She sees her extended family instead as the street urchins, college servants and remote scholars all of whom have taken some loose part in bringing her up. Particular friends like Roger, the Jordan College kitchen boy, play an extra significant part in her life given that she has no other close ties. This helps explain why, in The Amber Spyglass, it is so important for Lyra to rescue Roger from the land of the dead. The loyalty she feels towards him is similar to how a sister might react when a beloved brother is killed, partly – as she believes – through her own fault.
At other moments, Lyra feels strongly for a succession of father and mother figures, each one providing the sort of parental love and concern that she has never experienced at first hand. John Faa the Gyptian leader, Iorek Byrnison the armoured bear, Lee Scoresby the aviator, Serafina Pekkala the witch and Mary Malone, the nun-turned-research-scientist, all at some stage perform a role in Lyra’s life that would have been more appropriately played by a mother and father. Once again, there are distinct storytelling advantages here. A succession of different, interesting and sometimes bizarre parent-figures is always going to make for more intriguing characters than one pair of ordinarily well-intentioned parents.
As the only girl on John Faa’s boat expedition to the North, Lyra soon makes herself busy in the manner of another of Pullman’s favourite characters in fiction. This is Tim, the tough small boy in Edward Ardizzone’s famous picture book Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain and its various successors. After stowing away on a small boat, Tim is set to work and quickly makes the best of things, even when he seems to be facing certain death. Lyra is also soon on friendly relations with the rest of the crew, and like Tim is allowed to work the ship’s steam whistle and help the cook with his plum duff.
This combination of ordinary naughtiness and extreme responsibility under pressure makes her a splendidly well-rounded character, neither oppressively good nor monotonously rebellious. She has those human faults all readers can identify with as well as other virtues that they can freely admire. Nicknamed Silvertongue at one stage, she is also a natural storyteller.
But when Lyra tries to get the better of the harpies by telling them a pack of worthless lies, their indignant screams of ‘Liar! Liar!’ show her that this policy will never work. The whole episode is a reminder that Lyra’s very name, with its overtones of lyre – the instrument of the gods – can also be heard as ‘liar’ as well. She realises from that moment on that only stories concerned with what she knows to be the truth are going to do. Such stories must draw on her knowledge of what it is really like to be alive, aiming to get everything exactly right as she sees and feels it. In that sense, Lyra stands for the author himself, and his corresponding efforts to get at what he sees as the genuine truth in his imaginative vision of the world, however much this might offend various interested parties along the way.
When interviewed Pullman insists that Lyra is in fact a very ordinary child, and that he had met thousands like her when he was a teacher. As he puts it in the first story of the trilogy: ‘She was a coarse and greedy little savage, for the most part.’ But he also adds elsewhere that: ‘The point I am making is that ordinary people are capable of great deeds.’ Lyra finally comes through because Pullman believes that all humans have the capacity to be heroic, given the right circumstances. Many would find this an overoptimistic opinion, with Lyra obviously something special by virtue of her outsize courage, superb sense of loyalty and general toughness under fire. But Pullman takes a positive line about human potential wherever it is found. His belief that people can always make the best of their own lives if only they are left alone by religion, or any other authoritarian system of thought, is central to his philosophy.
Although he is the same age, Will is a sadder and more solemn character than Lyra. He has had to shoulder the experience of the loss of his father as well as take responsibility for his mentally ill mother. When others torment her, it is Will who protects her, while also trying to cope with his own bruised and angry feelings. Although having already accidentally killed a man is a major worry to him, he still seems drawn to violence. He says at one time to Lyra: ‘I got my own things to do in Oxford, and if you give me away, I’ll kill you.’ As he has previously told her that he is a murderer, she has no reason to disbelieve him.
Without his own visible dæmon for emotional support, Will remains a rather closed personality for most of the trilogy, much in need of more mothering himself. Silent, sometimes moody, but strong and determined when he needs to be, he makes a splendid romantic hero of the old school. It takes his growing feelings for Lyra to give him the confidence to talk about his past unhappiness. When he finally realises that he loves Lyra, he becomes a whole person at last, able to admit to the strong feelings he had up till then kept hidden away. He also by now has the maturity to destroy the knife with which he could have mastered the world.
He does this because he realises that although his own intentions about the possible future uses of the knife are worthy ones, the knife itself has its own plans too, and cannot of itself be trusted. So Will finally breaks it by bringing to mind the one thing it is unable to cut: his love for Lyra. The previous time the knife broke happened when Mrs Coulter filled Will’s mind with the image of his much-loved mother. But Will is moving on now in his own maturity, and it is fitting that his love for Lyra now seems to him the most urgent sensation in his life.
He and Lyra both have troubled relationships with their own parents, in one case because there is not enough love and in the other because there may be too much. Resolving their individual psychological needs is something else Will and Lyra have to do on their own, coming out stronger in the end though not before moments of pain. But until they can manage to solve their personal problems they are powerless to see to their most important task, which is nothing less than the saving of the world. The necessity for learning to look both forwards and outwards is another important message in this book, which has little time for those continually trapped in a past that prevents them from enjoying the joys, wonders and duties of the world they are living in at the present.
Fantasies about particular chosen leaders do not always end on a positive note; the mythological leader and saviour King Arthur, for example, dies before his time as part of his destiny. If Pullman’s trilogy also ended abruptly in tragedy, it is doubtful whether it would have enjoyed anything like the same success. But although Lyra and Will often suffer, both during their stories and at the moment of their final severance, the whole trilogy is fundamentally about the triumph of good actions over evil ones. This is never a victory that can be taken for granted. As Dr Lanselius says of Lyra, taking his cue from the prophecies made by the witches about her for centuries past: ‘she must be free to make mistakes. We must hope that she does not, but we can’t guide her.’
As the most important chosen instrument of good, Lyra comes over as an ideal character with whom readers can identify. Sometimes contrary over small details, she is magnificently brave when it really matters. Long realising that she has been picked out to do a special task, however much others believe that she is still ignorant of what her destiny demands of her, she never flinches from this duty. But Lyra has to wait until she finally knows what it is she has to do – which in her case, is to abolish death itself by liberating all those ghosts currently wasting away in a grim underworld.
Will also has his destiny marked out for him, and like Lyra also possesses freedom of choice. As he explains to his father at the end of the trilogy, ‘You said I was a warrior. You told me that was my nature, and I shouldn’t argue with it. Father, you were wrong. I fought because I had to. I can’t choose my nature, but I can choose what I do. And I will choose, because now I’m free.’
There is always a problem, however, over freedom of choice with characters who seem to be fulfilling the various prophecies previously made about them. This issue of free will versus destiny is also central to one of Pullman’s key influences, Milton’s Paradise Lost,
given that an all-knowing, all-powerful God should surely by definition always have been able to intervene in order to save Adam and Eve from committing their sin in the first place. But Pullman overcomes this problem by making both Will and Lyra such independent characters that it is impossible to imagine them ever doing anything simply because someone else has told them that they either should or will. What drives them is their sense of what should be, according to their own values and personalities.
This is an important point for both characters, since if they were simply doing what they were always required to do by the greater forces pushing them along they would be little better than robots. But it is not just heroes who must have the power of choice in order to qualify as such. All human beings have to make important choices throughout their lives, and the better they choose, the better it will ultimately be – not just for themselves but also for others. Will and Lyra set an example whereby, whatever the opposition, they insist on making a stand for what they believe to be right. If more people acted in a similar way, the story implies, our own world might be in a much healthier state.
Young people often have a similar fantasy at some stage that they too are extra special, selected by some mysterious force one day to astonish the world. This particular myth of the self frequently lingers on into adulthood, before accumulated experience finally proves to at least most of us that we really are very much like everyone else after all. In Lyra and Will, readers of all ages can identify with young heroes for whom this fantasy is a living reality. No wonder that so many took to them so quickly, with their story stirring up similarly flattering fantasies of the type that have always persisted deep in the spirit of all human beings.
His Dark Materials was published at the same time as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories. Both writers had experience of losing a parent when they were still children and both have since admitted to periods of depression in their lives, symbolised by attacks from the Spectres in Pullman’s stories and similar assaults by the Dementors in Rowling’s novels. Both have had to come to terms with adversity, Rowling as a single mother trying to get by in poverty and Pullman, disappointed after his poor Oxford degree, casting around for an occupation when all he wanted to do was write. It is perhaps no coincidence that both writers have created young characters who have had to battle against the odds for some time before achieving their ends.
Lyra, Will and Harry also come from troubled homes, where there has either been a marked absence of love or else a parent who was not coping. All have been chosen by some unknown force to carry out a great deed that will save the world. All are equal to this task because of their innate courage and moral integrity, and each one possesses an exceptional gift: Harry with his powers of magic, Lyra with her alethiometer and Will with his knife.
They also receive important help from friends but little or nothing from parents or parent-substitutes. Harry is an orphan, Lyra starts by thinking she is one, and Will has never known his father. All are, to this extent, self-created characters, responsible primarily to themselves for want of any parent or parent figure to take responsibility for them. All share the traditional attributes of the fictional lone hero, born in unusual circumstances but with access to extraordinary powers. All too are early on linked to a prophecy that marks them out as key figures in the saving of their own society.
Characters found in today’s children’s or Young Adult novels are not always so perfect. This is because modern fiction, whether for adults or children, often prefers to go in the direction of psychological realism when describing main characters, avoiding heroics in favour of revealing human flaws as well as strengths. Main characters are often shown as only coming into their own once they have defeated their various personal weaknesses on the way. Others are admired for the way they get the better of severe personal or social disadvantages.
But Lyra, Will and Harry seem to have been born both strong and good. While other children might have become severely disturbed by the sort of childhood all three endured, they come across as oblivious to every bad influence that might have had a negative effect upon them. The problems they have to defeat come from outside and rarely from their own personalities. Together they signal a return to a simpler fictional world whose heroes nearly always do the right thing. They also, through their courage, humanity and high sense of morality, represent exemplars of the perpetual human need for undoubted heroes or heroines, if only in the imagination.
Best-selling writers inevitably reflect some of the most popular feelings and fantasies of their own times, and such too could be the case with the creation of Lyra, Will and Harry. In a modern age where biographers, satirists and journalists are eager to cut down anyone who might otherwise seem to be setting a reasonably good or possibly even a heroic example, Lyra, Will and Harry offer a welcome contrast. They are shown throughout to be independent, largely insulated from social influences and very much their own creations. While other characters in their stories are unequal to the mighty task of putting the world to rights, they somehow have the key. Many readers looking at their own world could be forgiven for wishing – at least in their dreams – that similarly wise and brave heroes could one day also sort out some of the most dangerous political and social problems that exist in real life.
Supporters of genetic engineering have sometimes insisted that they may soon have the techniques to produce babies who are healthy and intelligent as never before. The whole idea of producing superior human beings, whether through genetic engineering or any other process, is of course another fantasy in its own right. Pullman’s and Rowling’s literary fantasies are of a quite different order, but there may still be some common ground here. Scientists who believe they can one day produce a better type of person and novelists who actually write about such beings are both to an extent reacting to a current dissatisfaction with humans as they actually are and the mess they are making of the world we all live in. A general lack of confidence over the future suggests that there is at present little conviction that things will improve unless human beings themselves change for the better. With no evidence that this will ever happen, it is not surprising that stories about such super-humans, young or old, continue to attract readers of all ages.
There are many other ways in which these stories appeal so powerfully to readers, and in particular to children. All the books in which these characters appear follow a pattern whereby good finally defeats evil in a cosmic battle whose opposing sides are, with some exceptions, clearly drawn. Lyra, Will and Harry do not just represent the best type of person. They also perform valiantly in the service of a moral goodness always clearly visible to them, however difficult it might sometimes be to discern in ordinary daily life, well away from the world of storytelling.
Science and Religion
Knowing your enemy:
Lyra and Will versus the Church
Early on in Northern Lights the alethiometer reveals that Lyra is going to play an important part in a major battle. This starts as a dispute between the Holy Church and her own father Lord Asriel, over the possible existence of other worlds beyond the present one and the conventional Christian view of only one other spiritual world in existence made up of heaven and hell. Later on this turns into a fight to the death between those who support further enslavement by evil Church forces versus those who want final liberation from spiritual oppression from whatever source.
This story can also be read as a fable, with Lyra and Will standing in for Adam and Eve. The suggestion is that our own cultural history might have developed along healthier lines had the story of the Garden of Eden been interpreted in the first place with Eve the heroine rather than the villain of the piece. Far from an act of tragic disobedience, Pullman clearly believes that her decision to eat the apple from the tree of knowledge was the right thing to do.
All the disgrace visited upon this action since stems in his view from the Church’s determination to keep everyone in a state of continual guilt and fear. Congregation
s brought up to feel like this are then all the more willing to turn towards an organised religion that promises redemption for the first great, human sin that Pullman believes should never have been described as such. Now, in a re-run of this famous story, Lyra and Will also disobey the teachings of the Church, but are seen by their supporters to have done the right thing, not just for themselves but for everyone else as well.
Lyra starts out in the trilogy as a child, but finishes with the experience of a first, passionate love affair. As Mrs Coulter puts it to the evil President of the Consistorial Court: ‘My daughter is now twelve years old. Very soon she will approach the cusp of adolescence, and then it will be too late for any of us to prevent the catastrophe; nature and opportunity will come together like spark and tinder.’
As so often, Mrs Coulter is playing a double game here, and in the next moment she turns against the Church, describing the whole court as ‘a body of men with a feverish obsession with sexuality, men with dirty fingernails, reeking of ancient sweat, men whose furtive imaginations would crawl over [Lyra’s] body like cockroaches’. But there is no doubt that the court sees Lyra’s progress towards taking up a positive attitude about her own sexuality as a severe threat. Should she, like Eve before her, also give way to what the Church defines as temptation but which Lyra would experience as love without guilt, this will surely ruin the authority of the whole ecclesiastical establishment. That is why its president, Father MacPhail, proposes to send out someone to kill her.
Pullman also suggests that the overwhelming sense of shame described in the Bible after Adam and Eve became aware of their naked sexuality for the first time, far from being a natural outcome, was actually imposed upon them by the grim-faced Authority. This action then allowed him a perfect method of control over them and subsequently everyone else. Since all humans coming after would inevitably develop sexual awareness, being taught to feel bad about such feelings allowed the Authority, now naming himself as God, a perfect method of control ever after. Having imposed a seal of shame on all believers, the Church could then set itself up as the only institution capable of bestowing forgiveness for a state of consciousness that in fact never needed to be excused or forgiven in the first place.
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