More About Philip Pullman and His Dark Materials

My first post on Philip Pullman’s tale His Dark Materials ran longer than I like, so here are the rest of the thoughts the tale gave rise to.

Why I Analyze

Why do I look closely at tales? I don’t want to pick on Mr. Pullman — I want rather to understand how and why his tale affected me (and I presume other readers as well) the way it did. I want to understand this mostly in order to learn how to tell my own tales better. When I find a tale that works well I want to see why it was so good and use the same tactics in my tales. And when a tale annoys me I want to be warned ahead of time about tactics that don’t work well. I don’t aim at any deep or over-arching theory of narrative because honestly I’m not clever enough for that.

Strong Sequences

There were several stretches of the tale that riveted me. When Lyra escaped from Mrs. Coulter in London the tale grew very strong and remained so until Lyra found herself among the bears at Svalbard — a considerable stretch. And when Will and Lyra were in Oxford fleeing the Secret Police and trying to regain the alethiometer from Lord Boreal the tale grew gripping again. Pullman created strong suspense in these sequences in the first two volumes of his tale. He combined danger with mystery and revelation to achieve this. Danger and mystery are basic elements of a strong tale regardless of genre, but revelation holds a heightened importance in tales of wonder — Wonder Tales Hawthorne called them, though today we generally call them science-fiction or fantasy.

In tales of wonder we take a special delight in imagining strange lands and creatures and powers. The gyptians living on boats and barges in the fens, taking fighting polar bears and magic tools like the Knife that will cut through anything even from one world to another and the oracular alethiometer are fun to contemplate in and of themselves — so are the daemons, a cross between imaginary friends, pets, and one’s conscience.

One of the pitfalls of multi-volume Wonder Tales arises when the talesman loads up all his wonders in the first volume, recycling them in subsequent volumes. Pullman has more wonders in Northern Lights than either of the other two books, but he does introduce the Subtle Knife in book two. He brings in angels too. For book three, The Amber Spyglass, he tells us about the spyglass, a wish-driven flying saucer called the Intention Craft, and the mulefa, spineless diamond-framed quadrupeds. These are all minor wonders that didn’t interest us very much or were not developed well.

Had I read the tale in a single volume this would have been less of a problem though it would even so have made the beginning of the tale more interesting than the end. And this is one of the foremost laws of talesmanship:

Let the ending of your tale surpass its beginning in all ways.

This is true not only in producing more and better wonders towards the end, but also revealing new and wonderful aspects of wonders already introduced. So Pullman might have revealed new tricks for either the alethiometer or the knife. He promises us from early on that the knife can do more tricks than we are first told, but he reneges on this — a deadly sin.

Puppetry

I have already mentioned how Pullman too-conveniently brings in Balthamos to take care of the assassin stalking Lyra, and drops Mrs. Coulter in the Himalayas and the two daemons on the battlefield without a word of justification or explanation. These embody the talesman playing fast and loose with events. Pullman also seems to play fast and loose with the souls of his characters. Lyra he draws as a fierce leader but he makes her passive and submissive when it suits the needs of his story. Will cares for nothing so much as his sick mother, but he leaves her and never tries to see her again; at the tale’s end Will is back on his native Earth and still scarcely seems to care about how she is doing.

This manner of treating his characters as if they were puppets shows us a talesman who does not believe himself in his characters, or who is too lazy to deal honestly with the problems of his tale. We in the audience feel cheated by such treatment. Something of our faith in the tale and our trust in our talesman goes out of our hearts.

Plot-Theme

Ayn Rand introduced me to the notion of the plot-theme, the total integration of the sequence of events within the tale and the ideas that lie beneath it. When plot and theme are united the talesman with a message only needs to tell his tale as if he had no message — and we will find the message ourselves in the tale’s events. Sinclair Lewis and Victor Hugo mastered this art.

We see a sure sign of a talesman who has failed to integrate his story and his theme when he resorts to making his characters give speeches and talk about the theme. Pullman gives us a lot of this. What is worse is that his story denies his stated aims in writing it. That goes beyond our look into His Dark Materials as a tale alone. It does raise questions about the thinking abilities of those prominent critics who have hailed the work as some sort of high water mark of the literature of the fantastic.