Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials

A look at His Dark Materials and its talesmanship

Philip Pullman wrote a series of 3 books for young adults: Northern Lights (retitled in the USA as The Golden Compass), The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. These books have proved immensely popular internationally and have sparked a great deal of controversy for their attacks upon the Christian Church and religion in general. But I want to look at them mainly as tales to see how well they work. I’ll only regard Pullman’s philosophy insofar as it affects the tales.

I’ll consider the tale as a single unified story rather than as three.

Warning: I’m going to reveal story twists and results in this, so if you haven’t read the story and want to, read no more.

The Beginning

In general the opening scenes of Northern Lights are strong. The first thing a Talesman wants to do is to let his audience know who the tale is about and something about the circumstances of the tale or its setting. Telling us about the setting is more important in any tale set in a place foreign to the audience. In this case Pullman has imagined a Jordan College in Oxford and an England on an Earth that is both familiar and unfamiliar to us, so telling us where we are is as important as telling us who the story is about.

Northern Lights begins strong with a scene of Lyra (our heroine) spying on a private meeting of the elders of Jordan College in Oxford England. We share her discomfort on the wardrobe floor and are encouraged to help decide with her whether to show herself to save her kinsman from poison. These are both good techniques Pullman uses to draw his audience into his tale and side with his heroine. But there is a problem.

We are not on Earth — at least not on any Earth we know. Pullman imagines an infinite number of Earths, all superimposed on top of one another and all different. So he tries to clue us in on this by using different terms such as “anbaric” instead of “electric” and “naphtha” instead of “gas.” This works well enough, but in addition Lyra witnesses a presentation of information new to her, centering on the mysterious little seen “Dust” photographed by special film in the Arctic.

It adds up to too much information all at once. The subtly-implied alternate world is one level of information, and the presentation on what lies in the Arctic (given as a series of allusions, names and hints at people and organizations unfamiliar to Lyra but not to the college scholars) is a second level of information. Added together it is too much information. We scratch our heads and sit back and try to put it all in order — if we were sitting at Pullman’s knee listening to him tell his tale aloud we would all be clamoring and interrupting him with questions. I confess that the first time I tried to read Northern Lights I put it down after only reaching the middle of the second chapter. My head, my poor head, was reeling!

Now, I think that a talesman ought to anticipate such questions.

Not that Pullman has to tell us everything, far from it — but the opening could have introduced us to Lyra first and her world before beginning to pile on the mysteries that will be her task to solve as the tale unfolds.

Indeed this is what I believe Pullman intended to do, because after the presentation scene he tells us all about Lyra and her life as it has been. He does this in Summary Mode, merely summarizing the typical events and outstanding occurrences of Lyra’s life. This is, I believe, where Pullman originally started his tale, and later moved the scene of the meeting of scholars to the beginning because it was so exciting and involving. But once begun in this way, the tale as it is seems to pull up lame and limp over this summation, which would have been perfectly acceptable as the very beginning of the tale.

QUESTIONS

No talesman need answer all possible mysteries his tale creates but there are some questions an audience will expect to find answered; other questions a talesman seems to promise he will answer. Any explicit mystery for example the talesman makes a bargain with his audience. “Ponder this and we’ll see if you can solve it. Fear not for I will reveal the answer before I end my tale.” When such questions are left unanswered we feel the talesman has cheated us. (Some talesmen seek to raise more questions than they answer and want us to confront mysteries and ambiguities for their own sake or for our own enlightenment. Is this Pullman’s goal? The rest of his tale makes us doubt it.) Other questions crop up as seeming lapses or contradictions and make us wonder about the competence of the talesman. All these questions lessen the pleasure we find in a tale. Here are some of the questions that bothered me while I was reading His Dark Materials:

1. How can Lyra fool bear after bear when bears are impossible to trick?
2. How does Mrs. Coulter take Lyra (who is presumably drugged as she is later on) through the worlds, across Eurasia and high into the Himalayas? How does she do this so fast?
3. What after all is Dust?
4. What is it that is controling the alethiometer? How do we (and Lyra) know it is trustworthy?
5. Why is Lyra suddenly unable to read the alethiometer?
6. What happened 33,000 years ago throughout the worlds? Dust and “consciousness” both came into being — but how and why?
7. What are daemons and how do they work?
8. What happened to the great white birds who are the natural enemies of the mulefa?
9. How did the climactic battle between the angels end? Who won and who lost? And what difference did that make?
10. Why do Lyra and Will’s daemons wander through so many of the infinite worlds, only to end up in the very place where they are in the greatest danger? What draws them there and what do they experience along the way?
11. Why does Lyra and Will falling in love make any difference at all to Dust and the universe?
12. Where does the Dust go when it escapes the universe? Why does it go there?
13. What are Specters?

Stuff and Nonsense

The theology of Pullman is not of interest to us, except insofar as it helps or hinders the tale. And at the heart of it all, the theology, because it makes no rational or common sense at all, hurts the tale.

The story of the Garden of Eden may not be entirely comprehensible to the adult rational mind (why, after all, is this one plant taboo?) but in its basics it is perfectly understandable to the child within us. We have all as children been told of taboos by our elders, and those taboos make no sense to us; and when children ask “Why not?” they more than likely are answered only, “Because I say so.” Of course the child is still likely to break the taboo, and then gets punished.

But Pullman offers us an incomprehensible (on any level) Dust which is conscious (or something) and out of a million million worlds this Dust takes interest in what this one girl and one boy do. Because Will and Lyra fall in love, the Dust stops “leaking” out of the worlds. Only it doesn’t really stop leaking out, it’s still happening. It stops, for unknown reasons, only it doesn’t really stop.

It makes no sense at all to me.

The Hand of God

Deus ex machina refers to miraculous escapes that are just too convenient; it seems as though the talesman has taken a shortcut through an obstacle in his way. Pullman gives us a few of these along the way, including what is a literal “god from the machine” when the angel Balthamos removes the assassin from Lyra’s path. This annoyed me particularly because Pullman had been following the assassin for many chapters as though he were important and not just a plot device to relieve the boredom of the last chapters (but that is all he is it seems, as Pullman goes so far as to treat the man’s corpse as trash).

Bad Shapes

The ending of the tale is badly shaped, as the great climax of the war takes place, and the climax between the principal characters comes later and is unrelated to the great battle, except that their two daemons have gone to the scene of the battle for no good reason at all. A good talesman will co-ordinate all his storylines so that they achieve climax as closely together as possible, and he will ensure that the audience is most enthralled by the main storyline, and he will resolve it last of all.

Young Love is Doomed

When tragic romance dooms the love of young lovers, the only appropriate resolution is the death of one or both of the lovers. To allow them both to survive is to do what Pullman does here: he has them choose to part even though they could remain together. And they will live on to find other loves, get married, have children apart from each other. This mutes the sadness and tragedy, and prevents the full flow of tears the audience who enjoys such tales wants to experience.

The Great War that Fizzled

Much of the tale shows the renewal of the “War in Heaven” that John Milton essayed in Paradise Lost. That war meant something to Milton, the Israelites, and later to Christians and Muslims alike. Pullman’s war on the other hand not only does not conclude even though the enemy commanders are both destroyed, but it turns out to make no difference. Not only are we not told who wins or loses this great battle that is the rebellion’s climax, but we are later told, in an offhand way, that oh yes, none of that made any difference at all and everything will continue just the way it always has.

Huh?