How the new His Dark Materials spinoff series explains the book-banning wars

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy was one of the most beloved children’s book series of the 2000s — and one of the most frequently banned, too. Tragic, philosophical, and fervently opposed to classic Christian dogma, Pullman’s series sparked widespread outcry and religious boycotts.

This week, Pullman released The Rose Field, the final volume in the Book of Dust trilogy, a companion series to His Dark Materials. (The first book takes place 11 years before the events of His Dark Materials, and the second two books take place eight years later.) In this new series, the big conflict begins with a book every bit as dangerous as Pullman’s critics used to claim his were. Two of them, actually.

Lyra, Pullman’s scrappy and charismatic heroine, has become infatuated with two books by modern philosophers who preach a kind of post-truth moral relativism. Nothing, they tell her, is real, and nothing means anything. Under the sway of their clever wording, Lyra becomes estranged from her daemon Pantalaimon, the animal companion who accompanies her everywhere — which is to say, within the metaphysical constructs of Pullman’s world, she becomes estranged from her soul.

Ironically, that used to be the religious right’s line about His Dark Materials: that it put children’s souls in danger. Conceived as Paradise Lost for teens, it is, after all, a series that metaphorically denounces the Catholic Church for child abuse and ends with two children literally killing God, then saving the multiverse by falling in love with each other. In 2008, the series ranked second on a list of the most-banned books in the US. A planned series of film adaptations puttered out after just one release in 2007, in part due to pressure from the anti-defamation group the Catholic League. 

Pullman pulled no punches when it came to his thoughts on religiously motivated censorship. “Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations,” he wrote for The Guardian in 2008. “Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.”

Pullman’s new series doesn’t call for censorship. But it does make it clear that he believes that there are such things as dangerous books and dangerous ideas, and that they can both put us in danger of becoming estranged from our fundamental selves. 

What exactly those dangerous ideas are is what’s at stake in the center of Pullman’s two Lyra trilogies — and in all the debates about which ideas children should be exposed to. 

“The Narnia books are such an invaluable guide to what is wrong and cruel and selfish”

In a way, the whole story begins with the danger of a bad book. Pullman’s His Dark Materials books were written in response to and as a reaction against C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and their Christian allegory. 

According to Pullman, the Narnia books are “propaganda in the cause of the religion [Lewis] believed in.” Moreover, they are filled with the kind of values children should be taught to abhor, not to aspire to. “It is monumentally disparaging of girls and women,” Pullman said at The Guardian’s Hay festival in 2002. “It is blatantly racist. One girl was sent to hell because she was getting interested in clothes and boys.”

The Narnia books, it is true, do not mesh nicely with today’s sexual and racial politics. Lewis’s girls are always taught to stay out of the action during battles, while the boys are given swords and fight in duels to the death. Susan Pevensie, as Pullman said, is declared “no longer a friend to Narnia” and thus ineligible to be transported to heaven with her family at the end of the series because she is “interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations.” As for the plot about the swarthy brown people in turbans who worship a god who turns out to be the devil — well, it’s probably best not to think about it too much.

What seems to have bothered Pullman most about Narnia, though, was not just the racism and the sexism but Lewis’s idea that heavenly Narnia is more real and more important than the ordinary world of England. 

“This world is where the things are that matter,” Pullman wrote in 2021 in the children’s literature periodical the Horn Book — not the other world of the spirit and the soul, but our own world of the physical body. “If the Narnia stories had been composed in that spirit, the children who have passed through all these adventures and presumably learned great truths from them would be free to live and grow up in the world, even at the price of engaging with the lipstick and the nylons, and use what they’d learned for the benefit of others. That would be the republican thing to do. That’s why Lewis doesn’t let his characters do it, and why the Narnia books are such an invaluable guide to what is wrong and cruel and selfish.”

In His Dark Materials, meanwhile, while the spirit and the soul and other worlds are all very real, they are not what is most valuable. Instead, Pullman’s characters are taught that what really matters is our own material world, our bodies, and the things that we can experience through them. Those are our greatest sources of pleasure and joy, and they are the tools through which we can create the utopia Pullman calls the Republic of Heaven. 

One of his most lyrical passages comes when a woman is able to slow the entropy of the universe by drawing on her memories of physical sensation: “The delicate dancing of her fingers on a computer keyboard. … Tasting an iced margarita in California, sitting under the lemon trees outside a restaurant in Lisbon, scraping the frost off the windshield of her car.” These were “all the sensations that made up being alive,” and they are, for Pullman, what makes life so precious to experience — not the promise of dying and being reborn in another, better world, but the reality of being alive in our own world, right now. 

Moreover, in Pullman’s world, unusually for children’s literature, becoming an adult is more a gift than it is a loss. As a child, Lyra has a supernatural knack for reading her alethiometer, the titular golden compass and “truth meter” that mystifies grown-ups but always answers all of Lyra’s questions. At the end of the first trilogy, however, Lyra abruptly loses her old ability, the unthinking ease of childhood. 

She can learn how to read the alethiometer again, an angel tells her, by working at it for a lifetime. “But your reading will be even better then, after a lifetime of thought and effort, because it will come from conscious understanding,” the angel says. “Grace attained like that is deeper and fuller than grace that comes freely, and furthermore, once you’ve gained it, it will never leave you.” 

The value of experience over innocence, body over spirit, earth over heaven: The whole original trilogy is written in service of this deeply held belief, and in a kind of outrage at all the children’s literature that ever came before it and told children otherwise. 

“A blatant, calculated attack on Christianity”

Pullman’s books were immediately controversial, especially in the US, where his publishers weren’t above trying to cut off any outcry at the root. When 13-year-old Lyra goes through her sexual awakening in The Amber Skyglass, her physical sensations are a lot clearer and more specific in the UK (“she felt a stirring at the roots of her hair: she found herself breathing faster”) than they are in the US (“Lyra felt something strange happen to her body”). 

Bowdlerizing Lyra’s adolescence wasn’t enough to address the bigger issue, however. In the late 2000s, the religious right was caught up in debates over whether there were coded Satanic messages in the Harry Potter books. When it came to His Dark Materials, no decoding was necessary. Outraged articles in the religious press were frequent, but they ramped up significantly in 2007, when Hollywood adapted The Golden Compass into a film. The Golden Compass movie rejiggered Pullman’s plot significantly in order to stay away from the child murder and the wicked Christian church. Nonetheless, the religious right was unfooled. The Catholic League called for a boycott.

“It is not our position that the movie will strike Christian parents as troubling,” the Catholic League had said in a statement. “Then why the protest? Even though the film is based on the least offensive of the three books, and even though it is clear that the producers are watering down the most despicable elements — so as to make money and not anger Christians — the fact remains that the movie is bait for the books. To be specific, if unsuspecting Christian parents take their children to see the movie, they may very well find it engaging and then buy Pullman’s books for Christmas. That’s the problem.” 

Protests against an inoffensive film because of the books became protests against the books themselves. By the end of the decade, it would be No. 8 on the top 100 banned books of 2000–2009, below Harry Potter but above The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 

Despite the outcry, Pullman remained sanguine on the power of provocation. In 2010, he published a new novel titled The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, with the premise that Jesus Christ was two brothers, one holy and one obsessed with worldly power. Faced with a reader at a live event who found the idea offensive, Pullman responded, “No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it.” 

If a person did read and dislike Pullman’s book, he went on, “You don’t have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or bought, or sold or read.”

Plenty of people felt that they did have the right to stop Pullman’s books from being kept in school libraries. But the fight over Pullman’s books would come to seem quaint in the wake of the culture wars that were about to ignite.

“Never before in the life of any living American have so many books been systematically removed.”

In the first half of the 2020s, the far right has mounted a series of campaigns to ban books deemed overly progressive from school libraries. Conservative groups have astroturfed school board meetings, decrying books about LGBTQ issues as “pornographic” and books that dealt with structural racism in America as crypto-commie critical race theory. “Never before in the life of any living American have so many books been systematically removed from school libraries across the country,” a report earlier this month from free speech advocacy group PEN America said. 

The right’s embrace of book banning comes after a decade of complaints that the left had become too censorious and obsessed with progressive purity tests. Few protests from the left turned into attempts to ban books from shelves, but it is true that messy controversies in the YA sphere saw some authors bullied into withdrawing their books from publication after allegations that they were insufficiently antiracist. Those books may not have been banned by the state, but they weren’t on shelves where readers could look at them, either. Partisans on both sides of the aisle began to fight over which side could be said to really, truly be on the side of free speech, and which side owned book bannings.

In the midst of this arguing, a consensus emerged. Most people did agree that there were limits to what ideas children should be exposed to, and that, for instance, while adults might have a legal right to read hardcore pornography and Nazi propaganda if they wanted to, such books did not belong in elementary school libraries. 

Moreover, it was clear that school libraries did not have infinite space or the ability to store all possible books for their children, just as publishers did not have the capacity to publish every book submitted to them. Some books would have to be excluded, because kids weren’t interested or because they weren’t age appropriate or because they were filled with false information — or, perhaps, because they were somehow found to be immoral. 

But where are librarians supposed to draw the line? And who decides what it is?

“That lost rebellious part”

In Pullman’s new companion trilogy, books really can do what the Catholic League feared His Dark Materials would do: they put people’s souls in danger.

The two books that enchanted Lyra make the argument that daemons aren’t real, which Lyra regards as a thrilling but ultimately silly provocation. While Lyra discards the idea in 2019’s The Secret Commonwealth and embarks on a quest in search for her estranged daemon, in the final book in the new trilogy, The Rose Field, we see a world in which people have embraced this teaching. 

First, fashionable young people begin to ignore their daemons. The trend spreads, and more people begin to ignore their daemons or even to abuse them. Gradually, the daemons lose their names and power of speech, and begin to drop dead in a kind of spiritual murder.

These anti-daemon ideas haven’t spread just on their own, however. They’re the result of a campaign by powerful people — church, state, and industry, all united by the power of money — to consolidate their own power and reshape the world for their convenience. They spread books denying the existence of absolute truth or of the existence of daemons on purpose, to render the populace too confused to fight back until it’s too late. 

Here, daemons are refigured as not just our souls but as the irrational and bodily part of ourselves, the part that understands metaphor and revels in corporeal sensations, the part that Pullman has been championing all along. We get long passages from the point of view of Pantalaimon as he revels in the experience of running outside and indulges in stormy emotional tirades. Lyra, without him, retains her logical mind but has lost the scrappy force of will that saw her through the experience of His Dark Materials — “that lost rebellious part of her,” Pullman writes, “that woodland-smelling self who’d set off in anger.” Without our souls, our rational animating spirits become alienated from both our bodies and the material world, because powerful people find us more compliant that way. 

Pullman’s target is less religion here than it is power more broadly — especially power as guided by modern capitalism, which he describes as “the universal solvent,” which dissolves all bonds with its implacable force. 

The antidote to this problem, Lyra learns, is to tell true stories, and specifically to tell them to children. Stories express the grounded, embodied details of day to day life. Metaphors express the connectedness of things. Together they show us how to be alive and what to value. 

But then, after all, there’s that problem again: what do we value? Which truth is that? And who gets to decide? “We have the truth,” a Christian commenter declared back in 2002, in response to a debate over what to do with His Dark Materials, “so why worry and fret when someone challenges that?”

Pullman’s response to this problem is that of a classic liberal. He has never argued in favor of banning the Narnia books, and Lyra doesn’t suggest that the books that so enchanted her should be banned. Instead, Pullman argues for answering one person’s true story with your own, for fighting it out in the marketplace of ideas. A bad book might endanger a child’s soul, he suggests, but a good book can save it again. (A Christian might well agree, capitalizing the G and the B.)

Pullman is not on the cutting edge anymore. These new books aren’t getting banned, in a bit of a tell that they are not considered as vital as their predecessors.

Nonetheless, the battle Pullman once defined — of what we should teach children, of whose values they should learn — rages on without him.