Deadline reports that Jack Thorne — writer of such films and TV shows as Skins, How I Live Now, A Long Way Down and This Is England ’86 + ’88 + ’90 — has signed on to write the BBC’s adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.
The first book in the trilogy was turned into the feature film The Golden Compass back in 2007. While it was fairly successful overseas, it flopped in North America and the sequels were never made. I wrote extensively about the books and the film at that time, and compiled a list of links to all my articles and blog posts here.
The books have been very controversial because they offer a subversive, anti-theistic take on the creation story in Genesis: among other things, the character Enoch — father to Methuselah and great-grandfather to Noah, and portrayed in Genesis as one who was so close to God that he never died — is one of the story’s villains, and the series climaxes with the death of God and the eradication of the afterlife.
I discussed some of those issues with Pullman himself when I interviewed him.
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