Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good” (Flood). He was also quoted as saying that, “Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. He also stated that he saw this rise in dissent over his novel due to religion was “the worst reason of the lot” (Flood).
The author himself, stated that he felt “glee” when he discovered his book was being challenged. In 2007 The Golden Compass received “420 formally submitted complaints to libraries and schools over ‘inappropriate content and subject matter’” (Flood). In the same year Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, in which The Golden Compass is apart of, ranked second on the United State’s banned books list (Pilkington) jumping up from its fourth spot that it held in 2007 (Flood). The books all ended up being returned to their respective libraries, but now holding a sticker that said, “representations of the Church are purely fictional and not reflective of the real Roman Catholic Church or the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” The Golden Compass was pulled from the shelves of many schools-most of which were Catholic schools-in both the US and Canada for the book’s “anti-Christian message” (Marshall University) in 20. What parents chose to hone in on though was Pullman’s treatment of religion (with an occasional spatter of issues with drug use alcohol). There are many things present in The Golden Compass that warranted other books to be banned and challenged at other times: violence (a bear gets its lower jaw ripped off, and many children and adults die, sometimes is fantastically brutal ways), the presence of magic and witches, and a rebellious and often foul mouthed protagonist (even though it is never explicitly written, Lyra is described as swearing and cursing quite a bit). That is when everything surrounding this magical story was placed under the prying microscope of parents. It went relatively unchallenged by the gatekeepers for more than ten year until the film adaptation was released in 2007. The Golden Compass, or The Northern Lights as it is titled in other countries, was first published in 1995 to great critical acclaim. Many of my friends had experienced the same thing with their parents when they brought the book home, and after I looked into it more, apparently many, many other parents did too. Right? When we were given this assignment I immediately sprang at the chance to grab this book and read it for the first time. If my mom thought it was bad, it had to be. “That book is evil,” she had said, “The man who wrote it is an atheist.”īeing an innocent and naïve child, I did as she said unquestioningly.
But, when I brought home Phillip Pullman’s The Golden Compass from my middle school’s library my mother immediately told me to take it back. I read whatever book I could get my hands on that told stories of other worlds, some like my own, some vastly different. As a child, and still now, I was fascinated by worlds of fantasy.
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