Sometimes you read or watch something that packs such an emotional and imaginative punch it stays in the mind and changes your mood for days afterwards or even longer.
The weekend before Christmas, the BBC made available the third and final series of His Dark Materials, its TV adaptation of Philip Pullman’s controversial trilogy, whose first series was screened three years ago.
The novels pronounce an anathema against organised religion. Their young heroine, Lyra, rescues the world from the murderous clutches of the church while her estranged father, Lord Asriel, leads the resistance against “God”, whom he denounces as a mere angel who lied about creating the universe.
I read the trilogy years ago and thought it was stunning. A fantasy created by Pullman’s vaulting imagination, it draws upon Milton’s Paradise Lost and William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, his revisionist reading of Milton’s great poem. Just as Blake suggests that the Messiah formed a heaven out of what he stole from “the abyss” after he fell, Pullman similarly inverts God and the Devil to present sin as a prerequisite for both freedom and humanity.
This final series was even more compulsively watchable than its predecessors, and brought out two aspects of the novels that previously I had not properly appreciated.
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The books set organised religion in direct conflict with life, happiness and personal fulfilment. This is a common view among atheists. What becomes so clear in these final episodes is that, in common with so many atheists in the West, Pullman’s hostility to religion is framed only by Christianity.
In his religious dystopia, joy and fulfilment are negated by the church’s emphasis on sex as the original sin requiring the extinction of the freedom to love, as well as its preoccupation with a punishing afterlife.
Many Christians would probably say Pullman’s portrait traduces their own religion. To a Jew like myself, it paints an utterly foreign picture since Judaism is rooted in this world not the next, sacralising and delighting in physical pleasures.
Lyra, who saves the essence of human life from the dark clutches of the church, also manages to liberate souls trapped in purgatory. But they are freed only to dissipate and merge with the universe.
The nightmarish trance of these dead souls supposedly derives from being trapped in this purgatory for ever. In fact, their depiction is gut-wrenching because it seems like a portrait not of the next world but of this one.
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For what comes across is the existential loneliness of life without the comfort of religion to provide meaning or purpose.
Pullman, of course, would scorn that comfort. Like other non-believers, he projects as supremely heroic the very solitariness of the individual unencumbered by religion. Hence the derring-do of Asriel who, like some swashbuckling SAS commando, sets his own life at nothing in his resistance against the totalitarianism of the kingdom of God.
That’s also why (spoiler alert) Asriel and Lyra’s mother, Mrs Coulter, who are intent upon annihilating the archangel acting as God’s regent, deliberately plunge with him into the abyss to meet oblivion. Both Asriel and Mrs Coulter make this supreme sacrifice as an act of redemption for having so badly failed Lyra as her parents. The outcome, however, is in fact loneliness unredeemed.
Loneliness is the second great theme clarified by this series. Mrs Coulter is locked inside her own guilt, remorse and horror at her previous crimes; Lyra is locked inside her own unrequited sense of abandonment. Each longs for the other. Neither can reach the other.
Pullman depicts parallel worlds, which can be sliced open for a while with Will Parry’s “subtle knife”. But even love can’t dissolve these walls.
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Will and Lyra, who fall in love, have to part because they inhabit different worlds. So the gap Will has opened in the wall between their worlds closes for ever. Every year after that, the two of them “meet” on the same bench at the Oxford Botanic Garden, putting out a hand to touch the other where in fact there is only empty space.
This is why the last episode is so shattering. Death is not conquered. Hearts remain broken. Some wounds can never be healed. We just have to get on with life as best we can, and take comfort from what the world has to offer.
For some, this is enough. The experience of the senses, life’s natural wonders, the love of family and friends: these things and more make existence meaningful in itself.
For others, this isn’t enough. There’s a longing for a further purpose to existence, to feel a sense of belonging to something larger than oneself; not to feel so alone.
Some still find this purpose in religious faith. And for all Pullman’s thunderous hostility to organised religion, His Dark Materials is a deeply spiritual work. In exploring the connectedness between humanity and the universe, the novels encompass a search for transcendent meaning.
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That’s why Pullman is so angry about the church. He sees meaning being perverted there. If he really thought life was meaningless, that wouldn’t matter. Freedom, love, belonging wouldn’t matter.
But they do matter, to him and to us. Which is why this masterly, if enraged, creator of parallel worlds is such an ornament of our own.
