This year marks 350 years since John Milton’s Paradise Lost was published (1667). Its author was a controversial blind man who publicly advocated the execution of King Charles I before serving in the republican government. He was an anarchist who spoke out against the Catholic Church, didn’t believe in the Trinity and wrote pamphlets about the merits of divorce. But Paradise Lost would become his most important contribution.
And this week, Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust is ready to hit the stores. This new work is a prequel to the famous trilogy, His Dark Materials, which drew heavily on Paradise Lost for its themes, characters and settings. In fact, the very title, His Dark Materials, is taken straight out of Paradise Lost. As Satan sets off on his mission to tempt humankind, he comes across “the wild abyss” of Chaos in which the component qualities of the classical elements are “mixed confusedly” forever. That is, unless God decides “to create more worlds”, in which case these elements will form “his dark materials”.
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