Facing The Daemons

I am not going to blog about Philip Pullman's latest book, because I am not going to read it. Even well-meaning attempts to re-tell the Gospels are never any good. I have never read the Dickens one, but it says a great deal that even Dickens buffs have often never heard of it. There is a reason why no one could now sit through Godspell or Jesus Christ Superstar with a straight face, if they ever could, whereas the Bible is still the bestselling book in the world, just as it was when each of them first came out. The talents of George Elliot were wasted on translating David Strauss. If you have never either read or seen The Last Temptation of Christ, then take the time to catch up on your ironing instead. You get the idea.

There is the extremely snobbish air of the Baconians or, especially, the Oxfordians about all such efforts. Which brings us to Philip Pullman. But which is not the present point about him. Pullman's famous trilogy concludes with sexual intercourse between two children aged about 12. Is it back to this that future generations are to look nostalgically when recalling the formative books of childhood? Indeed, are Pullman's pubescent readers today to emulate this behaviour? I have repeatedly been told, as if I did not already know it, "Will and Lyra touch each other's 'daemons' as a mark of love." Well, is that what they are calling it these days?

Pullman's 'daemons' physicalise processes that are primarily emotional. This extends to many other interactions in Pullman's world: persuasion, seduction, lying, betrayal, befriending. And it is very clever and effective, in that it allows extended expression of the psychological and emotional by means of physical vocabulary. However, precisely because this makes it far easier for younger readers who may not have the capacity or inclination to follow more sophisticated and difficult expressions of persons' inner lives, what of those younger readers or, now, viewers who have no 'daemons' with which to physicalise the primarily emotional process of being in love? What are they supposed to do in response to this literature?

We know the answer to that one, since Pullman himself has repeatedly denounced the absence of sexual content in the Narnia novels: sexualisation is even higher on his agenda than is secularisation, of which his obsession with Christianity is in any case a standing contradiction.

Whatever else a Catholic priest who has sex with a teenage boy might be doing, he is certainly breaking the Teaching of the Church. He would not, however, appear to be breaking the teaching of Philip Pullman.