What Pullman gets wrong about Narnia

“It’s a filthy lie. I hate that. I despise it.” So says Philip Pullman about Narnia to Alex O’Connor on a recent episode of Within Reason, rekindling his long-standing ire against C. S. Lewis. But does Pullman get Lewis right in seeing their worldviews as fundamentally opposed, or is he more Narnian than he thinks?

It’s easy to see the conflict between them: Lewis the Christian apologist, with Aslan the magic talking lion as Christ-figure of his fantasy world; Pullman the storyteller for the New Atheist age, with the dusty, faded figure of the Authority (his version of God) mercifully killed in The Amber Spyglass.

I deeply appreciate the imagination of both writers. Narnia was my first love, read to me by my mother when I was young, and I longed to escape there myself. Pullman’s stories, from the Sally Lockhart novels to His Dark Materials trilogy, were also part of the furniture of my childhood reading. Later, I would go on to study both as part of my university studies, part of a life-long fascination with story, myth and meaning-making. So this debate, as well as being a microcosm of some of our present cultural divides, is a little like watching parents fight.

For Pullman, Lewis’s message is cruel, unjust and anti-life. For him, Lewis’s great sin is the refusal to let the children in the Narnia books grow up. Instead, in The Last Battle, the children all die in a train crash so they can go to Aslan’s Country, the Narnian version of Heaven — all, that is, except Susan, who is “no longer a friend of Narnia” because she pretends that their adventures were just child’s play and is instead obsessed with parties and fashion.

As Pullman told O’Connor: “[Lewis]⁠ ⁠wanted them to turn away from things like nylons and invitations, which is a terrible thing to do to a child who’s on the verge of growing up. Children don’t want to be sent to heaven. They want to grow up and be men and women. The promptings of sexuality in the teenage body and mind are important and wonderful and valuable things; just to dismiss them in that off-hand way is terrible”.

I do think Pullman has a point, which I will get to in a moment. But it also seems clear to me that he has latched onto the most uncharitable possible reading of what Narnia fans and critics have come to call “The Problem of Susan”, taking it as anti-growing up and anti-sexuality. 

In The Last Battle, the comments about Susan being “a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up”, and “interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations” come from Jill Pole, another of the children (who are in fact young adults by this stage). Polly, another, older “friend of Narnia” gives a different perspective: “I wish she would grow up … Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one’s life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can”. Susan’s key failing in Lewis’s telling, is superficiality, not sexuality.

Yet I think Pullman is right to find something discomforting in the ease with which Lewis kills off his main cast. This isn’t simply a case of Christianity vs atheism, of seeing Heaven as genuine hope vs dangerous delusion. Lewis’ latent Platonism comes to the fore in The Last Battle — “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato,” as Professor Kirke mutters to himself, as they leave behind the “Shadowlands” of this material world for life in Heaven, with the old Narnia gone in fire and darkness. 

Within the Christian tradition, leading contemporary Biblical scholar N. T. Wright has led the charge against the influence of Platonism as a distortion of the Biblical hope. As Wright argues in Surprised by Hope, the Biblical vision of the future is not ultimately that “we go to heaven when we die”, but that of Resurrection, that we will be raised to new life again and this world redeemed and restored. Although Lewis offers a wonderfully embodied imaginative vision of life in Aslan’s country (including running up waterfalls!), his Platonism muddies the waters, turning the Christian hope of the world redeemed into otherworldly escapism. Granted, Lewis is far from alone in this tendency within Christianity, and, to the extent that Christians lose sight of the idea that the kingdom of God is meant to make a transforming difference to how we live in this present life, Pullman’s critique of being anti-life is at least half-deserved. 

Another line of Pullman’s criticism, the part he calls a “filthy lie”, comes from The Magician’s Nephew — Lewis’s prequel that reveals the creation story of Narnia. In it, Digory retrieves an apple from a tree in the middle of a garden in Narnia, that can give eternal youth. He is sorely tempted to take it to cure his sick mother but, obedient to Aslan, brings it back to him so it can be used to protect Narnia from the witch Jadis. Aslan grants Digory a fruit of the tree to take back to his dying mother.

Pullman is understandably concerned about how children who are reading the book, who might themselves have a dying mother or similar situation, might take this. He interprets this in terms of Digory’s mother’s death or recovery being the punishment or reward for his behaviour: “If you’re a bad boy, your mother’s going to die. If your mother lives, it’s because you’re a good boy”. 

But it’s hard for me to see any sign of such a crude punishment-and-reward schema in Lewis’s novel. Lewis was, admittedly, in part indulging in wish-fulfilment, having lost his own mother in childhood. But there is no hint that Digory is in any way to blame for his mother’s illness, and neither is her healing a simple reward for obedience. Aslan explains to Digory that the apple would have worked even if stolen, though under such circumstances it would have ended up causing misery as well as bringing life. The healing of Digory’s mother is a grace, a gift of compassion from Aslan, who weeps with Digory at the plight of his mother (and who, curiously, Pullman seems to forget in his retelling of the story to O’Connor).

Here we are running headlong into the shadow of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which both Lewis and Pullman are deeply indebted to as an epic retelling of the story of Creation and Fall as told in Genesis — a foundational myth for Western culture’s contested interpretations of the themes of innocence, sin and maturity. 

Just as Lewis plays off Genesis and Milton in his creation and fall story for Narnia, so too in His Dark Materials — in Pullman’s account “Paradise Lost for teens” — does the main character Lyra act the part of a second Eve bringing about a new Fall — one that Pullman’s narrative celebrates as a growing up and stepping into maturity. 

The Chronicles of Narnia and His Dark Materials represent two opposing interpretations of the story of the Fall: Lewis on the side of the traditional Christian interpretation, in which the Fall is a test of obedience to God which Adam and Eve fail, bringing sin and death into the world; and Pullman’s interpretation, the Luciferian outlook, which sees disobedience as a step into the light, a necessary act of rebellion on the path to authentic moral autonomy. Pullman said: “Blake once wrote of Milton that he was a ‘true poet, and of the Devil’s party, without knowing it’. I am of the Devil’s party, and I know it.”

Pullman interprets Narnia through the lens of his view, expressed in an introduction he wrote to Paradise Lost, that “Innocence is not wise, and wisdom is never innocent, and if we are going to do any good in the world, we have to leave childhood behind.”  For Lewis, innocence is not opposed to experience, but to moral guilt before God; through the Christian hope of forgiveness, a restored innocence can co-exist with experience, maturity and wisdom.

But despite this deep theological divide, these two authors’ moral visions converge in some surprising ways. If you take Narnia as not representing childhood, but the world of imagination, then an affinity between Lewis and Pullman emerges. In both series, we have moments where main characters must return to their own world as they grow up — Peter and Susan at the end of Prince Caspian, Edmund and Lucy at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and Lyra and Will at the end of The Amber Spyglass.

Aslan tells Lucy and Edmund at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader that “You are too old, children… and you must begin to come close to your own world now.” This is the same kind of moral responsibility in growing up voiced by Mary Malone in The Amber Spyglass: “We have to build the republic of heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere”. For Will and Lyra, this means sacrifice: being apart despite their love and returning to their own worlds, because they cannot keep coming and going between worlds without risking them again.

If Pullman’s His Dark Materials takes Lewis and the traditional religious idea of God as its foil, then The Book of Dust takes reductive materialism as its antithesis — and here Lewis and Pullman are once again in agreement. It’s ironic that Pullman should make such heavy weather of Susan, when his own heroine Lyra Belacqua experiences an adult falling away of her own in The Book of Dust, embracing a Dawkinsesque reductive materialism that results in her daemon Pantalaimon having to go in search of her lost imagination. Both are deeply concerned about disenchanted vision.

Can the gulf between the two be bridged?

Lewis wrote in one of his essays that “Reason is the natural organ of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning”, implying that both are necessary for obtaining knowledge and wisdom. Similarly, Lyra is told by the angel Xaphania in The Amber Spyglass that imagination “does not mean making things up. It is a form of seeing.” Perhaps the reason that Pullman’s opposition to Lewis runs so hot is that it is a family fight between Christian and secular humanist forms of Romanticism. But whereas Lewis came to see Christianity as “true myth”, satisfying both Reason and Imagination, Pullman finds the Christian story repugnant to both.

Can the gulf between the two be bridged? To return to The Last Battle, whether Lewis is being morally responsible or not hinges in large part on whether this world is all there is or not. If there is “no elsewhere”, for humans to live in service of an imaginary “Kingdom of Heaven”, especially to submit to the authority of God and Church, with its attendant self-denial and rules regarding sexuality, is wasteful and oppressive.

On the other hand, if there is a true King to serve, if there is a true hope of our world redeemed offered to us in God, then our moral horizons are reshaped. From different sides of the religious divide, both Pullman and Lewis would affirm what St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith”.

Yet Pullman’s “Republic of Heaven” and Christianity’s “Kingdom of Heaven” still bear a strong family resemblance, with a shared desire to build a better world, one marked by justice and love and, yes, imagination. And following Tom Holland’s thesis in Dominion that even our secular world inherits Christian assumptions, Pullman shares a moral imagination deeply shaped by Christianity even while he pulls away from it. Pullman’s “Authority” is a senile bureaucrat, a far cry from the “good but not tame” Lion who gives his life for others on a Stone Table: there is a Christ-shaped hole in His Dark Materials’ critique of Christianity.

I wonder, then, if Pullman is of Aslan’s party without knowing it, and not far from the Kingdom.