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Next Page is a newsletter written by senior correspondent and book critic Constance Grady. She covers books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. Read her latest work on our site. |
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Next Page is a newsletter written by senior correspondent and book critic Constance Grady. She covers books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. Read her latest work on our site. |
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How the new His Dark Materials spinoff series explains the book-banning wars |
Philip Pullman’s new book finishes the story The Golden Compass started. |
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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. |
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⇰ “The Narnia books are such an invaluable guide to what is wrong and cruel and selfish”
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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.
Read the full story >> |
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Book recommendations to get lost in |
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I'm looking for a book (in English) that is surrealist, dark whimsical, full of humor, and perhaps with political commentary. Something under 600 pages preferably. Female authors preferred but not exclusively. Tones of Miranda July, Tom Robbins, and Gianni Rodari.
Researching this question led me to look up Gianni Rodari, the beloved Italian children’s author who is all but unknown in the US, and now I have many books to read myself, so thank you for that.
Now, as for some books for you! I think the obvious answers are Karen Russell, Kelly Link, and George Saunders, all of whom are practically synonymous with dark whimsy. For Russell, I would recommend sticking to the short fiction or to her first novel, Swamplandia! They both have the kind of movement and sparkle that make whimsy feel easy instead of effortful. For Link, I think the move is to stick with the short fiction, not least because her novel exceeds your page limit. Saunders is consistent enough that you can pretty much jump in at random with him.
But you are out here reading obscure Italian antifascist children’s authors! You are probably aware of Russell and Saunders and Link already! Let’s find you something a little further off the beaten track.
Kate Folk’s Sky Daddy is a funny, surreal Moby-Dick story about a woman who is sexually attracted to planes. There’s a fair amount of whimsy here (our heroine struggles to explain her plane-filled vision board to the other attendees at a vision board party), but what I like most is how seriously Folk takes her protagonist’s desires. Another version of this book would make her the butt of every joke, but Folk never stoops so low.
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📲 For more thoughts from Constance Grady, follow her on X, Threads, or BlueSky.
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