Openings

Eleven days into the new year and this is my first post? (Mike already has 7 on his blog, with lots of photos of New Zealand.) Well one distraction has been the online chess site freechess.org, on which I created an account just after Christmas. I've played maybe a game a day there, winning about half. I still enjoy playing the software that we have on our computer, but it is interesting and exciting playing against a real person online. One difference is the use of a clock, typically ten minutes per person. Another is being unable to "undo" a bad move. I've played games where I blundered very early and resigned, and others where my opponent has blundered. The computer never blunders, so online games have more randomness. Playing against the computer is now more like training or practice (since I can take back a bad move and don't have the clock).

Another distraction has been reading The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman. The movie was released in December, reawakening the controversy over the book's negative views of organized religion. I decided that it was time to read it to find out what exactly the book is about. (Maybe others had the same idea; it took weeks to get a copy from the local public library.)

The book is a good page-turner but is set in a strange world that sort of resembles ours, but not exactly. Some of the names of places and things sound archaic, like the names that were used 200 or 300 years ago. Lamps use "naphtha," which today we use to describe a petroleum product, one version of which is a fuel for camp stoves and lanterns ("camp fuel"). The story starts in Oxford but England is never mentioned, just East Anglia (a portion of modern England).

There is certainly an anti-religious theme. I noticed a version of the old science-vs.-religion conflict, in which the Church refuses to accept certain scientific theories. Meanwhile, the people have replaced their faith in God with a faith in science. Theology is "experimental," and "holy" scientific devices are worshipped in church services.

The main character is a young girl named Lyra, and her name is apt: she continually deceives the adults around her. She certainly comes from a troubled family; both her mother and her father abandoned her and, for their part, continue to lie to her. The book is full of people lying to each other. A race of witches who have extremely long lives worship a goddess of the dead; one witch tells Lyra that everyone is subject to fate but must live as if they weren't.

Finally, there is a theme of elitism: some people are superior, and everyone else must bow to the superior ones. At one point, Lyra confronts another girl, whose daemon (a kind of embodiment of one's soul) defers to Lyra's, and then Lyra knows that she's beat the girl. And the race of intelligent bears has a similar protocol: a bear always surrenders to superior force.

So there's a lot not to like, in my opinion. However, Daniel Moloney, in "An Almost Christian Fantasy," discusses the entire His Dark Materials trilogy, praises Pullman's writing, and claims that the trilogy, in the end, affirms some important values, including the value of sacrificing one's own happiness for the good of others. He concludes:

As is, I can fairly characterize His Dark Materials in this fashion: imagine if at the beginning of the world Satan’s rebellion had been successful, that he had reigned for two thousand years, and that a messiah was necessary to conquer lust and the spirit of domination with innocence, humility, and generous love at great personal cost. Such a story is not subversive of Christianity, it is almost Christian, even if only implicitly and imperfectly. But implicit and imperfect Christianity is often our lot in life, and Pullman has unintentionally created a marvelous depiction of many of the human ideals Christians hold dear.

I wouldn't agree with that after reading just the first book. However, another passage from Moloney's review identifies some flaws that I would second:

Pullman has set himself an ambitious task, trying to tell a complex yet realistic tale about the death of God and the true nature and destiny of man. He has the talent to have pulled it off, but unfortunately, his atheism gets in the way. For unlike John Milton and his other hero William Blake, Pullman is a Richard Dawkins-type materialist, and his atheism fatally flaws The Amber Spyglass, and therefore, retroactively, the whole series. Pullman, who raised more than a few eyebrows with an article in the Guardian excoriating C. S. Lewis’ Narnia stories for their tendency to lapse into preaching, falls prey to that same bad habit himself. Indeed, to facilitate his preaching, he breaks many of the rules of fantasy-writing in this third volume, and although this probably makes his novel more appropriate for children, it seriously weakens it as art.