My Dork Materials

Novels discussed:
"The Golden Compass"
"The Subtle Knife"
"The Amber Spyglass"
by Philip Pullman

Earlier this year, in my continuing quest to read something that will take my mind off the news, I decided to read Philip Pullman's "The Golden Compass," the first novel in Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy. I ended up reading all three books within a couple months.

Published in 1995 (it was originally titled "The Northern Lights" in the U.K.) "The Golden Compass" is widely considered a modern sci-fi/fantasy/young adult fiction classic.

It's also a favorite among atheists. I don't think it's fair to think of the series as atheistic, but one of Pullman's major themes involves an institutionalized religion that views people's imaginations as threats to its power. This aspect of the novels so alarmed the Catholic Church that it campaigned against the 2007 film version of "The Golden Compass," thereby more or less illustrating Pullman's point.

The negative publicity around the film ensured that a sequel was never made, which is a shame. I liked the steampunk visual aesthetic of the movie and thought the star, then 12-year-old Dakota Blue Richards, was terrific as Lyra Belacqua. Nicole Kidman, who doesn't often get to play a villain, was very good as the duplicitous Mrs. Coulter. You also get to see Jim Carter as a seafaring pirate-type, which is delightful if you know him as the upright butler Carson from "Downton Abbey."

That said, the movie pales in comparison to the novel. I was surprised by how much I loved it. Although "The Golden Compass" was marketed for teenagers, I didn't get a sense that Pullman dumbed down the ideas he wanted to explore. I suppose if he had been writing for adult readers, he might have included more sex and bad language, but I didn't miss them. (He was apparently forced to tone down the theme of sexual awakening in some passages of the U.S. version of the final volume, "The Amber Spyglass" -- but even the censored part was pretty tame.)

"The Golden Compass" tells the story of how Lyra uncovers a plot that kidnaps children in an effort to, essentially, turn them into docile conformists. Lyra lives in a world that is much like our Earth, where she grows up on the grounds of her world's version of Oxford University. There, she is sheltered somewhat from the overpowering reach of the church authorities, collectively known as the Magisterium.

We get glimpses of how her world differs from ours in various small ways, as with the way technology seems, in some ways, stuck around 1900. For instance, there are a lot of zeppelins. (Maybe if the Magisterium had television, it wouldn't need to kidnap anyone to turn them into dullards.)

The bigger differences require a little more exposition. The biggest is that, in Lyra's world, everyone has a talking animal companion known as a daemon. For children, daemons can change shape, shifting from cat to dog to butterfly in an instant. Daemons settle into one shape at about the time the child hits puberty. Pullman introduces these concepts in a matter-of-fact way, so the reader just goes along with it, even when we aren't sure what, exactly, the characters are talking about.

Oh, and Lyra's world also has flying witches and talking polar bears.

But anyway, the relationship between daemons and puberty hints at Pullman's theme of religion trying to infantilize us. Inspired by Milton's "Paradise Lost," Pullman explores the traditional church view of knowledge and imagination as types of sin.

Another World

These themes become clearer in the second novel, "The Subtle Knife," in which Lyra steps through a sort of rip in the fabric time-space and into another world, where she meets Will, a boy who is from our world, and who stepped through another rip in reality.

The action in "The Subtle Knife" -- and there's a lot of action -- mostly involves Will's discovery of a way to walk between worlds using the dagger of the book title. Using the alethiometer (the golden compass of the first novel's title) Lyra and Will set off to find Will's missing father, fleeing along the way from a dizzying number of enemies. Will is smart, tough and resourceful, which makes him a good action hero, but I kind of missed having Lyra as main protagonist.

The introduction of characters from our world helps make sense of some of the more alien aspects of "The Golden Compass." For instance, Will discovers that when Lyra uses the word "anbaeric" she's talking about the same thing we talk about when we say "electric." More profoundly, when Lyra meets Will, she is disturbed to see that he has no daemon, until she realizes that his daemon is inside of him. In other words, in our world, we have daemons too; we call them our souls.

As much as I liked the way "The Subtle Knife" makes sense of "The Golden Compass," once I got to the third novel, "The Amber Spyglass," I started feeling like I had had enough explanation. It was too much of a good thing. There is a lot to be said for holding something back in fantastic fiction.

The action in "The Amber Spyglass" is on a truly cosmic scale. I mean, like, War-Between-Worlds, Angels-Rebelling-Against-God, Release-The-Souls-Of-The-Dead-From-Limbo scale. In addition to the characters from Will's world and Lyra's world, we meet beings from all kinds of universes, including little people who fly around on the backs of dragonflies, and kindly ankylosaurus-like creatures who stick their limbs through giant seedpods so that they can zoom around on wheels.

It's all a bit much for me. And, considering that I was totally on board with the shape-shifting daemons, talking polar bears, witches and interdimensional travel that happened in the first two books, that's saying something.

"The Amber Spyglass" has some interesting thoughts on the nature of consciousness and theology, but more interesting to me was the very familiar, down-to-Earth human story of kids growing into young adults. 

Spoilers Ahead

If you're an adult reading "His Dark Materials," you probably saw where this aspect of the story was heading as soon as Lyra and Will, a middle-school-aged boy and girl, met back in "The Subtle Knife," or maybe even in "The Golden Compass," when we learned the witches have a prophecy about Lyra that casts her in an Adam and Eve story. 

Still, I thought it was sweet to read about Lyra slowly falling in love with Will without even realizing what she's doing. It's silly to think of all this cosmic drama going on around what's really just a coming-of-age story, but I think that contrast illustrates one of Pullman's main themes: When organized religion tries to combat our imaginations, it is waging a battle it cannot win. Children grow up, have thoughts of their own, and turn into adults. There's no more mind-blowing story than that, is there?   

I gave my books to my 11-year-old. As I write this, he has already finished "The Golden Compass" and is starting "The Subtle Knife." I look forward to hearing what he thinks about it.