The Devil's Account

by Hugh Rayment-Pickard

Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy has charmed children and adults alike. The trilogy has been adapted for a hugely successful National Theatre production and the third volume, The Amber Spyglass, was the first children's book to win the Whitbread prize. But the stories paint a disturbing picture of a corrupt and corrupting church, and culminate in the death of a fragile and impotent God. Religious opinion of the books has been strongly divided, with the Catholic Herald calling for them to be burned, while the Archbishop of Canterbury proposes that they be required reading in religious education. In the first serious literary critical analysis of Pullman's writing, Rayment-Pickard examines the multitude of religious and mythological themes that run through the trilogy and his earlier writing, looking at Pullman's literary influences and linking these with his own, very critical, view of organised religion.