A school librarian friend in Minneapolis and her relatives in Arlington have informed me of an e-mail campaign that is being waged against yet another fantasy movie for young adults and the books that inspired it. The heat has even reached the level that the website for debunking fraudulent rumors - Snopes.com - has devoted an article about the veracity of the claims. Well, the power and influence of literati to enrage and create controversy once again overwhelms! Not yet having seen the movie, but being very well-acquainted with the books, I acknowledge that the perceived danger is not entirely imaginary for those who would prefer to keep their beliefs unexamined. However, the analysis at Snopes.com doesn't sufficiently do the debate justice.

This Friday's release of the movie version of Phillip Pullman's The Golden Compass ($7.50, Yearling, 0-440-41832-1) is once again drawing fire from parents and religious leaders. As someone who has recommended Pullman's writing to many in my years as a bookseller, I am dismayed, but not surprised, by this new development in the world of boycotts against fantasy writing for young adults. Actually, it was hard to believe that J.K. Rowling's mild-mannered, slightly self-important, brave, and, at times, fool-hardy young magician Harry Potter could really be denounced as a threat to the moral and spiritual lives of children, but Phillip Pullman takes alternate conceptual worlds to an entirely more subversive level. J.K. Rowling offended evangelical concepts of good and evil simply by describing the existence of dark and light magic, which is no worse than anything that C.S. Lewis offered, whereas Phillip Pullman actively and consciously subverts the moral order... But frankly, inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost, he is merely one more in a long line of creative reimaginings of the moral universe. And I believe that he ultimately serves to give young people even better models for making responsible choices, as well as telling a better story.

Essentially, The Golden Compass ($11.95, Knopf, 0-375-82345-X) and its sequels - The Subtle Knife ($11.95, Knopf, 0-375-82346-8) and The Amber Spyglass ($11.95, Knopf, 0-375-82335-2) address a fundamental truth in the world. Children, such as the principal character Lyra and her playmates in Oxford, often are able to live and play independently of the intervention or supervision of adults. But, there comes a point when they realize that there are cruel and self-serving people who possess temporal power, claim religious authority, and use both to their advantage to inflict control, oppression, and harm over others. Sound familiar? These observations would evidently indicate that a human's self-determination is constrained not by God but by one's fellow humans, and often even a supreme being's ability to counteract injustices in the world appears minimal. So, in his story, Pullman supposes a world in which the war in heaven (and on earth) has rendered God impotent. This supposition is threatening to religious people, but it is merely taking apparent evidence to a possible conclusion and telling a story to explore this possibility. Ultimately, his viewpoint enables his characters to find themselves more powerful than they thought they were, which is, contradictorily, also the standpoint of the religious.

However, focusing on his descriptions of God and organized religion actually distracts from what I think is Pullman's more important idea, which is his exploration of a child's process of transformation into a mature individual. Children and adults perceive the world differently. Children still live in a world of stories and imagination. So, Lyra and Will (her companion in the second and third books) are introduced as the prototypical, uncorrupted innocents - a new Adam and Eve, if you will, a concept that was also examined, if you remember, in The Chronicles of Narnia.

These pre-adolescent characters, who have not yet reached the age of sexual awakening, have an enhanced perception of the world's possibilities, but also a limited perception of the world's temporal realities. Lewis saw adolescence as the point at which children no longer were open to the magic of Narnia, i.e. the spiritual world. When Peter and Susan became teenagers, they were preoccupied with their own lives - the political and social distractions of parties and school - and so became separated from the world of Aslan, the God-figure, no longer able to accompany Lucy and Edmund to Narnia.

In interviews, Pullman expressed his opinion that Lewis' idealization of childhood offers a rather dim prospect for humanity, since adults are essentially irrevocably separated from God, getting their glimpses of the divine only briefly. For Pullman's characters, salvation and hope for humanity still comes through the actions of children, but he allows for a few enlightened and heroically empowered adults in the mix. In his conception, in contrast to the Narnia tales, the onset of the self-awareness that accompanies adolescence and the beginning of adulthood is transformative but does not have to definitively limit free-will. And his saga is immense and imaginative, taking his characters from Oxford, England (in a parallel universe), to the North Pole, through rips in the space-time continuum, and eventually into a battleground of divine forces, as well as the world of the dead. As illustrated above, there are a number of editions of The Golden Compass and the other books in the series, not least of which is the His Dark Materials Omnibus ($21.99, Knopf, 0-375-84722-7) which we have selected for Olsson's Holiday Gift Guide and which includes, in one volume, all three books in the trilogy. Read the books, see the movie, and decide for yourself where you stand in the controversy.