In 2007, “The Golden Compass,” the first volume of “His Dark Materials,” Philip Pullman’s alternate-world, cosmological science fantasy for young people, became a movie. As kids’ books go, “His Dark Materials” is grown-up stuff, an adventure story influenced by free-thinking poet-printmaker William Blake, with a title and epigraph borrowed from Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” whose lapsarian argument it inverts. Lewis’ Christological “Chronicles of Narnia,” which Pullman, an atheist, has characterized as misogynist, racist, anti-life and fat-shaming, among other things.) (“Dark materials” has a nice incidental resonance with “dark matter.”) Politically, it is dominated by the Magesterium, a militarized church-state with fascist tastes in building and branding. “His Dark Materials” is an anti-theist, anti-deist work, but full of supernatural characters and happenings all the same.

Source: Los Angeles Times October 24, 2019 14:48 UTC