Interview with the author of “The Golden Compass”, 2004:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/article494636.ece
It is also a world in which the fall of man, as told in the Bible, represents human emancipation rather than a moral catastrophe and hereditary guilt. Pullman’s preoccupation in the trilogy is nothing less than “man’s first disobedience and the fruit”. In his reprise of Paradise Lost, original sin is a lie, and God is an ancient fallen angel who has perpetrated a creationist con on the human race, wickedly exploited by a viciously inquisitional church.
As the trilogy develops, the central teenage character, Lyra, emerges as a second Eve. In a quest that takes in the literal death of “God”, who is no more than a wizened, foetus-like invalid, Lyra releases human beings from attachment to the afterlife.
The finale is the toppling of the kingdom of heaven and the establishment of a celestial atheistic republic on Earth. Small wonder the Christian right in America are out for his blood.
“It seems to me significant,” rages Pullman, “that George W Bush was depicted endorsing in a Florida classroom a book of stultifying stupidity entitled My Pet Goat while the 9/11 attacks were in progress.”
Reading his new book, The Scarecrow and His Servant, there is a plethora of politics just below the surface adventures of the romping, picaresque story: the destruction of bird species; the power of multinationals; the greed of the mafia; the poisoning of the planet.
Pullman must be a fan of Michael Moore. Typical liberal carp.