Pied Piper of Atheism: Philip Pullman and Children’s Fantasy, by Pete Vere and Sandra Miesel. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008. 100 pages, Softcover, $9.95.
I have long believed that kids understand certain aspects of children’s literature that adults often overlook. Children can be very perceptive about the nature of their entertainment, realizing that sometimes adults impose their own personal agendas upon kiddie fare. If an adult tries to trick a child into eating his broccoli by smothering it in chocolate ice cream, it would take a particularly unobservant kid not to notice his dessert’s hidden surprise. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy uses the ice cream of children’s fantasy literature to disguise the broccoli of promoting atheism, but as Pete Vere and Sandra Miesel illustrate in their book Pied Piper of Atheism, this broccoli is of dubious nutritional value.
This short book is divided into several sections. After a brief introduction by Carl E. Olson explaining the content and goals of the book, about half of the book is a monograph by Vere, which outlines the HDM trilogy and points out numerous plot points that parents might find objectionable. Miesel further scrutinizes Pullman’s unpleasant themes in her essay, covering mostly different topics, although there is some overlap. The volume concludes with a selection of recommended fantasy-based children’s literature.
For those unfamiliar with the HDM trilogy (The Golden Compass, His Subtle Knife (the knife is the only subtle thing in this series), and The Amber Spyglass), I shall summarize it here. A young girl, Lyra, discovers that you can’t trust religious authority, but you can trust a glorified pocket watch, which must be believed without question. Lyra begins a quest, assisted and hindered by two enigmatic scholars, Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter, whose true relationship to Lyra ought to come as a jaw-dropping surprise to anyone who hasn’t seen The Empire Strikes Back. With the help of anthropomorphic animal-shaped souls, talking polar bears, a sex-obsessed ex-nun, characters from various alternative worlds, ambiguously gay angels, and Will, a boy who possesses a knife that can cut through everything except the trilogy’s ham-fisted thematics, Lyra and her pals seek to kill God (known in this book as the Authority) and cripple the Magisterium that rules in His name. I will not spoil the ending of the trilogy, but suffice it to say, it doesn’t end with everyone happily going to church.
No, I don’t care very much for Pullman’s work, and it’s not because he’s an outspoken advocate of atheism. I can respect an author who writes because he loves atheism, but writing because one hates God and religion (especially Christianity), is a different matter. Vere and Miesel illustrate the not-so-hidden themes of the books, where God is a deceiving villain and the Devil a wise and noble revolutionary, amorous situations between teenagers are depicted as vital for the survival of the universe, oblivion is portrayed as the only endurable afterlife, and virtually all of the religious figures in the book are irredeemably evil and usually murderous child-abusers, although the “heroes” are allowed to slaughter innocent children in the name of “the greater good.”
This book is an excellent resource for adults wondering what their children are learning from their reading material, but this book deals strictly in theory. To be a truly informative resource for parents, Pied Piper of Atheismneeds the children’s perspective. Vere and Miesel are highly intelligent, educated people and gifted literary critics, but to truly help parents understand how Pullman affects children, they would have to cite the reactions of actual children.
Drawing again from my own experience, even when my age was squarely in the single digits, I could tell when an adult who thought that he knew what was best for me was shoehorning a heavy-handed moral into my story. One of my favorite genres as a kid (and now, for that matter) was fantasy fiction. The problem was, even though I loved the genre, I hated much of what I read. I concluded early on that there were two kinds of children’s fantasy writers: authors who make the real world a more magical place for kids by showing them the wonders that the human imagination can create and teaching them valuable life lessons that they can work into their lives even if real monsters and supervillains, and writers who just make the real world seem pallid. Had Pullman’s books been around when I was younger, I would have firmly based him in the latter category due to his attempts to make virtue appear worthless.
More time ought to have been spent exploring Pullman’s literary flaws, thematic aspects notwithstanding. One of the reasons why I could not get into the HDM trilogy is because I simply didn’t like any of the characters, save for the talking polar bear and the cowboy who is killed off much too soon. I have the same reaction to Pullman’s characters as I do to many of the characters in Shaw’s plays: they aren’t red-blooded, three-dimensional personalities that exist on their own, they’re simply sock puppets used to advance the author’s agenda.
Vere and Miesel have constructed a readable and interesting analysis Pullman’s book, without ever devolving into high-handedness or shrillness. The authors dissect the subtleties of the book, providing analysis of the literary and historical references that most casual readers might easily overlook. A number of commentators have argued that classes ought to read the HDM trilogy in order to spark debate. That may be so, but if they’re going to hold a debate, participants ought to read Pied Piper of Atheism as well.
–Chris Chan
This review first appeared in Gilbert!
