The secular angel in contemporary children's literature: David ...

CHAPTER TWO
PHILIP PULLMAN’S HIS DARK MATERIALS
Introduction
Philip Pullman is a writer who has been greatly criticised for his trilogy His Dark Materials¸
which is comprised of three novels, Northern Lights, published in the US as The Golden
Compass (GC), The Subtle Knife (SK), and The Amber Spyglass (AS). He has published 22
other books written for children, but for this trilogy he received as much controversy as he did
praise. This trilogy is multifarious and intricate in many respects, and its greatest influence is
John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Pullman has always been clear as to what his intentions were
while writing His Dark Materials and what he wanted to project; he has characterised the
trilogy as a retelling of the story of Genesis, or a different version of John Milton’s Paradise
Lost. He has stated in many interviews that storytelling has always been extremely important
to him, even as a child. 7 His early influences were numerous, his most important being his
grandfather who was an Anglican clergyman and who regularly told him Biblical stories.
Another formative figure in the author’s life was his high-school teacher who encouraged and
urged her students to read aloud in order to grasp a work’s meaning more firmly. Pullman
writes the following in an introduction to a recent publication of Paradise Lost, the work that
influenced him the most both as a child, and later as an author and storyteller: “So I begin
with sound. I read Paradise Lost not only with my eyes, but with my mouth” (Milton, 2005,
1). And so begins a fascination not only with John Milton and the story of Heaven and Hell,
but with every piece of writing that provoked physical responses in Pullman, stories that made
“[his] heart beat faster, the hair on [his] head stir, [his] skin bristle” (Pullman, 2005, 4).
7 (Mustich, 2007); (Lambert, 2010); (FitzHerbert, 2007).
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