of the books needed its own separate name
too (I don't like numbers in titles: THE GODFATHER PART TWO, and so on.
Just a fad. But it's my fad). So: what should they be called?
My first discovery was the phrase THE GOLDEN COMPASSES (plural, note).
This comes in Milton's Paradise Lost, a poem which inspired me a great
deal. The line refers to the Son of God taking 'the golden compasses,
prepared / In God's eternal store, to circumscribe / The universe, and
all created things."
In other words, these were compasses to draw a circle with, not a
compass to find your way with. I liked the phrase, and the trilogy
became temporarily, during the publication process, The Goldem
Compasses. And we finally settled on Northern Lights for the title of
the first book.
Meanwhile, in the US, it was being read by the editors at Alfred A.
Knopf. Someone decided (mistakenly, but firmly) that the title referred
to Lyra's alethiometer, which could be regarded as a sort of golden
compass, but of the direction-finding and not circle-drawing sort. So
the same someone or another someone decided to refer to the first book,
for their own internal discussing-a-forthcoming-book purposes, as THe
GOLDEN COMPASS.
Meanwhile, back in the UK, I had found the much better phrase, HIS DARK
MATERIALS, for the title of the trilogy. I quote the passage from which
it comes at the very beginning of the first book. Better, because it's
more atmospheric, and there's the uncanny resemblance to 'dark matter',
which figures largely in the story. So out went THE GOLDEN COMPASSES,
and in came HIS DARK MATERIALS.
Meanwhile, back in the USA, the publishers had become so attached to THE
GOLDEN COMPASS that nothing I could say could persuade them to call the
book NORTHERN LIGHTS. Their obduracy in this matter was accompanied by
such generosity in the matter of royalty advances, flattery, promises of
publicity, etc, that I thought it would be churlish to deny them this
small pleasure.
So that's it. The fact that all three titmore than a coincidence, though it does
make a nice pattern. Before I'd
finished the third one, the artist Eric Rohmann, who drew the wonderful
covers the books had in their first Knopf editions, asked what the third
book would be called, and before I could tell him, volunteered THE
SOPHISTICATED MONKEY-WRENCH.
One tiny final thing: my first suggestion for the third book was THE
LACQUER SPY-GLASS. My editor at Knopf, Joan Slattery, pointed out that
this might be mis-heard as LACK OF, and that made sense to me; so it
became AMBER instead."
Are people with same-sex dæmons gay?
"It was clear to me from the beginning that occasionally someone might
acquire a daemon of the same sex. What might that mean? I don't know
everything it might mean; it could mean something about their own
sexuality, or it might mean something quite different. It's one of the
many things I don't know fully about my world. Similarly with how
daemons are born. There wasn't actually any part of the story that
depended on my studying daemonic gynaecology, so I didn't go into it."
-Will there be any more books?
Yes. But no reunion of Will and Lyra. There will be two companion novels
to the trilogy - Lyra's Oxford
<http://comet1.jonesvilleschools.org/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.bridgetothestars.net/index.php?p=lyrasoxford>
has already been published and The Book of Dust
<http://comet1.jonesvilleschools.org/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.bridgetothestars.net/index.php?p=bookofdust>
is tentatively slated for a release some time in 2005. Lyra's Oxford is
a short story about Lyra four years after the end of The Amber Spyglass
(along with 'materials' that have slipped between Lyra's world and our
own, such as a postcard... it also includes woodcut illustrations by
John Lawrence), while The Book of Dust will be a collection of stories
and information about the worlds of His Dark Materials (such as how Lee
and Iorek met, or the Creation myth for Lyra's world). Lyra's Oxford
came out on October 29th 2003. No date has been announced yet for The
Book of Dust.
-What influenced His Dark Materials?
Pullman's main influence for His Dark Materials is the 17th century epic
poem 'Paradise Lost' by John Milton. He also cites Blake, Virgil, and
Homer as influences, and Von Kleist's essay, 'On the Marionette Theatre'
-What does he believe?
"I know full well that the total amount of the things I know is a tiny
little pinprick of light compared with the vast unlimited darkness that
surrounds it - which is all the things I don't know. I don't know more
than a tiny fragment of what it's possible to know about this world. As
for what goes on outside it in the rest of the universe, it's a vast
darkness full of things that I don't know. Now, somewhere in the things
that I don't know, there may be a God.
But if we come down - like coming close up with a camera - getting
closer and closer to this little pinprick of light, so that it begins to
expand and gets bigger and bigger until we find ourselves inside it... I
can see no evidence in that circle of things I do know, in history, or
in science or anywhere else, no evidence of the existence of God.
So I'm caught between the words 'atheistic' and 'agnostic'. I've got no
evidence whatever for believing in a God. But I know that all the things
I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know. So
maybe there is a God out there. All I know is that if there is, he
hasn't shown himself on earth. "
-Why did he portray religion as evil?
"When you look at organized religion of whatever sort - whether it's
Christianity in all its variants, or whether it's Islam or some forms of
extreme Hinduism - wherever you see organized religion and priesthoods
and power, you see cruelty and tyranny and repression." Whether he
portrayed religion accurately, or in an exaggerated sense, is again up
to the reader to decide. He has said that if he were able to, he would
have put in a good priest here or there "to show that they're nWhy do you hate God
so much as it appears in your books?
Philip: Well, it is not that I hate God, it is just I don't believe in
God. I think the people who do believe in God and persecute the people
who don't believe in God are thoroughly dangerous, that is the way I
would put it. People who have got an idea of God that makes them want to
persecute other people for not believing their idea of God, they are the
dangerous ones. People who say we have got the truth and the truth is in
the Bible or the Koran or the whatever it is and we know the truth, and
we are going to kill everybody who doesn't believe things that we
believe, that is a dreadful state of affairs and it is an unfortunate
part of human nature that it seems to be attracted to this sort of
extreme certainty and arrogance and so much so that they want to make
everybody else believe the way they do and kill everybody who believes
different. And I think that is the dangerous thing and those are the
people I mistrust and fear and would fight against willingly.
See another interview he did at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/94589/104-3616301-9523902
<http://comet1.jonesvilleschools.org/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/94589/104-3616301-9523902>
At the very end of page one, he addresses his idea of Heaven. Be sure
to read the second page, too. It provides good insight into what drove
his writing of the story.
(Yet another different interview)
Why are all the church characters bad? That was due to a flaw in my
artistry, no doubt. But I was trying to hit a target that deserved
hitting, and there's no merit in pulling punches when important issues
are at stake. Anyway, every time I thought I was overdoing it, up came
another scandal about brutal monks mistreating children in Irish
schools, or sadistic nuns tormenting children in Scottish orphanages, to
name but two that came up recently. These things do happen.
Will there be a movie of HDM? I haven't the faintest idea. I shan't have
anything to do with it if there is; "take the money and run" are the
wisest words of advice ever spoken on the subject of writers and films.
Casting: I like the idea of Nicole Kidman as Mrs Coulter, myself, and
the voice of James Earl Jones as Iorek Byrnison.
(He has, in fact, distanced himself from the movie in several
interviews.)
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