The Realist Magic of Philip Pullman

The Golden Compass author tells us how to love this world. It's not easy.

- By Lev Grossman

Philip Pullman's young-adult fantasy classic The Golden Compass was published in 1995, two years before Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Both are wildly popular, but only J. K. Rowling’s series inspired a theme park. Even after 30 years, during which The Golden Compass became a trilogy, His Dark Materials, which begat a second trilogy, The Book of Dust—collectively selling something like 50 million copies—Pullman’s books retain an idiosyncratic spikiness. Rowling's work has a glossy, optimized feel; it’s engineered for your comfort. Pullman's epic, which concludes this fall with the publication of The Rose Field, doesn't leach into the cultural groundwater quite so readily.

For starters, Pullman's world-building is spotty, probably intentionally so. Magic in contemporary fantasy is meant to function as a system, with rules and regulations, but his is wild and willful: Witches fly on cloud-pine branches; angels coalesce out of dust. His books are more permeable to the real world than Rowling’s—boat-borne refugees and climate change crop up. Not least, Pullman stakes claims; he politely but firmly declines to mince words. When Rowling wants to acknowledge her religion in her work, she does so with a few decorous, sidelong allusions to Christian faith. Pullman is an atheist, and he expresses that in His Dark Materials by killing God.