Northern Lights; The Subtle Knife;
The Amber Spyglass; La Belle Sauvage;
The Secret Commonwealth; Daemon Voices
THE OTHER GREAT CROSSOVER FANTASY SERIES OF THIS third golden age owed no direct debt to Harry Potter. Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights (1995) was first published two years before Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. The success of the subsequent volumes in the His Dark Materials trilogy no doubt benefited from the spotlight swinging onto fantasy literature for children, but Pullman got under way quite on his own. Like the Harry Potter books, Pullman’s work looked knowingly backward over the fantasy writing of the past, and like those books they took it in a quite new direction. Indeed, if Harry Potter can be seen as a summum of what came before, His Dark Materials can be seen as an overthrowing.
Philip Pullman (1946–) was a schoolteacher in Oxford when the first volume of the trilogy that made his name arrived in print, and it’s a book that wears its connection to a children’s classic of the past on its sleeve. Northern Lights is a direct riposte to the evangelical Christianity of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, and it draws much of its energy from its engagement with Lewis. As the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has said shrewdly, “In a peculiar way, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is quite a tribute to Lewis – because, although Philip loathes the Narnia stories, he clearly recognises that there is enough imaginative bounce and energy in them to demand a serious response.”*
Pullman reacted to Narnia – which he first encountered as an adult and read with an accordingly skeptical eye – with a version of the enduring anxiety about the influence that children’s stories can have on their impressionable audience. He has called the Narnia books “wicked”: “I find them very dodgy and unpleasant – dodgy in the dishonest rhetoric way – and unpleasant because they seem to embody a worldview that takes for granted things like racism, misogyny and a profound cultural conservatism that is utterly unexamined.”† Speaking at the Hay Festival in 2002, he said he saw in Lewis’s fiction “a peevish blend of racist, misogynistic and reactionary prejudice; but of love, of Christian charity, [there is] not a trace.” But rather than ban or burn them, he set out to write something better – a thrilling, high-concept adventure story animated by a fierce loathing for the institutional manifestations of religion, and the will-to-power that drives them.
Pullman’s work is for a higher age-group than that of Rowling. Pullman himself doesn’t consider it a children’s story, and it can be and is read by adults without the need for a blush-saving alternative cover design.‡ It draws its title from a line in the second, still more influential, literary predecessor to which it responds: Paradise Lost (1667). In Book Two of Milton’s epic poem, Satan escapes from hell and prepares to journey across the dizzying vastness of Chaos:
…this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
Confus’dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th’ Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds,
Into this wild Abyss the warie fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and look’d a while.
That turbulent passage indicates some of the complexity of Pullman’s ambition in the book. Chaos is a site, for Milton, of creation and destruction, its formless elements at ceaseless war with themselves unless and until God ordains them “his dark materials to create new worlds.”
Among the central mysteries of the multiverse of His Dark Materials is Dust – which in one of the constituent worlds of Pullman’s multiverse is analogous to the undetectable dark matter hypothesized by modern physicists as the sine qua non of the universe’s existence in the form it takes. Pullman’s imaginative multiverse grapples to bring together concepts in theology and in theoretical physics, which puts these sophisticated books in a territory that straddles the science fiction and fantasy genres. As a character in the third book puts it, “Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself.”
Dust is the fundamental grounds of existence – and it is the material form of consciousness itself. As such it is associated with free will, and the Church accordingly seeks to conceal and if possible destroy it. The story’s villains have forgotten, or want others to forget, that “from dust ye came and to dust ye must return”: that every sentient creature in the multiverse, including God (or “the Authority”) himself, is a product of Dust.
Accordingly, the Authority, we discover in the final book, is not an omnipotent and benevolent higher being, still less the immortal creator of the universe. He was the first Angel to form from Dust, and conned those that came after into believing him to be apart from and above the creation. By the time we meet him he is a feeble, geriatric, half-mad creature encased in a protective box, and whose powers are exercised on his behalf by a tyrannical regent. The “fallen Angels” – those who rebelled against the Authority and its sublunary Magisterium – are the heroes of this story. If Milton was (as William Blake said) “of the Devil’s party without knowing it,” Pullman is fully and consciously signed up to the Devil’s party – though in the service of a stridently moral liberal worldview.
This is intellectually chewy material. But – did I mention? – it is also an extraordinarily involving adventure story and a virtuoso feat of world-building that cross-shades its fantastical inventions with plausibly built-out edifices of science, politics, and organized religion. Perhaps the most memorable and original peculiarity of the books is the existence of “daemons”: animal familiars who accompany each character and are in some sense embodied representations of their souls. To be separated from your daemon causes agonizing pain, and there’s a profound taboo on making physical contact with another person’s daemon. These daemons change form in children but become fixed in their shape when the child goes through puberty. One of the books’ principal antagonists, the wonderfully sinister, “sweet-faced” Mrs Coulter, has a golden monkey as a daemon.
In recognition of his debts to his predecessors in the canon, from Lewis and Milton and (in the second trilogy) Spenser to the Boys’Own-style adventure stories whose narratives he echoes, Pullman has said that he sees his own daemon as a corvid: “I think she’s a raven. She belongs to that family of birds that steal things – the jackdaws, the rooks, crows and magpies – and I admire those birds.”*
The trilogy’s first protagonist, introduced in Northern Lights, is eleven-year-old Lyra Belacqua, who inhabits a steampunk version of Oxford and goes on to travel to the Arctic north (and the titular aurora) in a hot-air balloon, to encounter mercenaries, giant bat-like “cliff-ghasts,” flights of witches and – something you never saw in even C.S. Lewis’s least mimsy moments – an honest-to-goodness armored bear:
Out there climbed Iorek Byrnison, the bear in armour. Without it he was formidable. With it, he was terrifying. It was rust-red, and crudely riveted together: great sheets and plates of dented discolored metal that scraped and screeched as they rode over one another. The helmet was pointed like his muzzle, with slits for eyes, and it left the lower part of his jaw bare for tearing and biting.
In battle, Iorek is even more thrilling:
The armoured bear at the charge seemed to be conscious of no weight except what gave him momentum. He bounded past Lyra almost in a blur and crashed into the Tartars, scattering soldiers, daemons, rifles to all sides. Then he stopped and whirled round, with a lithe athletic power, and struck two massive blows, one to each side, at the guards closest to him […] Iorek struck again, twisting to one side, slashing, snarling, crushing, while bullets flew about him like wasps or flies, doing no harm at all.
Iorek Byrnison is one bear to which you’d have no hesitation in surrendering a marmalade sandwich.
Pullman’s great flourish in the trilogy, after the construction of this fully imagined world, is to pull focus to embed it in a wondrous multiverse. The second book, The Subtle Knife (1997), opens in a version of Oxford that is recognizably our own: no airships, no daemons, no flicker-lit grand halls, only “a loop of road in a modern estate with a dozen identical houses.” Lyra is nowhere, and we meet instead twelve-year-old Will Parry, struggling to get by with a mentally ill mother and a father who has been missing for years after setting off on an exploratory expedition to the Arctic Circle.
As the story goes on it becomes clear that the fantasy universe of the first book isn’t a “fictional” alternative world; our world is just one of a whole constellation of universes that coexist (as, indeed, many quantum theorists believe may actually be the case). Will, when he becomes the bearer of the titular knife, wields a magical object that can cut windows between those universes through which he and Lyra are able to step, and their quest duly takes them into a third space, Cittàgazze, still stranger than either of the worlds so far introduced. The movement of these books is always toward enlargement: an enlarged vision of the world, an enlarged vision of human possibility, and a struggle against the mental straitjackets into which power seeks to confine its subjects.
It’s little wonder that Pullman hesitates to identify as a children’s writer at all. His project in His Dark Materials is, in some sense, an assault on the nature of children’s literature itself – or, at least, the species of children’s literature that seeks to fetishize childhood innocence, to set childhood in amber or to portray growing up itself as a tragic fall from grace. Pullman rejects alike Milton’s puritan theology (with its doctrinal emphasis on the danger of knowledge and of original sin) and the controlling nature of the Magisterium, which stands in Lyra’s world for the Church. The shocking revelation in the first book is that the “Gobblers” – operatives of the secretive “General Oblation Board” run my Mrs Coulter – are torturing prepubescent children by amputating their daemons in a process they call intercision, a sort of spiritual castration (it’s at one point expressly connected to the Church’s creation of castrati) that leaves its victims near catatonic with trauma:
The little boy was huddled against the wood drying-rack where hung row upon row of gutted fish, all as stiff as boards. He was clutching a piece of fish to him as Lyra was clutching Pantalaimon [her own daemon] with both hands, hard, against her heart; but that was all he had, a piece of dried fish; because he had no daemon at all. The Gobblers had cut it away. That was intercision, and this was a severed child.
Her first impulse was to turn and run, or to be sick. A human being with no daemon was like someone without a face, or with their ribs laid open and their heart torn out: something unnatural and uncanny that belonged to the world of night-ghasts, not the waking world of sense.
Dust is drawn especially to human beings as they reach the age of puberty. The fall from innocence, knowledge of good and evil, sex… all the things that religious authorities or children’s stories in general, and C.S. Lewis in particular, anathematize: these are the things that Pullman’s stories present as vital to human flourishing and human freedom.
Pullman built out his fictional multiverse further by embarking on a second trilogy, The Book of Dust, whose events sandwich the timeline of His Dark Materials. La Belle Sauvage (2017) is a prequel in which Lyra appears as an infant; The Secret Commonwealth (2019) revisits her in adulthood. The boundary-pushing incidents of sexual violence in both books – not to mention their continuing preoccupation with politico-religious violence and their generic experimentation (La Belle Sauvage is half spy caper, half Spenserian dream-vision) – are continuing evidence that Pullman is interested in taking his readers a long way from the breadcrumbed path.
In his essay collection Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling (2017), Pullman writes eloquently about what connects the children’s writers of the present to the storytellers of the past – and how the heart of the thing never changes and never will.
“Most of all,” he says, “stories give delight. […] They bewitch, they enchant, they cast a spell, they enthral; they hold children from their play, and old men from the chimney corner. The desire to know what happened next, or whodunit […] is passionate and universal. It transcends age and youth; it ignores education and the lack of it; it beguiles the simple and enchants the wise. It was as enchanting in the fire-lit cave as it is in the seminar room.”
* Sam Leith, “C.S. Lewis’s Literary Legacy: ‘Dodgy and unpleasant’ or ‘exceptionally good’?” Guardian, 19 November 2013.
† Ibid.
‡ I first heard of the excellence of His Dark Materials from a friend before Pullman was widely known, and was surprised when, asking after it in a bookshop, I was directed by a shop assistant to the children’s section.
* Response to Frank Cottrell-Boyce in “Interview: Philip Pullman,” Observer, 22 October 2017.