** spoiler alert ** In The Amber Spyglass Philip Pullman commits two serious authorial sins: he gets preachy and he loses control of his story. The result is book that, while excellent in places, is somewhat less enjoyable than the first two volumes of His Dark Materials.

In The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife the narrative focused on Lyra and Will, the two main characters. In this book the action jumps between their story and three or four others, which are at times peripheral and uninteresting. The most egregious case is the storyline that follows Father Gomez, the priest sent to kill Lyra. This story goes nowhere: he never encounters Lyra and is eliminated by a character we thought had left the book several hundred pages previously. His story serves no purpose other than to inject some cheap tension and offer a platform for another dig at the Magisterium/Church through the doctrine of preemptive absolution (a cool idea, it must be said). This seems to be the motivation for many of the digressions. It's almost as if Pullman had a list of neat ideas, realized this was his last chance to get them in the series, and resolved to insert them at any cost.

There is also a great deal of convenience in the narrative. The alethiometers have become both deus and machina: everyone has one and can suddenly read them almost perfectly. This becomes a crutch for Pullman to move the story along without much motivation. Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter, at best morally ambiguous in the previous books, have become good for unclear reasons.

For all these narrative problems on the fringes, the central story involving Lyra and Will is strong. The more serious problem is the preachiness. Narratively the problem is that it's very heavy handed, but I don't want to focus on that. Nor do I object to the content of Pullman's message. My problem is that Pullman seems to be mistaken about what he is preaching.

Pullman has claimed in interviews that he wanted to be the anti-C. S. Lewis and that unlike Milton, who was of the Devil's party and didn't know it, he is of the Devil's party and knows it. These claims certainly helped raise the profile of the books and the film (about which less said, the better), but they are overstated. I believe, on the contrary, that Pullman is of God's party and doesn't know it. Pullman's cosmology is very similar to Christianity's, and his trilogy very similar to more overtly Christian fantasies like The Chronicles of Narnia.

This may seem to be a perverse claim to make. Pullman, after all, has a chacter whom we are supposed to believe say Christianity "is a very powerful and convincing mistake." But it is at least a plausable reading. In the first place, Pullman's world is not atheist. It is pantheist: the universe is god. This god communicates through the alethiometer and other truth-telling devices, which not only tell the factual truth, but also give moral advice. The alethiometer frequently tells Lyra that things are right and wrong, not just true or false.

Second, the relationship between god and the demonic element (The Authority) is exactly the same as it is in Christian accounts of Satan. In both cases a creature falsely claims to be the creator in order to gratify his own pride and exert his own power. This rebellion is the origin of evil in both stories. In both cases things can be set right by recognizing and rejecting the false claims of the demonic authority, a miraculous and unexpected intervention by the true god, and learning to love one another. Admittedly Christians are not pantheists, but most do not believe God is a lion either. Pullman has changed the form, but the content is remarkably similar.

Finally, both Pullman and Lewis show their characters learning moral lessons that the reader is also supposed to imbibe. In both cases the characters learn to be brave, honest, and loyal; to sacrifice their own immediate desires to the needs of others; and to pursue truth and knowledge, including to question authority. Pullman is not exactly tearing up the foundations of Christian morality here.

Rather than seeing Pullman as an atheist or anti-Christian author, it is more accurate to see his as part of a long tradition of English anti-clerical (and perhaps anti-papist, although that's a different review) writers. Many Christians have understood the visible Church to be corrupt and the clergy to be ambitious for power, without ceasing to be Christian. Some might even argue this is an essential truth of Christianity.