Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy was one of the most beloved children’s book series of the 2000s — and one of the most frequently banned, too. Tragic, philosophical, and fervently opposed to classic Christian dogma, Pullman’s series sparked widespread outcry and religious boycotts.

This week, Pullman released The Rose Field, the final volume in the Book of Dust trilogy, a companion series to His Dark Materials. (The first book takes place 11 years before the events of His Dark Materials, and the second two books take place eight years later.) In this new series, the big conflict begins with a book every bit as dangerous as Pullman’s critics used to claim his were. Two of them, actually.

Lyra, Pullman’s scrappy and charismatic heroine, has become infatuated with two books by modern philosophers who preach a kind of post-truth moral relativism. Nothing, they tell her, is real, and nothing means anything. Under the sway of their clever wording, Lyra becomes estranged from her daemon Pantalaimon, the animal companion who accompanies her everywhere — which is to say, within the metaphysical constructs of Pullman’s world, she becomes estranged from her soul.

Ironically, that used to be the religious right’s line about His Dark Materials: that it put children’s souls in danger. Conceived as Paradise Lost for teens, it is, after all, a series that metaphorically denounces the Catholic Church for child abuse and ends with two children literally killing God, then saving the multiverse by falling in love with each other. In 2008, the series ranked second on a list of the most-banned books in the US. A planned series of film adaptations puttered out after just one release in 2007, in part due to pressure from the anti-defamation group the Catholic League.

Pullman pulled no punches when it came to his thoughts on religiously motivated censorship. “Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations,” he wrote for The Guardian in 2008. “Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.”

Pullman’s new series doesn’t call for censorship. But it does make it clear that he believes that there are such things as dangerous books and dangerous ideas, and that they can both put us in danger of becoming estranged from our fundamental selves.

What exactly those dangerous ideas are is what’s at stake in the center of Pullman’s two Lyra trilogies — and in all the debates about which ideas children should be exposed to.

“The Narnia books are such an invaluable guide to what is wrong and cruel and selfish”

In a way, the whole story begins with the danger of a bad book. Pullman’s His Dark Materials books were written in response to and as a reaction against C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and their Christian allegory.

According to Pullman, the Narnia books are “propaganda in the cause of the religion [Lewis] believed in.” Moreover, they are filled with the kind of values children should be taught to abhor, not to aspire to. “It is monumentally disparaging of girls and women,” Pullman said at The Guardian’s Hay festival in 2002. “It is blatantly racist. One girl was sent to hell because she was getting interested in clothes and boys.”

The Narnia books, it is true, do not mesh nicely with today’s sexual and racial politics. Lewis’s girls are always taught to stay out of the action during battles, while the boys are given swords and fight in duels to the death. Susan Pevensie, as Pullman said, is declared “no longer a friend to Narnia” and thus ineligible to be transported to heaven with her family at the end of the series because she is........

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