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

person is finer and more obscure than we would like to believe. It is this philosophy that
delineates Pullman’s retelling.
Inversions of the Fall
The inversions discussed in this section are not only indicative of the influence that Milton’s
work has had on HDM, but also of the way in which Pullman wished to retell the story of
Genesis and the points he aimed to make. Claire Squires states that,
In his inversion of the morality of the Fall, and also in his exploration of the rich
imaginative possibilities afforded by devils, Hell, and the multiple worlds
travelled through by Satan and the angels in Paradise Lost, Pullman is both a
profoundly intertextual writer [...] and a provocative one. (Squires, 2006, 13)
Pullman’s parallels with Milton’s Paradise Lost are numerous. However, there are a few that
could be described as the most obvious or basic, both in their similarity, or, as Squires
suggests, in their inversion. The intertextual and provocative elements will clearly surface
through the analysis that follows, and both their meaning and purpose will be highlighted.
Pullman does not begin with the Creation and Lucifer’s fall from heaven, but chooses instead
to have Eve in place first, when the story commences, and introduce Adam in the second
novel. Pullman presents an Adam and an Eve who are of the same age, but come from two
different worlds—two of the million different worlds that exist simultaneously. The two
characters do not reside in paradise, or even in a paradise-like world, but on earth; they come
from two different worlds and meet for the first time in the SK. But here is where one
witnesses Pullman’s first inversion. In Pullman’s universe, paradise, or the afterlife, is not
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