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The story begins with a girl hiding in a wardrobe. It continues with a series of adventures in which the girl passes through gateways into other worlds, meeting witches, figures from ancient mythology, and talking animals along the way. Ultimately, it takes her into the afterlife and to an apocalyptic battle between supernatural powers.

Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials, has some striking parallels to C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia. Between protective beasts, snowy landscapes, and references to a prophecy only the girl may be able to fulfill, the ads for The Golden Compass—the first installment of Pullman's series coming to the big screen on December 7—look made to attract fans of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. New Line Cinema has also gone out of its way to link the new film to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which the studio also adapted.

But His Dark Materials presents a strikingly different kind of tale from the ones told by Lewis and Tolkien; on a certain level, it even opposes them. Pullman, writing in The Guardian on the occasion of Lewis's centenary in 1998, said the Narnia books are "one of the most ugly and poisonous things I have ever read," with "no shortage of … nauseating drivel." Peter Hitchens, writing in The Spectator in 2003, named Pullman "the Anti-Lewis."

While Lewis and Tolkien wrote stories imbued with Christian imagery, Pullman's trilogy—which has sold millions of copies and won numerous literary awards, including the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Prize—depicts the death of God and the creation of a "Republic of Heaven" that has no need for a King. And while Lewis and Tolkien kept the Christian elements fairly subtle—even the Narnia books have no explicit references to Jesus—a key scene in Pullman's trilogy shows a former nun telling two children that she left the Christian faith because it's "a very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all."

Pullman's story begins in a parallel universe similar to our own, yet different in key respects. The heroine, Lyra Belacqua, is an 11-year-old girl from Oxford who goes looking for a friend, one of many children abducted by scientists working for the church. Along the way, Lyra is assisted by gypsies, witches, and an armored bear. As The Golden Compass reaches its climax, Lyra watches in horror as her father, Lord Asriel, kills a child using a technique that releases so much energy, it opens a portal into another world.

Some Christians have expressed concern that if The Golden Compass is successful, it will lead to films based on the other two Dark Materials books, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass—both of which traffic much more explicitly in the death-of-God theme.

In these books, Lyra discovers that Lord Asriel is mounting a war against God, and she meets a boy from our own world named Will, who acquires a knife that can cut through anything, including the barrier between universes. The knife even has a prophetic name, Æsahættr, which means "god-destroyer." By the end of the trilogy, God is dead, and Will and Lyra have reenacted the Fall in the Garden of Eden—but in doing so, they save the universe rather than destroy it.

In Pullman's story, the God of the Bible is not really the Creator, but simply the first angel who emerged out of what Pullman calls "Dust." When other angels emerged, he lied and said he had created them—and he went on to set up churches in multiple universes, to assert his control over them. But now this angel, who is called "the Authority," is old and weak and faces a rebellion by angels and humans alike.

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December 2007, Vol. 51, No. 12