Do you want to be stabbed in the back? (The Subtle Knife - Philip Pullman)

Member Name: chris105

Product:	The Subtle Knife - Philip Pullman
Date:	11/09/01 (394 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: wonderful storytelling

Disadvantages: unacceptable indoctrination

THE SUBTLE KNIFE is quite simply one of the best children's books you will ever read - literature to blow your mind, engrossing as nothing you've come across before.

It is also one of the most subversive and mind-poisoning works of fiction you will encounter - material that aims to abuse children's psyches and manipulate their thinking.

I have never had to write such a difficult op in my dooyoo lifespan. For this book, purely as a work of literature, for children or adults, gets my unqualified admiration. The language is simply incredible, the immediacy of its descriptions astounding, and the pace of its storytelling unbelievable. It engrosses as no other book, leaving the Harry Potter series gasping for breath in its wake.

And this is what renders it even more dangerous. Kids reading this book will be enamoured - I have yet to meet a boy/girl/young person who, having read this book, did not love it. And thus the indoctrination seeps in unnoticed.

The story, first of all (warning: spoilers ahead).


THE SUBTLE KNIFE is Part Two of the second most-famous trilogy in literature: His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman. The title of the series harks back to a verse from Milton's Paradise Lost, where the "He" is Satan and the "Dark Materials" are the tools of his evil. Part One is Northern Lights, elsewhere reviewed, where we meet Lyra, a young girl living in a parallel world, in a parallel Oxford, who together with her daemon Pantalaimon (soul-like creatures taking the form of an animal that every human in this parallel world has) departs on a journey to save her best friend, Roger, who's been kidnapped. On the way she discovers a Church-led conspiracy to kidnap and mutilate children for scientific-cum-philosophical experiments. She also discovers that she is the Chosen One to operate a mystic device, the alethiometer - which answers her every question, giving her virtual omniscience.


Part One terminates when Lyra's father, Lord Asriel, manages to force a tear between the world they live in and another, by committing a barbaric act that makes child pornography seem saintly by comparison.

In Part Two, alias THE SUBTLE KNIFE, we meet Will, a boy living in our world with a mother who's being hounded by mysterious men. Will becomes, unwittingly perhaps, a murderer, and soon finds himself on the run and searching for his long-lost father - and while escaping finds a tear into another world. There he meets Lyra, still searching for her own father. They meet in a third world, a kind of crossroads between the various worlds, Cittagazze - a seemingly-Renaissance-style world formerly a paradise on earth, but which is now haunted by soul-eating Spectres. These Spectres destroy the souls of adults, but do not see or attack children, whose souls are thus immune.

Evil and danger beckons from all worlds, with Lyra's mother, the evil Mrs Coulter - appointed by the Church's nefarious Magisterium to head the feared Oblation Board, Inquisition against all independence of thought or action - hot in pursuit of her daughter and the alethiometer. Sir Charles is another world-crossing evil-doer interested in Will and Lyra as a means to obtain the ultimate weapon, source of all power in that it is invincible: The Subtle Knife - a knife that can cut into all imaginable materials and open windows into other worlds, with the unmentionable ability to kill even God.

On the other hand, Lyra has many allies: the witches, led by Serafina Pekkala, practising their dark witchcraft; the Texan aeronaut Lee Scoresby who, usually money-minded and "American", feels a strange impulse to seek out and protect Lyra at the cost of his life; and Dr Mary Malone, a former nun turned scientist who doubts the dogma of the Church and is undertaking her own research into Dust - the mysterious component of the cosmos that the Church so f
ears.

This book ends with the maturing of Will into the Bearer of the Knife - following a horrible mutilation suffered in a fight with a scared teenage kid who is sent to his death - and the two children's escape from some of their perils, only to end with Lyra's falling into the peril of perils... And, finally, the discovery that the story has been building towards since the beginning of Part One: Lyra is none other than the reincarnation of Eve, destined to fall once again into sin (not if the Church's agents can help it, though) and "liberate" humankind by giving it once again the freedom of choice between good and evil.

Part Three, The Amber Spyglass, is being released in paperback this month (September 2001).


I apologise for this totally unworthy summary. The book is undescribable. It makes enthralling reading - start and you'll be hooked, guaranteed. The detail in creating these parallel worlds fully justifies the innumerable comparisons made to the immortal Lord of the Rings trilogy. Pullman uses sublime language - immediately appealing to children without the pretentiousness of heavy words (such as these!), yet rich in vocabulary and structure. The storytelling is breathless - fast, to the point, with no interminable descriptions that so distract younger (and older...) readers.

And what's more, since a good chunk of the book's readers are turning out to be adults, it's just as well that there is continuous multi-level writing - whole paragraphs that can be read at different levels and with different meanings. Have a look at this:

Ruta Skadi, a witch-queen, is relating to fellow witches, in the presence of Lyra and Will, her encounter with her long-lost lover, Lord Asriel, when she surprises him in his bedroom:

" 'But I made myself invisible and made my way to his inmost chamber, when he was preparing to sleep.'

Every witch there knew what ha
d happened next, and neither Will nor Lyra dreamed of it. So Ruta Skadi had no need to tell, and she went on..."


But what made this op (and deciding on the stars rating) so excruciating for me was the totally unacceptable decision, in my opinion, made by Pullman to use such brilliant writing and inventive story to the sole end of indoctrinating against Christianity. Now, before I proceed: I KNOW that some people might not be Christians, or indeed not belong to any religious denomination - yet this is no reason for a popular work of fiction aimed principally at children to poison and defame the belief of billions of people on earth. This decision, taken by Pullman, is nothing less than criminal.

As in many other preferences, life-style decisions that would be perfectly acceptable for adults become criminal and obscene when enforced on children. Pornography is every individual's personal choice - but child pornography is worse than abominable. Ditto, on a lesser scale, for swearing, violence, treachery. The same goes for religion - even worse, since this effects the soul and spirituality of individuals. Everyone is, of course, fully entitled to their own choice of religion or abstention therefrom. But NO-ONE is entitled to impose that decision upon children in a devious and underhand way - imbibing subversive beliefs in them in the form of a fairytale. That is devious, criminal, underhand and cowardly. I hope you're listening, Mr Pullman.

All tenets of Christianity are destroyed in this book. The evil characters - who we are made to hate (I must admit the writing leaves no choice to the reader in the matter, it's a black-against-white kind of characterisation) - are the Roman Catholic Church, were the Pope has long been deposed by a conspiring Magisterium that rules with an iron hand, ordering the kidnapping, torture and murder of any opponents. Free thought is an obscenity for the Church, and in Pullman's twisted w
orld the Church has a long-term plan to physically mutilate all the world's children to prevent them reaching puberty - the age where consciousness (equated with evil in this Church's mindset) is born.

The "heroes", the characters we come to love, including Lyra and Will and Lord Asriel, are trying to prevent God and the Church from eliminating sin - a siege on Heaven is being prepared, the ultimate goal that the kid Will is being trained for is to actually kill the Creator. Extracts of the Bible are misquoted: more than misquoted, in fact, whole extracts and episodes are inserted that do not exist.


Do not get me wrong. I am no religious fanatic. But reading this book, and seeing the lack of uproar that has ensued - especially given that Pullman's trilogy is the best-selling children's series after, of course, Harry Potter - I was dumbfounded. The tenets of the beliefs of half the world are mocked, insulted and twisted, and in a fable aimed at children. Children and their innocence are being targeted to insinuate indoctrination.

Please do read this book - and even if you're not a Catholic please consider this with an open mind. Imagine if the book were mocking and spreading untruths about something you dearly believe in. Imagine.

You are of course absolutely free to NU this op, should you so deem fit, - but please consider it beyond your mere agreement or otherwise with Christianity, and please leave lots of comments on this op.

Incidentally, Philip Pullman is a school headmaster somewhere in the UK. If you please.

Summary: