*Warning - spoilers throughout*...Read the book before you criticize it, I always say. And so I did. I encourage you to do the same.
Tragic. That is the one word that first comes to mind as I set aside the nearly 1,000-page collection containing Philip Pullman’s
His Dark Materials trilogy:
The Golden Compass,
The Subtle Knife, and
The Amber Spyglass.
The plot is compelling; the characters, alive and covered with skin and hair; the emotion, fierce.
If there are snags in the fabric of story and philosophy, it is because this book is, in many ways, a refutation. When establishing a new order, an author can simplify without losing the credibility of his or her world. When dis-establishing an old order, an author has less leeway for simplicity.
And Pullman’s novels are distinctly disestablishmentarianist. His premise is that the Christian faith is, as one character says,
“a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all” (p. 871). This is the problem Pullman’s novels face. In one chapter Lyra and Will are battling a harpy in the world of the dead, and in another Pullman is alluding to the questions of grace and works that have occupied Christian theologians:
“But your reading will be even better then, after a lifetime of thought and effort, because it will come from conscious understanding. Grace attained like that is deeper and fuller than grace that comes freely, and furthermore, once you’ve gained it, it will never leave you” (p. 909).
For the reader, the plot has fallen into a crevice and is momentarily lost, but the philosophical treatise replacing it is only half-formed and simplified to a child’s level.
The metaphysics of His Dark Materials imagine a tri-part human, containing body, soul (daemon), and mind (ghost). The properties of mind and soul are incompletely distinguished, but the body is declared the most important.
The epistemology stems from the idea that consciousness (Dust, Shadows, original sin) is a fundamental force in the universe and is the root of knowledge. Knowledge, therefore, comes from the pursuit of knowledge. Pullman paints the overarching narrative of human history as
“a struggle between wisdom and stupidity” (p.899) rather than between good and evil:
“The rebel angels, the followers of wisdom, have always tried to open minds; the Authority and his churches have always tried to keep them closed” (p. 899).
The ethics of His Dark Materials are decidedly situational. Lyra, as the Eve figure, uses truth and lies, cheating, and betrayal to accomplish her ends.
“She felt warm and virtuous, because she did it for Will, never for herself” (p. 674), Pullman tells the reader. She deals with a shifting sense of reality that is not simply caused by her growth and maturity, but it is related to the nature of reality itself, according to Pullman.
“I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that’s an evil one, because it hurts them” (p. 875), says Mary Malone.
As a consequence, Pullman’s is a dismal, self-preservationalist political world. Closing instructions tell Lyra and Will to
“show [people] how to be kind instead of cruel, and patient instead of hasty, and cheerful instead of surly, and above all how to keep their minds open and free and curious.” Other parts of the narrative invoke a Hobbesian view of reality that is parallel to rationales for the use of the atom bomb and for the ensuing arms race:
“We never knew about [the subtle knife] when I first met you, Iorek,” Will says, “and nor did anyone, but now that we do, we got to use it ourselves—we can’t just not. That’d be feeble, and it’d be wrong, too, it’d be just like handing it over to ‘em and saying, ‘Go on, use it, we won’t stop you’” (p. 682).
Most classic (pre-postmodern) children’s novels carry the expectation that sacrifice will not go unrewarded and that beloved characters will be rescued from destruction, because there is someone who can always be trusted. Pullman’s protagonists are forced to realize that no one is safe or trustworthy, and that life does not have happy endings.
Elements in Pullman’s novel strike at comparable fantasy epics like
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien and especially like
The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis, of whom Pullman was an especially vitriolic critic.
There are specific elements, like the names of the heroines: Pullman’s Lyra and Lewis’s Lucy. Motifs are echoed, like the beginning of both Lyra’s and Lucy’s adventures through an escape from censure into a wardrobe. Fierce, helpful animals (the lion Aslan and the bear Iorek) appear in both sets of novels. Powerful, magical objects appear in both Tolkien and Pullman. Parallel worlds, initially reached through a neutral world (Citagazze in Pullman, the Wood between the Worlds in Lewis’s
The Magician’s Nephew) are featured in Lewis and Pullman.
Even dialogue mirrors other works of fantasy.
“I can feel war, Lyra Silvertongue; I can smell it; I can hear it” (p. 692), says Iorek at their parting. The quote has a parallel in
The Return of the King, in which Treebeard says,
“For the world is changing: I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air. I do not think we shall meet again” (p. 321).Pullman readily admits the intertextuality of his books.
“I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read,” he said honestly in the acknowledgements. He cites Blake’s poetry and Milton’s
Paradise Lost as central influences, but epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter also quote the Bible (angelic characters are drawn from the genealogies in Genesis), Emily Dickinson, Keats, and others.
Beyond the similarities, though, it is impossible to dismiss the extreme differences.
The worldview in
Narnia and
Lord of the Rings, from my perspective, is something pervasive and natural. It is inherently intertwined with the stories, as if the stories were created for their own merits and the worldview simply flowed into them (with possible exceptions in a few of the
Chronicles of Narnia). By contrast, Pullman’s story and worldview are intertwined deliberately, as if the story was crafted to exhibit the philosophy.
Pullman’s novels centrally seek to remove something: the certainty and persuasion of the church. His attempts to set up an alternate worldview in its place are subtle and fragile in contrast to the crushing arguments he flings at Christian thought.
In
The Amber Spyglass, there is a moment of realization and regret that, for me, was one of the most poignant in the entire trilogy. Mary Malone, who is called on by Dust (consciousness) to act as the serpent to Lyra’s Eve, pauses in relating the story of her downfall from faith. She says,
“And then had come the discovery of the Shadows and her journey into another world, and now this vivid night, and it was plain that everything was throbbing with purpose and meaning, but she was cut off from it” (p. 878). This is the emotion that Pullman’s
His Dark Materials left in me. The threads of human love, sacrifice, honor, duty, and compassion are prevalent throughout the trilogy, but they always pause just on the edge of purpose, continuity, and meaning. It is as if their author, like Mary Malone, had come to that same edge and, turning away, were seeking desperately for an alternative way to find it.
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The number of people and vendors is astounding, and a few minutes calculating the profit earned by the lemonade stands resulted in another "astounding." The only thing that could improve the crowd would be if the event took place in Flatsville instead.
