Golden Compass Points in No Direction.

Lest I use a technical terminology you non-writers cannot follow, allow me to explain. In professional writing, we professionals say a PLOT SUCKS when the actions of the characters do not flow from causes previously established in the narrative, or when the reactions of following events do not reflect any consequences. In the first case, something come out of nowhere; and in the second case, nothing comes of it.

In telling a tale, a narrator is trying to cast a spell, to deceive the reader (with the reader’s cooperation, or course) into the illusion that the events being portrayed are unfolding before his eyes. The basic  ingredient  of the magician’s cauldron,  is, of course, verisimilitude. The events need not be real, or even realistic. They can be larger than life or smaller than life or true to life. They do not need to follow the logic of real life cause-and-effect. But they must follow the story-logic of make-believe. The author can say what happens: but he cannot say, like a child playing a game, that it only happens because of his say-so. If the events or plot elements appear out of nowhere and vanish with no consequence trailing after them,  it is too much unlike life. The event seem to be inauthentic, inorganic, unnatural, and each thing that happens does not seem to be happening because of what the story requires, but merely because of what the author wants. If your plot has events and elements that don’t fit into the rest of the plot, if the plot is arbitrary, the spell is broken, artistic integrity flies out the window, and the reader is betrayed.

There are two ways in which a plot can suck.

The first is called the Gunrack Rule or Chekhov’s Gun Rule. If you establish in Act One that there is a gun hanging on the wall, by Act Three it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t have been hanging there in the first place. Guns that hang on walls and never go off are a distraction to the reader, a useless element, a protuberance.

 This second rule is a compliment to the first: If you need to have your character fire the gun in the Third Act, you cannot simply have a god lowered from the stage machinery and hand the gun to him. This is called Deus Ex Machina. While normally this term is used to mean the writer uses an arbitrary mechanism to have the plot end well, the word is still apt in cases, such as here, where the writer uses an arbitrary mechanism to have the plot creak and lurch like Frankenstein’s monster stiffly from one disconnected event to the next.

My complaint is that, not one nor two, but each and every plot element I can recall to mind either was an Unfired Gun or was a Deus Ex Machina.

 One of the responses to my previous criticism was to claim that there are no universal rules to writing. Not everyone needs to obey Chekhov! Such famous literary luminaries as Zachariah Snarfblorcht or the famous Ugo von Pfphlzu routinely violate these rules!

The only problem with relying on the example of these famous artists, of course, is that I have never heard of them, and the names sound made-up to me. Maybe I am a philistine and these rarefied artistes are too profound for my pedestrian tastes. That may be. On the other hand, maybe there are some writers who can violate the rules of writing and do it well. May claim is that Mr. Pullman is violating the rules of writing and doing it badly.

Now, dear reader, if that is my complaint, it does no good to tell me that an arbitrarily unhappy ending that splits Will and Lyra is mature and deep and shows that life does not have easy answers and blah blah blah.

My complaint is that the reason that forces the separation is not previously established, and has every earmark of being thrown in by the author without forethought or foreshadowing. My complaint is not that the arbitrarily unhappy ending is unhappy; my complaint is that it is arbitrary.

To prove that the ending was arbitrary, let us look at the scene where it is announced that anyone living in another world for ten years gets sick and dies. Change that one sentence. Now tell me what, before that point in the manuscript for three books, what else would also have to change to make the manuscript self-consistent? I cannot think of a single plot-point, paragraph, or line.

 Pullman could have easily established the unhappy ending in his background in the same way the Tolkien established the downfall of the Three Rings of the Elves once the One Ring was destroyed. Tolkien establishes his mood in scene one, when rustic hobbits at the pub talk about the elves passing through their land to the Gray Havens, there to board ships that go to some hither shore, never to return. This mood is followed through, and the plot point stated explicitly, in the scene where Galadriel is tempted by the One Ring. It is established that the end of the One Ring spells the end of the Elfin magic, and that Galadriel and her people must fade and pass away to the West if the Ring is destroyed. The melancholy ending in Tolkien is established from Chapter One. Had Tolkien rewritten the scene where Sam sees Frodo off on the last ship out of Middle Earth so that Frodo simply decided to stay, and keep his elfish friends with him, and the elfs suddenly returned to their ancient numbers and powers, and all the glory of the old days suddenly and for no reason sprang into being, that would have been a happy ending, but an arbitrary and stupid one, for it would have violated what was already established.

The melancholy ending in Pullman is exactly this kind of arbitrary and stupid one: the author merely says that no one can emigrate to other worlds, and we are expected to believe it. Well, I do not believe it. It violates what was already established, in mood if not in plot logic. Why is the gate between Lyra’s world and Will’s impossible to maintain, but the gate to the underworld is possible to maintain? What is there about the Subtle Knife that makes it impossible to find some safe way to use? As best I can recall, the Dust Demons promised to destroy the Specters that were the side effect of Knife-use. Why not simply have one stand by each time Lyra and Will went to see each other? Is this not a reward in keeping with those whose action have overthrown the tyranny of heaven? Who else in the plot died because of interdimensional travel sickness? Why are the Dust creatures immune to it? How do we know the demons were not simply lying about this point?

My complaint is not that the ending is unhappy. HAMLET ends unhappily, and yet the author there does not suddenly announce that the cup quaffed by the Queen contains poison only after she drinks it. The author there establishes in a previous scene which blade and which cup will be poisoned, and who is doing the poisoning and why.

I am not talking about plot twists. A plot twist requires more clever set up, not less; more attention to detail.

In HAMLET, when the Queen drinks a cup of poison meant for the Prince, that is a plot-twist. It is unexpected, yet not unbelievable, that the Queen might pick up the cup waiting for Hamlet and carouse to his fortune. Indeed, even in Act One the evils that follow the Danes from their wassail are foreshadowed. But since in the previous scene the audience was told that Claudio would place a poisoned pearl in the chalice of the prince, it is a surprise, it is a plot twist, but it is not arbitrary, it is not Deus Ex Machina, for the Laertes to announce the Queen’s been poisoned after she drinks.

So, the argument cannot be maintained that Pullman is indulging in a plot-twist or an unexpected turn of events in his narrative. A writer needs to have a plot to have a plot-twist. One needs to see a road to see an unexpected turn in it.

Imagine the same scene in HAMLET if Pullman had written it. Hamlet, using a mystic pearl, places the poison in the cup to kill Claudio. We are all told Hamlet will die by drinking the cup. Then Claudio dies choking on a chicken bone at lunch. Then the Queen dies when Horatio shows her the magical Mirror of Death. This mirror appears in no previous scene, nor is it explained why it exists. Then the Ophelia summons up the ghost from Act One and kills it, while makes a speech denouncing the evils of religion. Ophelia and Hamlet are parted, as it is revealed in the last act that a curse will befall them if they do not part ways.

Think I am kidding? I am not even being subtle. The pearl is the knife. Claudio is Evil God. The chicken bone is him falling out of bed. Horatio is Mrs. Coulter. The Death Mirror is this sudden, unexplained, stupid abyss that winged angels can not fly out of. The Ophelia is Lyra, and the Ghost is the ghost.

Unlike HAMLET, not only is there no climax to AMBER SPYGLASS, there is no plot, merely a disconnected series of events. In the case of the death of Metatron, which (in a properly constructed book, would have been the climax) I could not for the life of me figure out how killing off one badguy, even if he was the Caesar of Heaven, would halt or even hinder the Roman Empire of Heaven.

If there was one evil being done by the Empire of Heaven, such as a war or an oppression that only that one Seraphic ruler had ordered, but that the Praetorians, Patricians and soldiers (or, if you like, Cherubim, principalities and angels) had no interest in pursuing, then offing the one ruler would stop that oppression: but Mr. Pullman makes it clear that the evils of Yehovah are systemic. Killing Jove and Metatron could not uproot the Evil Catholic Church on earth, or even hinder the operations of her officers.

You see, in a well-crafted book, the evil empire of heaven would have been doing something, up to something. In a well-crafted book there would be, in other words, a plot. There would be a goal to which the good guys are moving, and a means they select to achieve; a yardstick of success and failure. There would be a goal to which the bad guys are moving, and a means to achieve it.

Let me use a clear example. I pick this example because it is clear, and it is good craftsmanship, not because it is great writing. In STAR WARS, the McGuffin was the blueprints to the armored battlestation Death Star. The good guys wanted to use the plans to blow up the Death Star, the bad guys wanted to recover the plans. Unlike Pullman, George Lucas establishes before even Act One, in the introduction word-crawl, this plot point. Space-Princess has the blueprints. Dark Helmet in Act One captures the Space-Princess. To recover the plans, Dark Helmet uses drugs and torture on Space Princess to get her to talk. That is a plot, because the bad guys want something, and they are using a certain means to get it.

Plot Twist one: good guys rescue Space Princess. This would seem to thwart the plot of the Bad Guys, because now they cannot discover the plans from her; but, aha! Dark Helmet let the Space Princess escape, so that Bad Guys could secretly follow Space Princess back to Rebel Base just in time for Big Fight Scene. Good Guys now try to use captured plans to blow up Death Star; Death Star now tries to use megadeath beam-weapon to blow up rebel base, but gas giant is in the way. If Good Guys blow up Death Star first, they win; if Bad Guys blow up rebel base first, they win.

See? THAT is a plot. Each party has something he is trying to accomplish, and he is opposed by a contrary party whose actions are mutually exclusive, and therefore antagonistic to, the first party.

Now, let us look at Pullman’s opus. The McGuffin here, the “plans to the Death Star” were the Subtle Knife, the god-killing weapon. But there are no bad guys on stage when the knife is introduced. The conflict with Evil Tyrant God is not in Act One; it is not even clear until late in book two, or maybe book three. The Evil Church sends out an assassin to kill Lyra, but it is not clear what this will accomplish for them. I frankly don’t remember what happens to that assassin– did Will get him with the knife? The scene did not make enough of an impact to lodge in my memory. The leaders in heaven of the Evil Church, one of them dies by falling out of bed, and the other one is seduced and pushed into a Bottomless Pit by a side character. The hero and heroine, as far as I know, never even hear the news that anything has happened to the bad guys.

The good guys have no goal. The bad guys have no goal. There is motion, and speeches, but no plot. Nothing is done by the end. What makes the Church in the final volume unable to send out a dozen more evil assassins to mug the girl? What advantage or disadvantage did it do the Evil Church to have the wheeled elephant things on another world innocent or fallen, if these words have any meaning in this context?

The arbitrary plot points in Pullman are countless. When Mrs Coulter announces that she has the power to seduce Metatron, on the grounds that all angels are consumed with lusts of the flesh, this plot point is introduced when and only when needed. It is not part of the background of the rest of the story. It could be removed without damage to the rest of the story. It does not crop up again. It is not explained, even though it would have been easy for the author to do so.

This plot point also seems arbitrary because there is no sense that the author thought through the implications. To use a simple example, if you found out young women on this planet wore men’s hats with wide brims whenever they walked out-of-doors, and then found out they were afraid that the angels in heaven would see them and carry them off, then the dress code of this planet would have a logical relation to the plot point. Or if women were not allowed to walk abroad without an armed priest or something. Or if the world had many stories of Nephilim and Demigods, men who were the offspring of the Sons of God and the Daughters of Eve. Or if Lyra’s older sister had been carried off by a lustful angel. Or something. If the details were correct, it would seem like a real planet.

The Pit into which Mrs. Coulter pushes the archangel, likewise is arbitrary. It is not the pit that was foretold to us since chapter one was the Dread Pit Of No-Escape. This is arbitrary writing, as if a character in Act Three picked up a vase, announced it was a gun, and shot the antagonist.

Let us remind ourselves of other arbitrary plot points.

Will. The plot promises us the boy will kill God with a magic knife: he doesn’t. He does not kill God at all; God dies by falling out of bed, through no action set in motion by the main character or any character. The Subtle Knife does not kill God, or even God’s regent Metatron.

Asrael. The plot promises the evil Kingdom of Heaven will be overthrown and replaced with Republic, a place where humans get a say in how the universe is run. It isn’t. As far as I can tell, two officers of the Evil Kingdom die: Nothing in the book indicates that Archangel Michael will not don the crown of heaven and continue the war. The war has no point and no victory conditions.

Lyra. The girl is supposed to be the new Eve: apparently this is a sterile Eve, because no new race is born of her. Being the “New Eve” of the entire universe is evidently the same thing as being a freshmen in college. Ho-hum.

Mary. The ex-nun was supposed to be the new serpent. She simply is not: there is nothing and no one she talks to that is persuaded to depart from submission to the evil God. The wheeled creatures were not Church victims. No one is in chains to be set free.

There is no new Eden, no victory, no change, no nothing.

The Evil Church. It is merely arbitrarily said to be evil, but nothing in the plot shows it to be evil. It sends out an assassin to kill a child, but this is done apparently for no reason, and it is not a worse thing than what Asrael does in killing children to open a gate to a new world.

The Evil God. As far as I can tell the Evil Church does not even know that the Evil God exists. He does not give them dust-power or create evil miracles when they are starting their evil inquisitions, because there are no evil miracles and no evil inquisitions on stage. Killing Evil God would not put Evil Church out of business, or even require a half-day holiday to change the branding.

Mrs. Coulter. Starts out evil, decides to rescue her child, and then sacrifice herself to slay Metatron. None of these motives are established, and nothing comes of them. Certainly Lyra never finds out what happened to her Mom. I don’t remember if she even knew it was her Mom. Had Metatron died by choking on a fishbone, or some other death as arbitrary and stupid as the one that felled his boss, not a single word in the book that lead up to that event, and not a single word in any scene that comes after, would need to be changed. No references are made to it: the act exists in a vacuum; nothing is accomplished.

This list could go on and on. Indeed, I am hard pressed to think of a single event or plot point that is not introduced arbitrarily and then swept off stage without meaning and without consequences. There was no reason given as to why Lyra was the “Chosen One” who could read the Golden Compass, no explanation of who made the artifact or why. Nothing comes from any prophecies about her, which means that the art of reading the Dust for clues about the future (Lyra’s only skill in the book) means nothing.

If all the prophecies are fake, what is the point of having your main character girl be a prophetess?

Nothing comes of Will’s wound to his hand. Nothing comes of Will’s missing father. Nothing comes of Lord Asrael’s experiments: he breaks through to a new world, but so what? All that means is that he released another specter into the environment. Lord Asrael gathers a titanic army, but so what? Mrs. Coulter offs the head general on the other side. We all know that the killing of Yamamoto would have stopped World War II, right? Oh, wait a minute …

Does the homosexual angel who was banished from heaven ever get back again and revisit his sodomite lover? Aside from whether you think this plot element is Politically Progressive or jarringly tasteless for a children’s book, the fact of the matter is that the plot never returns to this character, and we never find out. Just one more point where the plot suffers from attention deficit disorder.

Let me emphasis the most pointless plot point on this whole pointless list.

 Lyra kills the ghosts. This is a particularly egregious example, and the flaw would have been particularly easy to fix. All you have to do is set it up and follow through. Nothing in her character or in the plot before this scene makes her, or the reader, or anyone, have any stake in the outcome, emotional or otherwise, in this scene. It makes sense on no level, either as metaphor or as literature. Why would the ghosts prefer oblivion to a disembodied existence? If their new life is not oblivion, then either they are going to some sort of reincarnation, to a self-hood-destroying union with the Cosmic All, or to a Last Judgment: in this last case the Evil Church is correct about life after death. In the other two cases, the Hindu or the Buddhist is correct, neither of which has any representatives in the plot. For an atheist book to be preaching an oriental religion is baffling to say the least. Nothing comes of it. Nothing that was wrong is set right because the ghosts are dead.

Compare it to a parallel situation in THE FARTHEST SHORE by Ursula K. LeGuin. In that book, the unwise wizard Cob attempts to extend his life by necromancy. But his necromancy upsets the equilibrium of the spirit world, and of the world of men. Crops are failing. Magic spells are fading. The Wise are forgetting the names of things. The dragons are dying. All that is good and fair is draining out of the scheme of the world. The door between the world and the afterworld is breached. The living world is becoming slowly to be like the death world.

The Archimage of Roke, Sparrowhawk finds and confronts Cob, who, by then, is neither alive nor dead. Cob has forgotten his own True Name. Now Sparrowhawk must walk through the land of the dead to undo the fracture Cob made in the wall between life and death. This is accomplished, but at a tremendous cost: the magic of Sparrowhawk, greatest of magicians, is gone. But the magic of the world is saved. It is the yearning of the magician Cob for endless life, for Ying without Yang, for Day without Night, that causes the catastrophe.

I must emphasize yet again that I am not talking about the ideas in AMBER SPYGLASS, I am talking about the plot. In THE FARTHEST SHORE the fact that some imbalance is draining the magic from the world is established in Act One. The reason for the evil is revealed to be something understandable: a necromancer wanted to interfere with the natural balance between life and death in order to win more life for himself. The consequences of the terrible act, and the sacrifices needed to affect a cure, and carried through with admirable plot logic. That Sparrowhawk loses his magic is melancholy, and even unexpected, but it is not arbitrary.

The scene with Lyra killing (or whatever) the ghosts is almost identical in concept, except that Pullman does everything clumsily that LeGuin does with effortless grace. There is this stuff called Dust, which is apparently demon-stuff. Or maybe it is sexual energy. Or maybe it is self-awareness. Or maybe it is the wisdom that rejects religion. Or maybe it created the universe. Or …. If the author had any idea of what this stuff is, he did not make it clear to this reader, at least. The Dust produces Angels, who are all-powerful beings ruling the universe. Except that they are weak, hollow-boned creatures that a crippled thirteen-year-old can defeat in a wrestling match: Will cracks their bones with his wounded hands when they get in his way. The Evil Church somehow, back in the past, imprisoned a bunch of ghosts in a boring afterworld. Why? Unlike Cob, no reason is given, at least, none I can recall. (I am not willing to go back and reread these books to find the passage where the reason is given, if it exists: if you, dear reader, have the passage at hand, tell me, and satisfy my curiosity on this point.)

The boredom makes the ghosts yearn for oblivion. Why? Just because. Lyra shows up, and, for no reason, uses the Subtle Knife to open a gateway into oblivion for them, and the joyful ghosts all annihilate themselves, so that their soul-atoms can be carried off and be recycled. Why? No reason. Does anything come of this? No.

Maybe I am wrong on this point: after all, the harpies were tormenting the ghosts with memories of their sins and crimes. If you actually think people like Stalin and Hitler and Mao (or (if you are Dante) people like Brutus, Cassius, or Judas) deserve no worse penalty than merely a verbal recitation of their list of crimes (a pretty doubtful “if”) then why not use the Knife on the harpies and simply kill the harpies, instead of killing the ghosts? Why not open a gateway into some other environment, a place with nice things to look at, rather than into oblivion?

If you have to sacrifice someone to maintain the spiritual ecology of the universe, why sacrifice the ghosts? Why not sacrifice a cow? Why destroy the memories of your sacred ancestors? You tell me the universe is constructed so that the life-energy or the thought-substance of the ghosts, the Dust they accumulated, has to be returned to the source? That sounds to me like the book is saying the universe needs to eat the thought-substance, the intelligence, of the ghosts in order to remain a healthy universe. If so, this universe is a worse evil god than Evil God, for it kills its children like Saturn, it kills your children like Moloch, but is merely a blind and dumb machine. Evil God sounds positively charming compared to that.

Are those ghosts annihilated, reincarnated, unified with the Cosmos, or brought to a Last Judgment? A casual reader cannot tell. The reason why a casual reader cannot tell is because none of these four options would make the slightest bit of difference to anything following after this event, nor make the slightest bit of difference to anything that led up to this event.

To add insult to injury, it would have been easy, so easy, effortless, for any editor to tell Pullman to put in a scene in Act One where the land was ailing and the crops were failing, because the ghosts were not being recycled as part of the spiritual ecology of the world. Babies were being born without their daemons. The magic is poisoned because Cob, or the Evil Church, meddled with the natural order of things. When the natural order is restored, the wrong things go right. How hard is that? How hard is that to put in a book? If anything like this was in there, I missed it.

Of the controversy surrounding whether or not Will and Lyra are lovers at the end of the book or just good friends, the author has left this ambiguous, and I have no opinion and frankly do not care a tinker’s damn, because both options are bad writing.

Option one: if Lyra and Will are lovers, not only is this grotesque, considering their age, but it is pointless. It is pointless because nothing comes from it and nothing leads to it. It is both a violation of the Gunrack Rule and of the rule against Gods from the Stage Machinery.

Nothing comes of it. Lyra is supposed to be the new Eve, but she must be a sterile Eve, because there is no New Cain, Able, Seth or any new mankind. The idea that all the world changes merely because two teens do the Wild Thang is stupid and offensive. Love may conquer all, but, seriously, it is not that important in the grand scheme of things. And the matter of fact is that the world is not changed at the end of the story. All the angels in heaven are still around, and the Evil Church is still running things. The only change is that Lyra now wants to go to school, and she makes a dumb speech about being nice and kind to all living things, a speech that could not come out of the mouth of the character as previously established, and which nothing in the plot could have put in her mouth. Oh, and she lost the power to read the Golden Compass, which is okay, because we find out that the powers manipulating the compass and sending her messages through it are fallen angels, creatures who we know nothing about, not even their names.

Nothing leads up to it. If one act of pre-teen coitus it is that important in the grand scheme of things, the author has to establish its importance in the first act.

Let us contrast this, not with HAMLET, but with the movie KRULL. In KRULL in the first act, it is established that the princess is prophesied to give birth to a son who will rule the stars. This is the motive for The Beast to kidnap the princess, and the reason why The Beast does not simply kill her. It drives the plot. In Pullman, there is nothing said in Act One that establishes Lyra losing her virginity will shatter the thrones of heaven and change the world.

Option two: Lyra and Will are just good friends. Well, gee, it is nice when two teenagers are friends, and even puppy love is nice, but I don’t know any real life girl who is still moping, years later, after going to school, growing up, getting a man and a family of her own, for some guy she met at age thirteen. Every year she goes to the same beach and sits and looks mournfully out at the sunset. Boo-freaking-hoo. I am not saying it does not happen: I am just saying I don’t know anyone like that, and if Lyra is like that, the author did not introduce me to her in such a fashion as to create in my imagination the impression that she was that way.

It is trivial, almost offensively so. After all this blood and thunder, the death of her parents, the downfall of archangels, we get, what, again, exactly, as the pay-off?

Not only does nothing lead up to this ending, the lead-up is contrary to it. We are told that daemons cease to change shape when children become adults, and adulthood is defined as being touched by the hand of a lover. The word lover, under option two, refers to an unconsummated love. We are told that it is Lyra’s innocence that give her the power to read the alethiometer. So, under option two, Lyra’s innocence is lost and her adulthood gained, not because she goes from being a maiden to a wife (which is the normal meaning traditionally attached to those words) but because she goes from being a self-centered little girl to being a girl with a puppy-love teen crush on a guy that is never consummated. This makes no sense on any level. Why would young love make anyone less innocent? The message here is that falling in love is a corruptive rather than an ennobling process: this is a strange message indeed, coming from a book where the cosmic substance underlying all reality, the Dust, is the source and side-effect of sexual passion, and the Evil Church is evil because and only because it preaches chastity. Or perhaps the Dust represents wisdom and the Church represents willful ignorance, in which case, having innocence be the source of magic makes even less sense. Wisdom would be the enemy of magic in that background; wise men would be the only ones not able to do magic.

This book should have been an atheist book. In an atheist book, the point would be that life consists of life on Earth, and that daydreams about life after death or Flying Spaghetti Monsters ruling the world are pernicious. In such a book, the churchgoing characters would be shown being corrupted by the act of having their faith blind their reason. The churchmen would be shown robbing and deceiving the gullible faithful. The short term and long term effects of the evil being done by the ideas and by the practice of the Evil Church would be onstage. It is not that hard to do. The short and long term evils caused by collectivist thinking are admirably and unmistakably put on pitiless display in the philosophical novel ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand. Love that book or hate it, no one can say that Ayn Rand does not show in the plot what she conceives the wrongheadedness of collectivism to be, or does not show what she conceives to be the bad consequences that flow from collectivizing the economy. Her plot supports her ideas: she had the United States railroad industry, and indeed the whole economy, fall apart step by step in front of the reader’s eyes. In Pullman’s book, nothing of the kind is done. I cannot tell what Pullman thinks is so great about atheism or thinks is so wrong about believing in God, because nothing happens in the plot to support the ideas. Nothing falls apart. Nothing is going wrong at the beginning of the book and nothing is put right at the end; or, rather, the thing going wrong at the beginning of the book, street urchins being kidnapped for Nazi experiments, turns out to be the work of Lord Asrael and his wife, who stop the experiments for no particular reason.

I say again: This book should have been an atheist book. An atheist book says not only that God is a delusion, an atheist book also says men need to take control of their own lives and their own destinies. That is NOT the message in this book, despite a nod in that direction, too little, and too late. The message in this book is that the promises of the Republic in Heaven is FALSE. That you will never get to vote on how the worlds and constellations are run. You don’t get a vote. You will NEVER solve the problem of separation from your loved ones. You are NOT in charge.

In order for this to be an atheist book, some character, major or minor, would need to be shown not in charge of his life, oppressed by the Church, by a web of falsehoods trapping him, and then, when the net is cut, he proves able to do for himself, and make all the decisions he needs to make as well as, nay, better than, what the false Gods made for him. Nothing like that happens in the … whole … boring … silly … badly-written … book.