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

the crude awakening of the fact that the world around her is driven by forces of good and evil
whose distinction is not always clear and straightforward.
The three sections in this Introduction, on angels, intertextuality, and transformation
respectively, form the essential threads of the argument of this thesis which involves the
analysis of a novel, secular, twentieth-century angel created by the three atheist authors in
question, David Almond, Philip Pullman and Cliff McNish. Each chapter will use these three
notions as the key parameters in the analysis and development of the main argument—except
for Chapter 3, where intertextuality is not an active participant in McNish’s narrative. The
first chapter of analysis looks at Almond’s Skellig, whose focal elements are the hybrid
creature Skellig, Blake’s ideas of the Contraries and evolution, and Michael’s transformation
as he learns to see beyond the real to the transcendental. Chapter 2 will delve into Pullman’s
deconstruction of the story of Genesis—both the Scriptural and the Miltonic— and the angels’
role in its achievement, as well as their involvement and interaction with the human characters
and how they facilitate Lyra’s transition from a state of ideological ignorance to a state of
experience and knowledge. Finally, Chapter 3 will analyze a new breed of secular guardian
angels who resemble humans on several levels, and whose free will makes them as vulnerable
to emotional and physical suffering and possible lapse in judgment as humans. McNish’s
angels also possess the ability to rectify their wrong moral choices and start being defined by
their good ones. The story’s focal theme is choice, a notion that is explored by the author to a
great extent especially from the point of view of morality, both through its human and angelic
characters. This is an element that essentially delineates the thesis, as all secular angelic
creatures presented in all five books possess free will by default. The order of the three
following chapters aims first to introduce the reader to “the secular experience of the
transcendental” (Bradley & Tate, 2010, 11) with Skellig, then show how Pullman annihilates
the fraudulent God-figure thereby allowing the now secular angel to roam free in His Dark
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