I never did understand the whole “it’s an atheist book” thing. I mean, it is a fantasy that clearly deals with religious concepts, but it is hardly “atheist” - in the universe of the book, angels, God, and an afterlife all exist, if not in the forms that the (evil) Church claims.
Sure it’s an atheist story. Not in the sense that it takes place in a universe lacking the supernatural; in the sense that it takes place in a universe in which no entity exists who is worthy of the name “God,” with a capital G–that is, self-existent, omnipotent, invulnerable, infallibly righteous, and deserving of worship. In other words, it’s an atheist story in the same sense that the Chronicles of Narnia (in which the words “Jesus,” “Christ” and “God” never appear–are Christian; it’s what Professor Lewis called a “supposable.”
It’s made clear that the Authority is NOT God. It’s an extremely old angel, so old that it longs for death; its moral authority is a sham, based in the past on brute force and currently on fraud and inertia. Nor is Metatron God. The enigmatic rebel angels who are responsible for Dust are not God. All of these are, at most, beings possessing extended life-spans and super-human powers, but they are gods only in the sense that, oh, Marvel Comics Thor (who generally doesn’t care to be worshipped) is a god.
The story is an explicit didactic counter to The Chronicles of Narnia–specifically to The Last Battle. Lyra & Will are Jill Pole and Eustace Scrubb. I think I’ve pointed out before that the chapter with our heroes in the afterlife is an attempt to rebut the assertions made in the stable chapter of Battle. Here’s that post, if anybody gives a damn.
It’s possible to enjoy it with sufficient mental contortions. You have to inserting the word “Church” into the scenes where it clearly was edited out. That’s why the movie fails, I’d say. It’s incoherent to persons who’ve not read the book, and persons who have read the book find it irritating.
Well, I hadn’t read the books prior to seeing the movie, and I understood it fine.
I did think it was pretty mediocre on first view, but that changed after I read the books. Now I think it is pretty awful. Especially because they ended it where they could claim a “happy” ending, instead of the horror that ends the first book.
The casting was good, the production was excellent, but the movie felt like the lite-lite-lite sanitized-and-scrubbed-like-an-institution-shower version of the book.
I thought the 3rd book was great, btw. I particularly liked how each book was completely different from the others, even tho it was all one big story. But the semi-redemption/reform of both Asrael and Coulter was poorly done, IMO.
Oh and yeah…Sam Elliott just frikkin pwned that role.
By “incoherent,” I don’t mean that the plot cannot be followed; I mean that the story is maddeningly non-sensical because of the gaping holes in motivation.
If you think that’s bad. Stop reading. The end of the third book is the one and only book I’ve ever read that made me feel bad at the end.
Update of third book in progress: I 'm reading now about the wheeled elephant-type beings and having lots of fun building the mental image.
An “Atheist” story is one, I would imagine, in which there was no such thing as the supernatural, an afterlife, or angels. The fact that the old angel is not “god” in the Old Testament sense doesn’t atheism make - there is nothing to suggest that such a being does not exist within the universe of the book; the fact that there is such a thing as an afterlife etc. would certainly indicate it is possible.
If anything, it struck me as Gnostic (not atheist) in outlook, in that the Authority is claiming to be “god” when it is not - more like the imperfect and flawed (if not evil) demiurge of the material world. There may well be a higher, spiritual world (as in some forms of Gnosticism) with its “true” deity - as for example the creator of Dust.
Edit: there is some support for this:
From Pullman:
You can believe in the supernatural, and afterlife, or angels, and be an atheist. I’d consider you weird, but you can do it.
They don’t have metaphors where you grew up, do they?
His Dark Materials is not not a **literal **atheist tale; it’s an atheist **supposable **-- a word coined by C. S. Lewis, and thus particularly apt for the discussion.
Lewis did not believe that God ever literally incarnated himself as a lion and created a land inhabited by fauns, talkings, and bad-ass mice. He wrote the Chronicles as an answer to the question of what it would be like if Jesus had done just that, in the interests of telling an entertaining tell and also expressing his view of the truths of the world.
Pullman does not believe that there exists an athelieometer that can be used to divine truth with the help of angels, or a knife that can cut through the very fabric of space-time, or an angel named Metatron. He wrote His Dark Materials to answer the question of what the universe would be like if all those things existed, in the interests of telling an entertaining story and rebutting Lewis’s world-view.
You could I suppose, but you can’t be a Gnostic and an atheist at the same time.
I metaphor, but she was too expensive. 
I’ll see your atheist “supposable” and raise you a Gnostic one.
Pullman’s tale is not “atheist” by any stretch of the imagination - it posits, not the lack of any god or gods, but the existence of a Gnostic “bad demiurge”, combined with a comple array of afterlife, angels, etc. His rebuttal of Lewis was more along the lines of the Albigensians than Atheism.
Not all opposition to the Lewis world-view is atheist, though to think it is is, in a way, oddly … Manichean. 
I’m aware of the Gnostic worldview, and I agree that the universe of HDM is a largely Gnostic one. (Not entirely, though, because in Gnosticism flesh is generally considered at least suspect and frequently corrupt, whereas in HDM, flesh is presented as a good thing; Lyra and Will’s (implied) lovemaking at the end is neither tragic nor sinful, but a validation of the goodness of the physical world.
What we’re arguing about, I think, is the meaning of the word “atheism.” Atheism does not, I would say, deny that it is possible that extremely long-lived, quite powerful entities exist and intervene in human affairs; rather, it denies that any intelligence exists who is transcendent, or who is worthy of mortal worship and blind obedience. It is possible to construct a universe in which super-powered & extremely long-lived beings exist without such beings being big-G gods; Star Trek is an example. The Q are nearly immortal and vastly powerful, but you don’t see Picard & Janeway bowing to them.
As I wrote above, Pullman’s creation is largely an attempt to rebut the world-view of Professor Lewis.
Can one make a truly great story out of a desire to contradict someone else? I mean, maybe that’s partly why I was so disappointed with the third book–he was so busy thumbing his nose at Lewis that he neglected his own story and let his agenda take over. Certainly I felt that he turned a great story into a message sledgehammer and ruined it in the process. Maybe the whole project was flawed from the beginning if it was just a way to rebut Lewis.
I think it’s still a great story, though I would nonetheless say Lewis is the better writer (based on Till We Have Face more than the Chronicles. The Amber Spyglass has a great book hiding inside, but it’s obscured by the. Pullman’s error was not, I think, his didacticism; it was, as I wrote upthread, trying to conclude in three volumes what really needed four.
Damn trilogy tradition. I blame Allen & Unwin. 
FWIW I loved the third book as much as the first two. It does get a bit more metaphysical, but I’m OK with that, the first two books had their own individual traits as well.
The ending is one of the most amazing moments in any book in my opinion, it perfectly sums up where the whole journey has been leading. I hated Pullman for it and loved him for having the courage to write that at the same time.
Yes. I find the last half of the last book to be Pullman, shrieking his screed to all the world. It got tiresome, quickly.
I don’t see them as wheeled giraffes or elephants but as wheeled parasarolophuses
And I’m sticking with that.
I love the concept of a person’s daemon. They are more complex and subtle than the patronuses of Rowling’s. Daemons make sense on an intuitive level, which makes the evil attempted all the more gripping and well, evil.
Bumping this thing to report back upon my completion of the third book.
Yes, I agree that it’s not as good as the preceding two. Yes, I agree that it was badly in need of being expanded from one into two books to flesh out all the stuff crammed into it. Yes, some of the character development wasn’t entirely convincing. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it and am glad to have read it.
The Sally Lockhart series is sitting on my to-be-read shelf but I’m reading other stuff for a while first, sort of a palate-cleanser, one might say.
Oh, and this:
for me is spot on.
IMHO, the first book is the only good one.
I keep meaning to try those books as well. I’m glad you liked book 3.
Where would you end up rating the whole trilogy?