Serafina Pekkala the witch, and her lover the gyptian Farder Coram
Will’s parents: his father vanishes
Will and his mother: loving her and wanting to protect her, he nevertheless has to leave her and go off alone
…and so on. There are many others. The most dramatic, and many people have told me the most shocking, example of this pattern occurs when we discover that the children who have been kidnapped are being forcibly separated from their dæmons: they are severed from them in a sort of guillotine-like device.
The reason this is shocking is that I set it up to be—firstly, by establishing early on the tightness, the complete unity, of the dæmon-body pair, so that we come to think automatically that of course people are always with their dæmons, it’s unthinkable that they should be without them; and secondly by throwing down a sort of false hint, a misdirection, with the word severed. Lyra hears people talking darkly about severed children without understanding what it means. But the word severed in our linguistic experience is often followed by head. That phrase is even the title of a novel by Iris Murdoch. It’s inaccurate, of course, because it’s the neck that’s severed, not the head itself; but that’s what we expect. So we’re sort of looking in another direction when the surprise occurs and we learn that children are being severed from their dæmons. But it was another example of this pattern, this binary fission.
Now when I read Mark Turner on the way image schemas work in our experience of narrative, I realised that I could do what I wanted to do with the third book. Here was a pattern I hadn’t been aware of; and now that I was aware of it, I could use it again, but consciously. And when Lyra and Will go into the world of the dead, she has to leave her dæmon, Pantalaimon, behind. I didn’t know if I could write that—I don’t mean emotionally: I didn’t know if it would make sense in the story. But seeing this pattern helped me realise not only that it did make sense, but that it wouldn’t make formal sense—pattern sense—if she didn’t.
And there were two other things that helped here: very early, the Master of Jordan College makes a prediction that Lyra will be involved in a great betrayal, and that she herself will be the betrayer, and the experience will be terrible for her. When I wrote those words I thought that that betrayal would be her leading Roger to his death. She thinks she’s rescuing him, but unwittingly she’s leading him to the most dangerous place of all, and he dies. When, years later, I got to the world of the dead passage, I discovered that these words of the Master’s could relate even more closely to Lyra’s betrayal of Pantalaimon. And, of course, I thought how clever I was to have misdirected the readers again; they think that they’ve seen Lyra’s great betrayal already, but here comes an even bigger one. Little did they know! Well, little did I know, actually.
The other thing that helped was the witches. One of the things that makes the witches seem uncanny to people like Lyra is that they alone can be seen without their dæmons. Witches’ dæmons can leave them and wander far away, while still maintaining close mental and emotional contact. I didn’t know how, or why; it was just a sort of picturesque detail that made the witches different and strange. When—again, much later—I thought about how I was going to bring Lyra and Pantalaimon together again, I remembered this, and retrospectively invented a sort of initiation that young witches undergo, when they have to go into the wilderness, to a place where dæmons can’t enter, and they suffer the torments of separation voluntarily. But unlike severance, this results—after the suffering—in the witchy, witch-like power of being apart while still united; and I could grant this witch-like power to Lyra and to Will, as a sort of compensation for the suffering of having to leave their dæmons behind on the shores of the world of the dead. That’s the value of leaving a lot of loose ends in a long narrative: when you get to the end it’s very handy to have some lying around to tie up a bit of the story neatly.
And finally, on the subject of the image schema of binary fission, Lyra loses her power to read the alethiometer, and then comes the thing that causes the biggest pang of all for many young readers—Lyra and Will have to part. But it’s a stronger ending than if they’d stayed together, and part of the reason for its superiority to the happier ending, I think, is that it’s true to the formal pattern of the whole story: things splitting apart.
So Mark Turner and his image schemas came at the right moment; they helped me to see something I hadn’t noticed and then to reinforce it. The next sentence brings me to what happens when you meet a critic at the wrong moment.
She looked defiant as well as lost, Dame Hannah thought, and admired her for it; and the Master saw something else—he saw how the child’s unconscious grace had gone, and how she was awkward in her growing body.
(TAS, 518)
I don’t know how other storytellers function, but in my case I never start with the theme of a story. My stories are about something, to be sure, but I never know what that is till I’m in the process of writing them. I have to start with pictures, images, scenes, moods—like bits of dreams, or fragments of half-forgotten films. That’s how they all begin. In the case of this one I didn’t realise what it could be about until after I’d discovered dæmons, which happened in the way I described just now. But more especially it was when I found that children’s dæmons change and adults’ dæmons don’t; and I think that that idea and the theme must have leaped towards each other like a spark and a stream of gas. I don’t really know which came first, but they took fire when they came together.
The theme of my story is the end of innocence. The whole thing—all 1,200 pages—is a sort of clumsy gloss on that marvellous essay by Heinrich von Kleist on the marionette theatre (which I go into in more detail later), which is itself a very elegant gloss on the third chapter of the book of Genesis. It’s also the subject of Rilke’s Eighth Duino Elegy.
The story of Adam and Eve seems to me the fundamental myth of why we are as we are. Having eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge, we are separate from nature because we have acquired the ability to reflect on it and on ourselves—we are expelled from the garden of Paradise. And we can’t go back, because an angel with a fiery sword stands in the way; if we want to regain the bliss we felt when we were at one with things, we have to go not back but forward, says Kleist, all the way round the world in fact, and re-enter Paradise through the back door, as it were. In other words, we have to forget about innocence—it’s gone; it’s no use moping about our lost childhood, and becoming intoxicated by the sickly potency of our own nostalgia; we have to grow up. We have to leave the unself-conscious grace of childhood behind and go in search of another quality altogether, the quality of wisdom. And that involves engaging with every kind of human experience, making compromises, getting our hands dirty, suffering, toiling, learning.
Innocence is not wise; wisdom cannot be innocent. And it’s very painful and it’s very hard, but it’s the only way forward, and in the end, if we keep on trying, we shall have acquired a deeper, fuller, richer understanding than we ever had before we tasted the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.
That is the meaning of Lyra’s losing the power to read the alethiometer. It came to her easily, like grace; it departs as if it had never been, leaving only a memory of the ease and swiftness and certainty she used to feel. But this is not a story about how wonderful it was to be a child, and its dominating principle is not nostalgia and regret. It’s a story about how necessary it is to grow up, and its dominating principle is realism and hope.
Now I was going to tell you what happens when you encounter a critic at the wrong time. It came about because this focus on the Fall and all its meanings naturally led me to think about Gnosticism. Very fashionable thing, Gnosticism; there’s a lot of it about these days. The original Gnostic myth tells of how this material world was brought into being by a false creator, a Demiurge, in order to imprison the sparks of true divinity which had fallen from the o
riginal God, the inconceivably distant true God, who is their home; and it’s the task of those who know the truth—the Gnostics—to escape from this world altogether and find their way back.
Well, nowadays at the clever end of things we have the distinguished literary critic Harold Bloom writing about this in Omens of Millennium, and at the popular end we have The X-Files and The Matrix and The Truman Show, which are all pure Gnosticism. This world, they seem to be saying, this world we can see and touch, this world of power and politics and government and official pronouncements and large corporations, is a delusion and a fake, a vast conspiracy designed to trap us and keep us in ignorance. “The truth is out there,” says Mulder in The X-Files.
The Gnostic myth is a very powerful story, because it’s intensely dramatic, and it puts us and our predicament right at the centre of it, and it seems to explain why so many of us feel unhappy, ill at ease, alienated from the universe and from things like joy and purpose and meaning. We’re not at home here, because the universe is not our home. But those who know can find their way out.
There’s no time now to go further into this myth, which is full of psychological fascination, but the thing that was of obvious interest to me was its connection with the story of the Fall, because it’s all about knowledge. There was no single body of official Gnostic doctrine, but some of the sects and cults whose influence wove in and out of early Christian thought (until they were finally rounded up and condemned as heretical) revered the Serpent, which helped Adam and Eve see the truth that had been concealed from them by the false creator-god.
So I was interested to read as much Gnosticism-related stuff from the clever end of the scale as I could find, as well as gaping at stuff from the popular end; and while I was in the middle of writing The Amber Spyglass a book came out by A. D. Nuttall called The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake. It’s full of connections and insights and information; I seized on it with delight and read it with fascination, and then found myself completely unable to proceed. I felt hypnotised into immobility. So interesting was Nuttall’s argument, and so persuasive his examples, that I found myself thinking about my own story, “Well, I’ve got this bit wrong…and surely I should be stressing the Ophite angle a bit more strongly…and he must be right about Milton saying such-and-such about Satan, so I’d better rethink what I say about so-and-so…and if Blake’s attitude to the serpent was ambiguous, then maybe I’ll be on dodgy ground when I write the next bit…”
In short, I was reduced to creeping around like a mouse in someone else’s intellectual house, trying not to disturb things, or make too much noise, and not make any mistakes. All that had happened was that I’d met the book at the wrong time, you see, when my story was still partly in flux.
It was Blake who got me out of this perplexing state (as I describe in more detail in “I Must Create a System”); I remembered his line “I must create my own system, or be enslaved by another man’s,” and with one bound I was free. I thought: actually, I can say anything I like. If I contradict Milton and Blake and A. D. Nuttall, so much the worse for them. There are times when the best attitude to adopt towards critics is that of P. G. Wodehouse’s immortal character Bertie Wooster towards his spots. He was having a bath one day, and he noticed a rash on his chest. “I should not advocate scratching, sir,” says Jeeves. “I disagree,” says Bertie. “You have to take a firm line with these spots.” Sometimes I think you have to take a firm line with critics.
Actually, just to wind up the Gnostic motif, my system—my myth, if you like—is passionately anti-Gnostic in one vital respect: the story insists on the primacy, the absolute importance, of “the physical world, which is our true home and always was,” as one of the ghosts says in the world of the dead. Lyra discovers this by accident when the ghosts beg her to tell them about the world, to remind them about the wind and the sunshine; and instead of telling them one of her Lyra-like fantasies, full of wild nonsense, she tells them about something that really happened, and tries with all her heart to evoke the smells and the sounds and the look, the sensuous texture and presence of the real world for them. She leaves fantasy behind, and becomes a realist. (As the whole story does, indeed—it’s a movement away from fantasy and towards realism, which is why Lyra goes to school at the end of the book: a cruel disappointment to some critics, academics and teachers themselves, actually, who seem to have lost any sense of the nobility, the moral value, the sheer passionate excitement of education.)
Anyway, when that happens, when Lyra tells that true story, she sees to her astonishment that the harpies who guard and torment the ghosts in the world of the dead have stopped everything, and have been listening closely. This is what they have been hungering for all this time—the truth about the world, about life. So they make a bargain: if you go to the world of the dead with a story to tell—your story, the story of your engagement with life—then the harpies will guide your ghost out into the world again, where it can finally dissolve into the general world of life and physicality, and be free of the anguish and misery of immortality. So my heresy is to suggest that eternal life is not a reward, but the most cruel punishment, imposed on us by God for the sin of seeking to grow up and become wise.
Illustration for Chapter 6 of The Golden Compass, by the author
And the implication is that if you spend your life doing nothing but watching television and playing computer games, you will have nothing to tell the harpies in the world of the dead, and there you will stay.
The final passage I want to comment on is a pretty straightforward piece of dialogue. Lyra is running away, and she stops at a coffee stall, where she attracts the attention of the man whose picture is reproduced here.
That’s his dæmon on his shoulder—a lemur. If you imagine a sort of suave, upper-class Leslie Phillips voice for him you’ll get his tone exactly right.
He begins a conversation with Lyra:
“Where are you going, all alone like this?”
“Going to meet my father.”
“And who’s he?”
“He’s a murderer.”
“He’s what?”
“I told you, he’s a murderer. It’s his profession. He’s doing a job tonight. I got his clean clothes in here, ’cause he’s usually all covered in blood when he’s finished a job.”
“Ah! You’re joking.”
“I en’t.”
The lemur uttered a soft mewing sound and clambered slowly up behind the man’s head, to peer out at her. Lyra drank her coffee stolidly and ate the last of her sandwich.
“Good night,” she said. “I can see my father coming now. He looks a bit angry.”
(TGC, 101)
The reason I put this in is to explain, just briefly, why dialogue is easier to write than narrative. Once you’ve got the characters established in your mind you can hear what they say to each other quite easily. And because they give you the words, you can write them down. You can also see what they do, of course, but that doesn’t come in the form of words—it comes in the form of pictures, and you have to find the words, and that’s not so easy. Do you say, “She stopped at the coffee stall” or, “Lyra saw the coffee stall and stopped” or, “Seeing the coffee stall, Lyra decided to stop”…? There are a hundred ways of saying it, and with each variation you have to choose what to put in and what to leave out.
In fact, here I said:
At a crossroads near the corner of a big department store, whose windows shone brilliantly over the wet pavement, there was a coffee stall: a little hut on wheels with a counter under the wooden flap that swung up like an awning. Yellow light glowed inside, and the fragrance of coffee drifted out. The white-coated owner was leaning on the counter talking to the two or three customers.
It was tempting. Lyra had been walking for an hour now, and it was cold and damp.
(TGC, 100)
That’s functional: you put in a few little visual details—the yellow light, the brilliance of the shop windows, the wet pavement; anyone who wanted to could visualise it without difficulty, but there’s not so much that it gets in the way and holds the story up while you demonstrate your mastery of descriptive prose. But every phrase has to be thought about and alternatives rejected. And now I see this again, I realise that it would have been better to say of the wooden flap that it was suspended rather than that it swung up, because “swung up” is active, it suggests movement, and of course it’s not moving, it’s still. That’s the sort of thing you have to think about and often get wrong. It’s just harder to do.
But when Lyra says, “I told you, he’s a murderer,” and so on, I didn’t have to think about it in the same way. I did make one or two little changes; originally, after the words “I can see my father,” I began to write “now,” but stopped before I’d finished that word and changed it to “coming now” instead—it’s more vivid, he’s not just standing there, he’s getting closer; but that’s all. Dialogue, for me, is very much easier than narrative.
And I don’t think I’m alone in that. In fact, I know I’m not. I used to be a schoolteacher, teaching children roughly between the ages of ten and thirteen, and I noticed that when they wrote stories, many of them were much better at dialogue than at narrative. What they were doing in a number of cases was not actually writing a story at all, but writing a TV script without realising it, and without knowing how to make transitions between scenes or describe the things they were clearly seeing in their minds’ eye—the stage directions, as it were. What they could do very well was put down the things they were hearing in their minds’ ear, because those things were already words. Their difficulty with narrative, and their ease with dialogue, might be due to their lifelong experience of television and film, or it might just be that dialogue is intrinsically easier; I don’t know.
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