Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth

by John C. Wright

  The boredom makes the ghosts yearn for oblivion. Why? Just because. Lyra shows up, and, for no reason, uses the Subtle Knife to open a gateway into oblivion for them, and the joyful ghosts all annihilate themselves, so that their soul-atoms can be carried off and be recycled. Why? No reason. Does anything come of this? No.

  Maybe I am wrong on this point: after all, the harpies were tormenting the ghosts with memories of their sins and crimes. If you actually think people like Stalin and Hitler and Mao, (or, if you are Dante, people like Brutus, Cassius, or Judas), deserve no worse penalty than merely a verbal recitation of their list of crimes, (a pretty doubtful "if"), then why not use the Knife on the harpies and simply kill the harpies, instead of killing the ghosts? Why not open a gateway into some other environment, a place with nice things to look at, rather than into oblivion?

  If you have to sacrifice someone to maintain the spiritual ecology of the universe, why sacrifice the ghosts? Why not sacrifice a cow? Why destroy the memories of your sacred ancestors? You tell me the universe is constructed so that the life-energy or the thought-substance of the ghosts, the Dust they accumulated, has to be returned to the source? That sounds to me like the book is saying the universe needs to eat the thought-substance, the intelligence, of the ghosts in order to remain a healthy universe. If so, this universe is a worse evil god than Evil God, for it kills its children like Saturn, it kills your children like Moloch, but is merely a blind and dumb machine. Evil God sounds positively charming compared to that.

  Are those ghosts annihilated, reincarnated, unified with the Cosmos, or brought to a Last Judgment? A casual reader cannot tell. The reason why a casual reader cannot tell is because none of these four options would make the slightest bit of difference to anything following after this event, nor make the slightest bit of difference to anything that led up to this event.

  To add insult to injury, it would have been easy, so easy, effortless, for any editor to tell Pullman to put in a scene in Act One where the land was ailing and the crops were failing, because the ghosts were not being recycled as part of the spiritual ecology of the world. Babies were being born without their daemons. The magic is poisoned because Cob, or the Evil Church, meddled with the natural order of things. When the natural order is restored, the wrong things go right. How hard is that? How hard is that to put in a book? If anything like this was in there, I missed it.

  Of the controversy surrounding whether or not Will and Lyra are lovers at the end of the book or just good friends, the author, (at least in the edition published in North America), has left this ambiguous, and I have no opinion and frankly do not care a tinker's damn, because both options are bad writing.

  Option one: if Lyra and Will are lovers, not only is this grotesque, considering their age, but it is pointless. It is pointless because nothing comes from it and nothing leads to it. It is both a violation of the Gunrack Rule and of the rule against Gods from the Stage Machinery.

  Nothing comes of it. Lyra is supposed to be the new Eve, but she must be a sterile Eve, because there is no New Cain, Able, Seth, or any new mankind. The idea that all the world changes merely because two teens do the Wild Thang is stupid and offensive. Love may conquer all, but, seriously, it is not that important in the grand scheme of things.

  And the matter of fact is that the world is not changed at the end of the story. All the angels in heaven are still around, and the Evil Church is still running things. The only change is that Lyra now wants to go to school, and she makes a dumb speech about being nice and kind to all living things, a speech that could not come out of the mouth of the character as previously established, and which nothing in the plot could have put in her mouth. Oh, and she lost the power to read the Golden Compass, which is okay, because we find out that the powers manipulating the compass and sending her messages through it are fallen angels, creatures who we know nothing about, not even their names.

  Nothing leads up to it. If one act of pre-teen coitus is that important in the grand scheme of things, the author has to establish its importance in the first act.

  Let us contrast this, not with Hamlet, but with the movie Krull. In Krull, in the first act, it is established that the princess is prophesied to give birth to a son who will rule the stars. This is the motive for The Beast to kidnap the princess, and the reason why The Beast does not simply kill her. It drives the plot. In Pullman, there is nothing said in Act One that establishes Lyra losing her virginity will shatter the thrones of heaven and change the world.

  Option two: Lyra and Will are just good friends. Well, gee, it is nice when two pre-teenagers are friends, and even puppy love is nice, but I don't know any real life girl who is still moping, years later, after going to school, growing up, getting a man and a family of her own, for some guy she met at age thirteen. Every year she goes to the same beach and sits and looks mournfully out at the sunset. Boo-freaking-hoo. I am not saying it does not happen; I am just saying I don't know anyone like that, and if Lyra is like that, the author did not introduce me to her in such a fashion as to create in my imagination the impression that she was that way.

  It is trivial, almost offensively so. After all this blood and thunder, the death of her parents, the downfall of archangels, we get, what, again, exactly, as the pay-off?

  Not only does nothing lead up to this ending, the lead-up is contrary to it. We are told that daemons cease to change shape when children become adults, and adulthood is defined as being touched by the hand of a lover. The word lover, under option two, refers to an unconsummated love. We are told that it is Lyra's innocence that gives her the power to read the alethiometer. So, under option two, Lyra's innocence is lost and her adulthood gained, not because she goes from being a maiden to a wife, (which is the normal meaning traditionally attached to those words), but because she goes from being a self-centered little girl to being a girl with a puppy-love teen crush on a guy that is never consummated. This makes no sense on any level. Why would young love make anyone less innocent? The message here is that falling in love is a corruptive rather than an ennobling process: this is a strange message indeed, coming from a book where the cosmic substance underlying all reality, the Dust, is the source and side-effect of sexual passion, and the Evil Church is evil because—and only because—it preaches chastity. Or perhaps the Dust represents wisdom and the Church represents willful ignorance, in which case, having innocence be the source of magic makes even less sense. Wisdom would be the enemy of magic in that background; wise men would be the only ones not able to do magic.

  This book should have been an atheist book. I mean a properly, openly, honestly, hardcore really atheist book. In an atheist book, the point would be that life consists of life on Earth, and that daydreams about life after death or Flying Spaghetti Monsters ruling the world are pernicious. In such a book, the churchgoing characters would be shown being corrupted by the act of having their faith blind their reason. The churchmen would be shown robbing and deceiving the gullible faithful. The short term and long term effects of the evil being done by the ideas and by the practice of the Evil Church would be onstage. It is not that hard to do. The short and long term evils caused by collectivist thinking are admirably and unmistakably put on pitiless display in the philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Love that book or hate it, no one can say that Ayn Rand does not show in the plot what she conceives the wrongheadedness of collectivism to be, or does not show what she conceives to be the bad consequences that flow from collectivizing the economy. Her plot supports her ideas: she has the United States railroad industry, and indeed the whole economy, fall apart step by step in front of the reader's eyes.

  In Pullman's book, nothing of the kind is done. I cannot tell what Pullman thinks is so great about atheism or thinks is so wrong about believing in God, because nothing happens in the plot to support the ideas. Nothing falls apart. Nothing is going wrong at the beginning of the book and nothing is put right at the end; or, rather, the thing going wrong at the beginning of the b
ook, street urchins being kidnapped for Nazi experiments, turns out to be the work of Lord Asriel and his wife, who stop the experiments for no particular reason.

  I say again: This book should have been an atheist book. An atheist book says not only that God is a delusion, an atheist book also says men need to take control of their own lives and their own destinies. That is NOT the message in this book, despite a nod in that direction, too little, and too late. The message in this book is that the promise of the Republic in Heaven is FALSE: You will never get to vote on how the worlds and constellations are run. You don't get a vote. You will NEVER solve the problem of separation from your loved ones. You are NOT in charge.

  In order for this to be an atheist book, some character, major or minor, would need to be shown not in charge of his life, oppressed by the Church, snared by a web of falsehoods trapping him, and then, when the net is cut, he proves able to do for himself, and make all the decisions he needs to make as well as, nay, better than, what the false Gods made for him. Nothing like that happens in the… whole… boring… silly… badly-written… book.

  Here is my last question to all defenders and apologists for Mr. Pullman's rollickingly bad third novel in his started-well-but-crashed-and-burned trilogy.

  Why, oh, why in a book about the virtues of not listening to authority and not taking anything on faith, did everyone in the book, and I mean everyone, believe whatever a Dusty pocketwatch told them to do?

  Not a single character ever asked for independent confirmation of the pronouncements of the oracle of the Golden Compass.

  The alethiometer, you see, was sensitive to 'The Dust' which was the self-reflective nature of matter when it starts to become self-aware. The oldest and most powerful of the self-aware vortices of Dust, is, oddly enough, God Almighty, who is portrayed as a senile husk. So, if the Dust is all-wise, why is the God who arose from the Dust all-stupid? If, on the other hand, the Dust is a natural but unintelligent spirit force, why should anyone listen to it or follow its advice? If, on the gripping hand, the Dust is a self-aware being, or stream of beings, how do we know it did not go senile at about the same time God Almighty did, or earlier?

  Oh, I get it, I get it. Yes, I know, the alethiometer is actually just a symbol or a metaphor for the Power of Reason, or the Power of Matter, or the Power of Believing in Yourself or whatever power it is that Mr. Pullman thinks is the touchstone to determine true from false. His faith in the power of whatever-it-is is touching. We skeptics are more skeptical. We skeptics reason that reason, like all things possessed of qualities and properties, has utilities it can perform and those it cannot. No one constructs a syllogism to deduce whether a woman is beautiful, for example. No one can reason in the absence of evidence, for another example.

  We skeptics would have had someone give the old pocketwatch-of-materialism a few simple James Randi style tests to make sure it was working. Matter suffers entropy, you know. Sad if Lyra found out in some later scene that a slipped disk or a loose cog made the symbol arm overshoot by twelve degrees each time the dust-o-meter was measuring the truth of things. Hate to get all my positive and negative signs reversed, you know, and have it turn out the God was Good and the Fallen Angels were lying about all that stuff.

  An afterword on counterarguments:

  The article above first appeared, (as the time of this writing), seven years ago. It generated a degree of controversy that frankly surprised me. Some people, including some people whose opinions I respect, (but also including some orcish-tongued babbling dunderheads), take the book very seriously, and wished to challenge my statements about it. Sadly, nearly all challenges were based on a misreading of what I said.

  I did not think anyone would object to the idea that Pullman was preaching a message instead of telling a story. Indeed, more than half the counterarguments I got in reply said that I must be benighted because I did not get the profound message Pullman was preaching. What looked to me like bad storytelling was in truth, (so I was told), Mr. Pullman's subtle way of saying real life is hard and nothing works out with the neatness of a storybook. Funny how all the events in his storybook work out so neatly to make that point!

  The counterarguments were saying, in effect, that storytelling had to go by the wayside for a "new type" of storytelling. What was this "new type" of storytelling? Preaching a message rather than telling a story.

  Funny how none of his defenders noticed they had just contradicted Mr. Pullman's public statement.

  Other counterarguments were better constructed. I had not recalled the events in the third book The Amber Spyglass correctly. My faulty memory had automatically filled in motives where there were none and plot points where there were none. People have been kind enough to describe to me scenes in the book I've forgotten, and to make clear certain messages the author put in that I had ignored.

  Upon revisiting the issue, and thinking back over the books, I found that The Amber Spyglass was much worse than I remembered, much more chaotically written, much more sentimental and pointless and ugly, and much more… well… stupid.

  A hard word, I know, but there is no other that will do.

  The scenes I had forgotten I had forgotten for good reason: memory works by association, which is why it is easier to remember a sonnet than a string of meaningless alphanumeric symbols of the same length as a sonnet. Scenes that meant nothing and did nothing are easy to forget.

  The messages, aside from the blatant anti-god message, (which I liked when I first read it; I was an atheist myself back then), I had tried to ignore because they got in the way of enjoying the story. And the messages were easy to ignore, because they were so bland, and so insipid and so unimaginative. But now I realize there is no story, only the messages.

  And what messages! The worldview involved is so sickeningly-sweet, so cloying and pious, yet so innocuous, that only a bleeding heart could love it. It is sentimentality in the very worst sense of the word.

  We Christians tend to forget the banal and boring nature of real evil. Not every devil can be a sharp dresser like a Nazi, or a magnetic writer like a Nietzsche. Some of them are just drab.

  What were the messages iN The Amber Spyglass? By my count, they were: (1) Question Authority, (2) Sex is a good thing, (3) Be nice to people in small ways, (4) Tell stories, (5) Stay in school, (6) Hate God. Of these, only the last one is likely to spark any controversy worth thinking about.

  How did the author choose to put across these messages? Answer: he did not. He simply did not. Let us count the ways:

  (1) Question authority? The author did not have an authority that forbade anyone from questioning anything on stage, that later turned out to be a good question with an answer that improved anyone's life or solved any problem. Asriel is in trouble for investigating the Dust, but the book never quite makes clear what the Dust is anyway, and Asriel does not improve his own life or anyone else's by finding anything out about the Dust. As I recall, he dies by falling into a pit after his ex-wife pushes an archangel into it. The only thing that came of Asriel's investigation into the Dust was that he murdered a child to open a gate into another world. Once he got there, nothing in particular happened. For a good example of this message, told correctly, see The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster or see The Lottery by Shirley Jackson.

  (2) Make love, not war! I have to assume Mr. Pullman is not preaching in favor of married sex with one woman to whom one is faithful for life. That is a Christian message, and we Christians are Grendel, right? So it must be illicit sex he is on about. This is only a guess, since his trilogy is just as unclear on this as on everything. I suppose the author just thinks we will take on faith the idea that sex outside of marriage is the source and summit of human aspirations. Is he preaching against Puritans? Well, Catholics don't like Puritans either, so take a number and stand in line.

  In any case, no one in the book has a sexual encounter improve, (or even change), his life. Are Lyra and Will underage lovers at the end of the book, or just good friends? The a
uthor coyly does not say. But neither option makes sense. If they are lovers, the sexual awakening did not do anything for them. It did not improve their lives: they are condemned to eternal separation. Lyra is not the Beatrice for Will's Dante. She is not even the Queen Gwen for his Lancelot. The coupling, (if it took place), did not mean anything and nothing comes of it, not even a baby. If they are just good friends, then the message is contradicted. For a good example of this message, told correctly, see Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead, or read a poem by Byron, Keats, or one of the Romantics.

  Again, a reader tells me it is not sex per se that is good, but the maturity that sex represents. Under this interpretation, the Evil Church was trying to keep everyone from maturing, and Mary the Lapsed Nun was the tempter trying to get Lyra to grow up. The only problem with this interpretation is that it makes sheer nonsense of an already muddled plot. Growth as a physical process of maturing is natural and inevitable, not something a protagonist can seek out or an antagonist can try to prevent, not in any story outside of Peter Pan, at least. You don't have to talk a child into suffering puberty. Growth as a spiritual process is never mentioned, and, in any case, makes no difference to the plot: it is not as if Senile God had lived, or Metatron, or Mrs. Coulter, then our young Lyra would have been propelled one inch toward or away from spiritual growth or moral or mental maturity: if anything, it is the innocence of Lyra as the Noble Savage, (an oddly Victorian value, that), that has magical properties.

  (3) No one in the book is nice to anyone in any small ways. Lyra is a liar. Will is a murderer. I cannot recall a single line, not even a word, spoken in kindness to any other character. I guess they like their spiritual pets. The only act of large-scale kindness in the book is on the part of Mrs. Coulter, who turns apostate to the Evil Church in order to nurse her ungrateful daughter back to life, and who also falls into a pit during an archangelicide. For a good example of this message, told correctly, see “Leaf by Niggle”, or The Great Divorce, or even The Mahabharata.