Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials, is one the best works written in English in my lifetime.
Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials, is one the best works written in English in my lifetime. He is a truly great storyteller, and the details of his myth, as well as the rich gallery of characters, live forever in the reader’s memory. It upset many religious readers, especially in America, because of the fact that the central villainy of the Gobblers, child-stealers controlled by the Magisterium, are a Blake-inspired vision of Church Christians. (And rather a prophetic picture of what is now revealed on a daily basis in the papers about the activities of the Roman Catholic clergy).
No reader of his trilogy will be surprised by the fact that in his latest book, in which Pullman retells the narratives of the Gospels (apocryphal and canonical), he departs from Christian orthodoxy in a very Blakean direction.
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