Darkness Visible

by Nicholas Tucker

  Returning together to Will’s Oxford, Lyra meets Dr Mary Malone, a scientist working in the university’s Dark Matter Research Unit. Dark matter here is defined as the so-far undetected stuff that exists between stars and makes gravity work, and which makes up at least 90 per cent of the universe. Lyra tells her about Dust, and together the two are able to bring up on a computer screen some elementary particles that seem to have consciousness. Dark matter and Dust turn out to be one and the same thing, or as the angel Balthamos puts it later: ‘Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself.’

  Lyra loses her alethiometer to Lord Boreal, a smoothtongued, dishonest collector. He will only give it back if she and Will bring him the very special knife that exists in the other, Italian, world. Returning to Cittàgazze, they finally capture the knife during a fight in the Torre degli Angeli, the Tower of the Angels, formerly occupied by the local Guild of Philosophers.

  Will is wounded in the process, losing two fingers and then bleeding dangerously. Like many other traditional heroes, he has to pay a harsh price in acquiring the magical powers he needs. He soon manages to learn how to operate the knife, which is capable of cutting a window into another world at a moment’s notice. By now Will has read the letters his father sent home during his final expedition, where he too wrote about the windows that exist between worlds. Will decides that his father may still be alive, and resolves to find him. Back in Oxford, the two children use the knife to cut their way from one world to another, so allowing them access to Lord Boreal’s house, where they steal back the alethiometer. Lord Boreal is entertaining Mrs Coulter at the time, who is still anxious to find Lyra.

  Meanwhile Lee Scoresby, the aviator, has met up with Stanislaus Grumman, who turns out to be John Parry, Will’s father and now a self-taught shaman. Grumman too has been investigating Dust, which was why the two hired men, acting on instructions from the Church, were trying to confiscate his papers at the start of the story. He also knows about the knife, though not that it is his own son who currently holds it. Grumman desperately wants to find whoever does have it, in order to tell him or her about the vital role it has to play in the future fate of the entire universe.

  The soldiers of the Church surround Lee and shoot him dead after a prolonged gun battle. Will at last meets his father, who tells him that the knife is the only weapon capable of killing God himself. But just as they finally both recognise each other, John Parry is slain by the witch he once dared to scorn. Will is then told by two angels to find Lord Asriel, in order to help him in his great fight against the Church authorities. But Lyra meanwhile has disappeared, and Will wonders if he is ever going to see her again.

  Evil in its blackest form again walks the land here, with ghastly Spectres not unlike the Dementors that haunt J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories. In each case, they have the power to invade and destroy a person, rendering them into a zombie state. Evil is shown to exist in children too, with Lyra declaring to Will that she will never trust kids again, after seeing the young people of Cittàgazze torturing and killing a pet cat. In return, Will tells her about the time when his mentally ill mother was tormented by boys from his school.

  For Will, this could be evidence that: ‘Maybe we do have the Spectres in my world, only we can’t see them and we haven’t got a name for them.’ Other explanations for the existence of evil in humans go back as far as the Bible and beyond. Pullman rejects theological theories as to why this should be, and is happy to describe various communities, such as the Gyptians, where harmony always prevails. He is also a lifelong admirer of Erich Kästner’s pre-war classic children’s tale Emil and the Detectives, where a group of street-wise Berlin children set about helping the more innocent country-born Emil track down the crook who has stolen his money. For Pullman, the main point in this junior self-help story is ‘that the children find the solution themselves, out of the everyday qualities they share: resourcefulness, quick wits, determination’. The same could equally be said about the Oxford urchins with whom Lyra has such close connections in the previous volume. Although mischievous, they always work together when the occasion demands.

  But this still leaves us with other characters, junior and senior, capable of appalling behaviour without conscience or regret. It would be unfair to expect Pullman to come up with any easy theory about why humans in both life and his stories are at times given to general wickedness. The existence of such characters certainly makes for stirring moments when they can be roundly defeated by the good, to every reader’s satisfaction. But despite Pullman’s ingenious reworking of the Bible story to show how things could once have been much better, there is no indication in his stories that all evil can simply be blamed on the noxious influence of a perverted religion. Other forces are clearly involved too, but of these we hear little at any stage.

  On another tack, there are also powerful warnings here about what a world could look like after extreme climate change, when the summers have become hotter than they used to be after adverse reaction to chemicals injected into the atmosphere. Altogether, things are looking very bleak at the conclusion of this story. Time to move on to the final instalment.

  The Amber Spyglass

  Lyra is drugged and kept captive by her mother in a secret cave. Mrs Coulter had snatched her daughter away in order to save Lyra from the Church, which wants to kill the child whom it now views as a second Eve. Just as the first Eve was judged to have made trouble by disobeying God’s orders, Lyra too is seen as a potential rebel who could, if left alone, re-write human history. Mrs Coulter wants to save her, even though this means opposing the Church for which she had worked so diligently in the past.

  Will is still being urged to find Lord Asriel by the two angels, Balthamos and Baruch. They also had previously taken sides against the ultimate Authority, variously known as ‘God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty’. As Balthamos points out: ‘He was never the creator. He was an angel like ourselves – the first angel, true, the most powerful, but he was formed of Dust as we are, and Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself.’

  It was this same grim Authority that banished the original Eve after she discovered that he was in fact not the Creator at all. This Authority was later backed by the established Church. His second in command, Metatron, is now out to kill both Will and Lyra. But Will is determined to find Lyra first, as are Iorek the bear, Serafina Pekkala the witch and Lord Roke, Lord Asriel’s spy-captain. This gallant gentleman, no taller than six inches, rides on a dragonfly and is the possessor of a lethal pair of poisoned spurs. A new character, Father Gomez, is also in on the hunt. He has a special commission from the Church’s Consistorial Court of Discipline to find and eliminate Lyra as soon as possible.

  The action then passes to Mary Malone, alone in a world not her own. She meets the strange mulefa, peaceful talking animals with horned heads and short trunks who travel around with the aid of two wheel-shaped seed-pods. Their gentle placidity is reminiscent of the Moomin characters invented by the Finnish children’s author Tove Jansson, much admired by Pullman as a self-evident genius. But the mulefa are now perpetually raided by cruel, giant bird-shaped creatures known as the tualapi. The trees upon which the mulefa depend for their seed-pods are also dying because their world is losing the vital Dust that once allowed it to thrive.

  Will locates Lyra, but is nearly taken in by Mrs Coulter’s charm. His attempt to rescue her daughter works, although his knife gets broken in the process. Lyra then dreams that Roger, her former friend, wants urgently to speak to her, which will necessitate a trip to the land of the dead. After Iorek mends Will’s knife, Lyra and Will join a procession of ghosts making their way to the underworld. But when they get to the river dividing the living from the dead, Lyra discovers that she has to leave behind her beloved dæmon, such an integral part of herself. This is the great sacrifice originally mentioned by the Master of Jordan College, when he rev
ealed that the alethiometer had prophesied that at some stage Lyra would perform an act of terrible betrayal. But she has to do so, agonising and unbearable though it is.

  After the crossing she meets Roger, now like her without his dæmon. They encounter some terrifying half-human, half-animal harpies, appointed by the Authority to torment the ghosts of the dead with reminders of all their former wickedness, cruelty and greed. This ghastly process happens to everyone who dies, good or bad alike, because up to now the land of the dead is far from being anything like heaven. It is in fact a place of nothing, ‘with no hope of freedom, or joy, or sleep or rest or peace’.

  Lyra finds she can get round the harpies by telling them stories that are true at heart. Won over by their enjoyment of these tales, the harpies agree to conduct all future ghosts to the special exit from the underworld that Will and Lyra are planning to make. But this is only on condition that the ghosts involved continue to tell them stories about the lives they once had on earth, true stories about what they have ‘seen and heard and loved and known in the world’. Once they leave the land of the dead, they can then happily disappear and in so doing become at one with all other living things on earth. As they approach this moment of final liberation, Will has one last encounter with his father, now also a ghost.

  Mrs Coulter meanwhile has made her way to the President of the Consistorial Court of Discipline, who operates from Geneva. She is imprisoned, but discovers that the President is overseeing the making of a bomb that will kill Lyra once exploded, since it contains a lock of her hair which, with the advanced technology involved, is enough to enable it to track her down. Mrs Coulter just succeeds in aborting this bomb, and is then rescued, bruised and bleeding, by Lord Asriel. They resolve their differences, each determined to keep Lyra alive at all costs against the different threats facing her.

  To this end, Mrs Coulter arranges to meet, and then pretends to seduce, Metatron, The Authority’s Regent and the greatest of Lyra’s enemies. She tells him she wants to betray her daughter, but this is a ruse to enable Lord Asriel to first ambush and then hurl the wicked angel into an abyss from which there is no return. But he can only do this by sacrificing his own life at the same time, as does Mrs Coulter, having finally admitted to herself that her love for Lyra is now greater than her own wish for survival.

  Reunited with Mary Malone, Lyra and Will learn that Dust is leaking from this world because there are now so many windows leading off from it. Will therefore has the duty of closing them, except for one through which the ghosts of the dead can continually pass into the living world before finally disappearing. Father Gomez, Lyra’s would-be assassin, is stopped and then killed at the last moment by the angel Balthamos. Lyra and Will find their dæmons once again, and Will is able to see his for the first time.

  They realise that they are now in love, but because of the necessity for closing the windows that exist between their two worlds, it will not be possible for them to live together. The option of one staying in the other’s world is impossible, since any prolonged absence from one’s own universe inevitably leads to premature old age and death. Instead, Lyra will go to school for the first time in her Oxford, while Will must first destroy his knife and then return to the mother who needs him so much in his own world. But they will never forget the great love they have for each other, and both are now determined to help build the Republic of Heaven on earth, by which they understand that they are making the very best of the life they currently possess, both for themselves and for others.

  In this story, Pullman gives his final clues about the greater meaning of his trilogy. Rejecting orthodox Christianity he also recognises the spiritual loneliness experienced by Mary Malone and others, of living in what they have come to believe is a Godless universe. His answer is an insistence instead on continuing to celebrate the best of what life and the world still have to offer. Simple, sensual pleasures are pictured as properly and significantly life-affirming. Or, as Lyra experiences it after waking up from a long sleep out of doors: ‘She felt the little breeze and the sun’s warmth and she heard the little insect-scrapings and the bell-song of that bird high above. It was all good. She had forgotten how good the world was.’

  The onset of sexuality is for Pullman another moment of huge human potential. Sexual attraction and fulfilment, demonised in the traditional Adam and Eve story, is seen instead as the greatest adventure of them all. When Mary Malone recounts what she describes as the paradise of her own first adult sexual experience, Lyra, listening enrapt,

  felt as if she had been handed the key to a great house that was somehow inside her, and as she turned the key, deep in the darkness of the building she felt other doors opening too, and lights coming on … And inside her, that rich house with all its doors open and all its rooms lit stood waiting, quiet, expectant.

  Lyra and Will are both under-age, and Pullman is writing principally for a junior audience. So their own sexual awakening is merely signalled by the symbolism of Lyra offering Will a little red fruit just as Eve once gave Adam the famous apple. But this time the couple are allowed to celebrate their burgeoning love for each other without guilt. Later on, in another symbolic act, they shyly handle each other’s dæmons. Their final parting is even more painful, but Pullman insists that they can still go on to live good lives apart.

  For Mary Malone, also at the end of her story: ‘The clouds seemed to know what they were doing and why, and the wind knew, and the grass knew. The entire world was alive and conscious.’ But while she felt the truth of this observation, she herself still did not know what this ultimate purpose was. Pullman too, also coming to the end of his own particular fictional journey, is in something of the same position. Outspoken about what he sees as poisonous ways of viewing the human’s place in the universe, he feels instead that there is a positive message out there for us all but one that can only be experienced at best instinctively by leading good, positive lives.

  To get this view across, he uses his own God-like role as narrator to advance the causes of those he sees as the good and condemn those he has written off as the bad. The prophecies surrounding Lyra and Will and their ultimate destiny come true not through any revealed intervention from a higher force, but because Pullman wills them so. He also uses details and characters from great stories from the past, including some from what Mary Malone later describes as ‘that very powerful and convincing mistake, Christianity’.

  So here is a humanist writer who still reaches for the Bible, even if it means re-writing crucial scenes. Pullman has always seen himself as, above everything else, a storyteller. And if the story fits his writer’s purpose he will include it, whatever its genesis. There is, after all, a wisdom in the greatest stories that have survived over the centuries. They can give meaning where there is confusion and hope where there is despair. Above all, they help define what it is to be human by our reactions to them. Lyra, like her author, is also a born storyteller. The stories she tells and the visions she has ultimately work for everyone’s good. His many fans might well claim that the same could be said of Pullman himself.

  Will and Lyra

  Lyra is a character immediately recognisable from some of Pullman’s earlier stories. Mischievous, tough-minded, disrespectful and independent, she is also kind and caring when it most matters. Moving easily between the social classes, she is at home with everyone willing to treat her as a proper person in her own right. No respecter of adult authority, enjoying anarchic mud fights and often in need of a good wash and brush-up, there are moments when, like the character Thunderbolt in the New Cut Gang stories, she reminds readers of Richmal Crompton’s pre-war child character William.

  Spitting plum stones onto the heads of passing scholars or hooting like an owl outside a window where a tutorial is going on are both activities enjoyed by Lyra that William would have been proud to imitate. Cousins, the Master of Jordan’s manservant, is at one moment described as ‘an old enemy of Lyra’s’. This phrase is identical to the descriptio
ns of William’s various adult adversaries. Lyra’s child friends, and the often ungrammatical English with which they speak to each other, also have something in common with the mode of speech used by William’s band of self-styled Outlaws: a gang of children as mischievous as he is himself.

  Although Lyra is no orphan, she has had an orphan’s upbringing, having been falsely told that her parents had died in an airship accident. Her childhood has been supervised by those living or working in the all-male Jordan College. There is also help from Mrs Lonsdale, a hard-working but unaffectionate housekeeper. This odd background gives Lyra another strong advantage as a storybook heroine. Child heroes who possess loving parents always face a problem in fiction. If they play everything safe, as any properly concerned parent would wish them to, their capacity for adventure is going to be strictly limited. If on the other hand they go in for dangerous exploits, this will mean going against what all good parents would wish for their child. Deliberately running terrible risks is less easy to contemplate with parents who are affectionate, concerned and therefore deserving of trust. But disobeying bad parents, or harsh parent-substitutes, is not a matter for guilt. Accordingly, Lyra stays guilt-free on this issue, given that she does not even know at the start of her story that she has parents who are still living.

  When she discovers that they are Mrs Coulter and Lord Asriel, she has even less reason to consider the wishes of such an unpleasant and selfish pair. Having grown up as an orphan, she comes over as someone who has largely invented herself, and who still retains the possibility of reinventing herself once again should the occasion demand. Fictional children possessing caring, hands-on parents can never aspire to the same level of independence, which from the start makes Lyra such a potentially interesting as well as attractive character.