Talk:His Dark Materials (novel)

Here's my take, and I haven't even read the book, so I'm insulated from all bias by my sheer ignorance. ;-)

The author thinks he can pull a fast one on us. He has created a satire of God and Christianity with the world's best "deniability" clause; see plausible denial.

He portrays God and Christians as viciously cruel. Any criticism that he has portrayed God in a bad light can be dismissed simply by denying that he was talking about God at all. --Ed Poor ^Talk 16:29, 10 December 2007 (EST)

Interesting point, and it's one that the Archbishop of Canterbury raised when he was interviewed alongside Pullman - that this otherworldly church has no element of redemption, that it is purely a matter of control. Pullman's response was interesting, too - he said that Jesus' core teachings are antithetical to the organisation itself:

"I think he's mentioned once, in the context of this notion of wisdom that works secretly and quietly, not in the great courts and palaces of the earth, but among ordinary people and so on. And there are some teachers who have embodied this quality, but whose teaching has perhaps been perverted or twisted or turned, and been used in a fashion that they themselves didn't either desire or expect or could see happening."

It's definitely worth a read, if you haven't gotten around to it yet. :-D Underscoreb 22:43, 10 December 2007 (EST)