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(Bit of a mad rant....)
I have to say that I only vaguely remember Pullman's book, but cannot for some reason even bring myself to skim it again. I remember feeling disappointed by the hopelesseness if the ending. It was as if Pullman, in deciding to 'liberate' humanity from God felt he also had to 'liberate' us from hope as well. He disguises the hopelessness by dressing it up in 'clever' terminology about 'building' a 'republic of heaven' (though, as I've said before, how, exactly, one can physically 'build' what is a metapysical concept - 'heaven' - is beyond me).
Tolkien refuses this cop out. He leaves us with the difficult metaphysical conundrums: How can a loving God permit suffering? What happens after death? What is the meaning of our existence? What Pullman does, as I said, is kill off God & by extension kill off those very questions, leaving us with a sense of emptiness, which we may not immediately feel because we're caught up in our sadness at the eternal seperation of Will & Lyra, & in the (apparently) 'profound' nonsense about this 'republic' of heaven. Pullman has no images of Paradise, because he clearly believes 'Paradise' is one of the 'childish things' that 'grown ups' must put away.
Its perhaps strange at first sight that Tolkien, who lived through the horrors of the Somme, saw his sons go off to fight in WWII, & experienced the unbelievable made fact (the death camps & Hiroshima) could still hold to a hope beyond the circles of the world, while Pullman, product of a safe, secure society which had not known or directly experienced true horror, can dismiss such a thing as almost an 'evil' fantasy needing to be grown out of. But I don't know. Perhaps its the very security Pullman has known that has given him a kind of 'safe distance' from true horror. Certainly he happily plays with the idea of the 'devil', in the form of Lord Azriel, as a kind of Miltonic Satan, heroic anti-hero, defiant to the last, going down in a blaze of glory.
Tolkien, on the other hand, had seen true evil for what it is - his evil ones are vicious, cowardly & cruel - 'monsters' in the true sense of the word. Pullman can only imagine 'evil' in the form of an intolerant 'church' attempting to rule the world & & tell everyone what to do. A simplistic worldview. True 'good' for Pullman is everyone being sensible & grown up about things - generally everyone being nice to each other. I suppose his 'heaven' is a 'heaven on earth', bound within the circles of the world - hence not a 'heaven' at all. His 'vision' (ie the 'hope' he offers) is one stripped of the metaphysical, & so of mystery. In both Tolkien & Pullman we find an account of the end of 'magic', of the world of myth, but in Tolkien the metaphysical dimension remains, & thus so does hope, & possibility. In Pullman it is replaced by blandness & the everyday. But then his conception of 'good' & 'evil' in HDM is equally 'bland'.
(Told you...)
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