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

can and do become both, and so determining their place between the two moral poles becomes
an issue of analysing and defining all their different acts, as well as their means and aims.
Although Pullman does not exculpate Asriel or justify his relentlessness, the author’s
projection of the Magisterium, the Authority and Metatron, clearly confesses his disdain for
the woes that organised religion has inflicted, and promotes a different choice.
Asriel and Mary Malone provide the final inversion, which is that of the Devil figure in
the trilogy. Although, in the end, Milton’s aim in writing Paradise Lost was to justify God’s
ways to man, in the beginning of the poem the reader witnesses the Devil as being more
righteous or sensible than God. This very image is what stayed with Pullman, and what he
wishes to show in his own narrative. The author inverts Milton’s morality not only when he
clearly states that Asriel’s concerns and feelings towards the Authority and the Church are
legitimate and reasonable, but when he exposes this God-figure’s wrongdoings and presents
his demise as a Fall—not of Man, but of God; a Fall that is once again defined by the
parameters that characterize Lyra’s Fall. Therefore, if Lyra’s fall was an act of liberation from
the ignorance in which humans dwelt in, the fall of the Authority represents an act of
liberation from the bonds and control of a corrupt authoritarian. Yet the morality Pullman
employs is not straightforward either, as far as Asriel is concerned. This partially surfaces
from Pullman’s act of killing Asriel, which designates that his role was important but
remained a means to an end he was unable or not meant to complete himself. Instead Pullman
places this responsibility within the hands of the children and Dr. Mary Malone.
In HDM, the role of the Devil in regards to the temptation and the offering of the fruit of
knowledge is played by Dr. Mary Malone, a major character in the trilogy despite the fact that
she only appears in two of the three novels, who plays the role of the serpent by tempting Lyra
at the end of the trilogy. Her contribution to the story does not end there, nor is it limited to
this act. The first time the reader encounters Mary is in the fourth chapter of The Subtle Knife.
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