Unless you can come up with a better ending yourself
Dear friends, my complaint about Mr. Pullman’s trilogy is not that it has a anti-Christian message. As I said, I was an atheist when I read him, and I was favorably disposed toward his message.
My complaint is that the plot promised us a War in Heaven, and instead we got a dumb scene where a little girl annihilates all of the ghosts of the dead rather than saving them–and the dumb part is that the ghosts are grateful for their abolition into non-being, because their elemental energies return to the great cycle of life. I mean, I know some people for whom recycling is a religion, but I don’t know they would die for it.
In any case, I would have thought to preserve at least some of the ghosts, so that historians could talk to them. Shakespeare and Plato, if no one else.
War in heaven! It should have been grandiose. We know Mr. Pullman can do grandiose, because we saw the Homeric combat between the armored polar bears and other great scenes.
Myself, when I want to read about men fighting God Almighty, I want to see something massive and impressive happening. I want something of Wagnerian magnitude: the stars should shatter on the dome of heaven, the planets and angels wail in terror, and God be pitched flaming headlong from his crystal throne, to lie, huge bulk smoldering, with his head prone upon Gibraltar, and his feet in Jerusalem, with all the middle sea steaming around him.
From his limp fingers drops the thunderbolt, that cruel scepter by which he has oppressed the myriads of time. Adam, first of all men, guilty of nothing but a desire for knowledge and freedom, should step forth from the avenging army crowd of God’s victims (for surely Prometheus and Ixion and Tantalus are here as well!) to drive a stake made of apple-wood into the tyrant of heaven’s monster-heart, unfurls the banners of peace and liberty above the continent-spanning corpse. Now to all with liberal hand, great Adam, universal father, and gives the fruit of the Tree of Life, his by right and theirs by inheritance: for the fiery cherubim are slain.
Albrecht, another victim of heavenly malfeasance, now connects with copper cables the dropped thunderbolt to the electrical grid, taming the divine fires for human use and convenience. The cities of man, adorned as a bride in gems, shine back the light of heaven to the liberated stars.
Job, tormented for no reason by this cruel bully of heaven, arises from the land of the dead with all his family and cattle around him, and, being instructed by modern science to answer all the mysterious questions of when and where the earth was made, and what the Sons of Light sang at the dawn of time, weeps a tear of gratitude, and is finally free to curse God with relish, and live.
Lord Asriel, the angel of death indeed, would reveal the spiritual mechanisms by which the so-called almighty had usurped from Man his native powers: and the Pope be dragged by her hair (actually a woman in disguise, a whore named Joan) to the pyre where she is burned alive on a stack of her own false bibles. Death being banished from the newly-cleansed world, the fiery torment lasts forever.
The great and powerful spirit despised and reviled as Satan turns out to be none other than gentle Saturn, and at his re-awakening, the world enters a Golden Age, as once was known during Saturn’s reign of old. No king save Peace and Happiness rules over the rejoicing peoples of the world.
Okay. THAT would have been a scene worthy of Mr. Pullman’s intent.
If you are going to blaspheme, let ’em have it with both barrels!
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
