I’ve always been amazed that Pullman’s Dark Materials books sell in the children’s section without more hue and cry from the Jesus brigades. Very glad, but quite surprised.
SPOILERS IN FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH
I love the idea of a whole generation of readers growing up on books where the kids save the world by having sex and killing God. Or, more relevantly, by rejecting dogmatic authority and thinking for themselves.
Anyway, Pullman talks about the notion of theocracy in this piece, and comes to some interesting conclusions.
Here’s a couple of relevant bits:
My third and final charge against the theocracies, atheist or religious, and their failure to read properly is this: that the act of true reading is in its very essence democratic.
Consider the nature of what happens when we read a book – and I mean, of course, a work of literature, not an instruction manual or a textbook – in private, unsupervised, un-spied-on, alone. It isn’t like a lecture: it’s like a conversation. There’s a back-and-forthness about it. The book proposes, the reader questions, the book responds, the reader considers. We bring our own preconceptions and expectations, our own intellectual qualities, and our limitations, too, our own previous experiences of reading, our own temperament, our own hopes and fears, our own personality to the encounter.
and
Of course, democracies don’t guarantee that real reading will happen. They just make it possible. Whether it happens or not depends on schools, among other things. And schools are vulnerable to all kinds of pressure, not least that exerted by governments eager to impose “targets”, and cut costs, and teach only those things that can be tested.
and
Young people brought up to think that that sort of thing is a real book, and that that sort of activity is what reading is like, will be in no position to see that, for example, it might be worth questioning the US National Park Service’s decision to sell in their bookstores a work called Grand Canyon: A Different View, which claims that the canyon was created, like everything else, in six days. But then it may be that the US is already part way to being a theocracy in the sense I mean, one in which the meaning of reading, and of reality itself, is being redefined.
