Darkness Visible

by Nicholas Tucker

  Yet if humans can never confront Dust directly, they can still become conscious of examples of its essential truth. The better any of us live, Pullman says, the more likely that we too might experience the type of positive joy that also drives the entire world. Cruelty, greed and selfishness, on the other hand, only obscure what is good and true. When these negative impulses become linked to evil political or religious movements, the results can be disastrous. Dust, of itself, has no power to shape human lives. Only we can do that; but by doing the best we can we will, in Pullman’s view, then be working in the true spirit of this special Dust rather than against it.

  This is not to say that Dust in itself, when we finally return to it, offers a necessarily better alternative to life on earth. When Serafina Pekkala watches the gleaming angels flying away, she feels nothing but compassion for these magnificent beings composed only of light and Dust: ‘How much they must miss, never to feel the earth beneath their feet, or the wind in their hair, or the tingle of the starlight on their bare skin!’

  Later on, Mrs Coulter makes the important discovery about angels that ‘lacking flesh, they coveted it and longed for contact with it’. For Pullman, therefore, it is still best to be human, enjoying all the legitimate pleasures of the body that we have been blessed with but which religion in the past has sometimes condemned so cruelly. As Will explains to Lyra: ‘Angels wish they had bodies. They told me that angels can’t understand why we don’t enjoy the world more. It would be [a] sort of ecstasy for them to have our flesh and our senses.’

  He is not simply referring to sexuality here. Pullman is an enthusiast for all types of physical joy, there to be relished without the shame and guilt that religion has sometimes tried to attach to any sort of sensual enjoyment in life. A good example of this belief occurs at the moment when Mary Malone feels she is somehow being carried away from her own body and desperately attempts to fight back:

  She flung a mental lifeline to that physical self, and tried to recall the feeling of being in it: all the sensations that made up being alive […] The taste of bacon and eggs. The triumphant strain in her muscles as she pulled herself up a rockface. The delicate dancing of her fingers on a computer keyboard. The smell of roasting coffee. The warmth of her bed on a winter night.

  Mary survives this episode; Pullman makes it clear that this is supremely well worth it, given that now she possesses the capacity to find delight in comparatively simple pleasures. But those children cut away from their dæmons before reaching adolescence will never get to experience such strong feelings in any areas of their lives. Mrs Coulter tries to explain the positive side of this whole, cruel practice of intercision to an unconvinced Lyra: ‘All that happens is a little cut, and then everything’s peaceful. For ever! You see, your dæmon’s a wonderful friend and companion when you’re young, but at the age we call puberty […] dæmons bring all sorts of troublesome thoughts and feelings, and that’s what lets Dust in.’

  Losing a dæmon, therefore, is akin to losing an individual’s adult soul. Without it, there can be no contact with that vital Dust that is also synonymous with energy, consciousness and freedom of thought. Like the victims of the Spectres, those without dæmons become ‘indifferent [and] dead in life’. But with their own dæmons and therefore remaining open to attracting Dust as adults, individuals are able to become fully formed human beings, conscious of their own potential and able to make informed decisions about the rest of their lives.

  So who or what is in ultimate control of everything? What force, for example, both powers and informs the alethiometer? Who exactly picked out Lyra for her great task of saving the world, and who originally prophesied that it would be a girl who would be the chosen saviour? Pullman offers no clear answers here, nor does he wish to. He disapproves of systems of thought such as organised religion that attempt to explain and account for everything within the world and the spirit. His own belief system is basically intuitive rather than worked out to the last letter.

  Dæmons

  Lyra’s dæmon is named Pantalaimon, which means ‘all merciful’ in Greek. The word ‘dæmon’ also derives from the Greek, with Socrates at one stage talking about his own daimon, which in his terms was a cross between a conscience and a guardian angel. Always addressed as Pan, Lyra’s dæmon is a visible personal soul or spirit, able to take on any animal form. Everyone in Lyra’s world has his or her own dæmon, whose shape only becomes constant once an individual has grown beyond childhood into late adolescence. Such dæmons act variously as confidants, advisers, spies, look-outs, defenders, occasional scolds, best-loved intimates and, most especially, the voice of conscience.

  They are particularly important in this story where Lyra is concerned. As a child with an absent, neglectful mother and a father who is almost as bad, Lyra has the type of childhood that in normal circumstances would be described as severely deprived. Although the tutors at Jordan College take an absent-minded interest in her, there is no one who clearly loves her and whom she can love in return – except, of course, for her dæmon.

  Pan therefore has a vital role in this story. Like nearly all dæmons, he is of the opposite sex to his human counterpart. As such, he corresponds to the psychologist Carl Jung’s idea that all humans have a craving for another half, also of the opposite sex which, if we could reunite with it, would then mean that we could at last become truly whole individuals. This concept is described in Jungian terms as the lifelong search for the anima, where men are concerned, and the animus in the case of women. But because we can never be joined up to our missing male or female counterparts, Jung believes we must always go through life with the feeling that there is something important missing within us.

  Lyra has no such problems, since her dæmon already gives her all the love and support she needs. This is vital for the plot, since it would otherwise be difficult even to start believing that a ten-year-old girl on her own could be equal to any of the acts of daring and courage that Lyra manages to carry off throughout this story. In real life, a child as deprived as she is could well have major and sometimes disabling psychological problems to deal with long before getting to the fearful adventures she triumphs over in this story.

  But with her own dæmon as constant support and always ready with a friendly word or understanding look, Lyra can take on any of the tasks at hand. Readers, in their turn, are offered an exceptionally pleasing fantasy of the type that has always been popular in children’s fiction, with its long tradition of describing heroes who also possess ideal companions. From the story of Dick Whittington’s cat to modern classics like Clive King’s Stig of the Dump and Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman, the idea of the main character blessed with a close and beloved friend has been a constant theme. Hamlet has always needed his Horatio, Don Quixote could never manage without his patient servant Sancho Panza, and Sherlock Holmes would not have had half as satisfying a time without his great friend Dr Watson.

  But more recently in teenage fiction, there seems to have been less emphasis upon the role of the special friend. There are several reasons why fiction may be following contemporary trends in this respect. Many of today’s teenagers now expect to develop romantically-oriented relationships with the opposite sex far earlier than was once the case, leaving less time for more ordinary, less intense same-sex friendships. The time that proper friendship requires in order to get established is more limited now in other ways, with ever-more-demanding schoolwork during term-time and holiday jobs in the vacations. Allowing their children to spend a lot of time away from home, with or without friends, is also less popular with parents now, anxious that something bad may happen when they are not there.

  Many fictional best friends still exist in teenage books, but even here those that there are can occasionally turn into a worst enemy. This happens in Anne Fine’s memorable novel The Tulip Touch, and there are other stories where friendship causes as many problems as it once seemed to solve. Against this background, the idea of a personal dæmon offers all the
consolations of the closest and most intense friendship, without any of the possible disadvantages. The British psychotherapist Donald Winnicott once wrote that every individual has the need to create what he called a ‘caretaker self’. This is that internal voice that tries to cheer up someone, particularly when he or she is down, acting as a sympathetic and reassuring friend at all times.

  In this sense, dæmons too can surely claim to be caretaker selves of a different order. Always on the side of their human counterpart, they can actually be seen and heard, as well as felt. Will can’t wait to see his dæmon, who has hitherto always been invisible to him. When she finally flies down, ‘he felt his heart tighten and release in a way he never forgot’. And so, to the great love between Will and Lyra that serves as the final climax of the trilogy can also be added the equally profound love they have for their respective dæmons. Both of these loving and intimate relationships – to each other as well as to their dæmons – represent an ideal to which humans have constantly aspired.

  Realistic novels for young readers commonly stress the pain experienced by those children suffering from adverse social or psychological conditions. Readers afterwards may also find themselves more alert to the various signs of mental or physical stress in other children who are going through a particularly difficult time in real life. But fantasy stories, including this trilogy, often have a quite different sort of agenda. They may be more concerned with extending the imaginative world into the realms of the truly extraordinary, making use of main characters able to survive everything thrown at them precisely because they do not have the weaknesses and problems common in real life.

  But there may still be issues of credibility here, even in a fantasy story, when it comes to making such bold adventurers believable at the same time. So giving Lyra the additional backing of her own personalised dæmon is one brilliant way of effectively winning readers over to the idea that she really could always behave in the courageous and independent way that she does. It also enables Pullman to turn what would normally be private thoughts into an ongoing dialogue, given that Lyra and her dæmon constantly talk to and argue with each other throughout their story. This is particularly true in moments of stress when it comes to deciding what to do next.

  Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter

  Lord Asriel is Lyra’s unloving, superior and short-tempered father. Is he on the side of good and Dust or is he simply playing his own selfish game? Like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, he is a mixture of both good and bad. His mighty ambition is to destroy God himself, just as Milton’s Satan wants to wage a war in order to regain a place in heaven after his expulsion for rebelling against God. But after more thought, Satan decides to investigate new worlds instead, just as Lord Asriel does. Like Satan, by building a bridge to another world Lord Asriel risks upsetting the natural order, and in so doing may have been instrumental in introducing the plague of Spectres unleashed on the world. It is for this type of reason that the otherwise kindly Master of Jordan College tries to poison him early on, conscious that if his bold scientific investigations into other worlds were allowed to continue they could eventually bring disaster for all.

  Although Milton describes him as evil and malicious, readers often find something heroic in the depiction of Satan, and the terrible energy that goes into his quest for power and revenge. As William Blake put it: ‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of angels and heaven, and at liberty when he wrote of devils and hell, is that he was a true poet and of the devil’s party without knowing it.’ Lord Asriel too is a more vivid, colourful figure than some of the more anodyne angel characters that crop up in Pullman’s books. When he appears, things happen, however unpleasantly he may behave in the process.

  Lord Asriel finally dies to save his daughter Lyra. He is also determined to protect Dust from its many enemies, and fights bravely in the various pitched battles that result from doing this. So on this basis, both Satan and Lord Asriel could be seen to be on the side of essential human freedom. While Satan battled in vain against what Pullman sees as a jealous and restrictive God, Lord Asriel takes up the fight against the evils of organised religion that in this account plague humankind.

  Milton’s Satan suffered from a sinful pride that constantly led him to make bad decisions. The same too is true of Lord Asriel. Cold and rejecting towards his daughter, he is willing to sacrifice the life of a child in order to further his attempts to travel to another world. He revels in his scientific power not just for what it can achieve but also for its own sake. When he boasts to Mrs Coulter that ‘You and I could take the universe to pieces and put it together again’, there seems little doubt that he is beginning to think that he is something like God himself. As his servant Thorold confides to Serafina Pekkala: ‘his ambition is limitless. He dares to do what men and women don’t even dare to think.’

  Thorold goes on to say that this makes him either ‘mad, wicked, deranged’ or else a man like no other, exceeding even angels in his desire and ultimate capacity to put right an ancient wrong. But his pride, so important in motivating him for his great task, also blinds him to the value of others, in particular his own daughter. Only in the closing pages of the trilogy does he realise that her life is actually more important than his own. By this time he has understood that his determination to live in other worlds has been fundamentally mistaken. As the ghost of Will’s father John Parry observes: ‘we have to build the republic of heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere.’

  This is because a dæmon can only live its full life in the world in which it is born. In the same way, Pullman suggests, we too must always make the best of where we are. But Lord Asriel realises, almost too late, that his loyalties must stay with his own universe and in particular with his daughter. A flawed hero, he always runs the risk of turning into just the type of bullying authority he had made it his life’s work to destroy. Sacrificing his life to save Lyra is not just a noble act; it is also a final admission that he is ultimately expendable, and to that extent a servant of fate rather than, as he once believed, its potential master.

  Mrs Coulter, the mother of his daughter, is an even less attractive character. A faithful servant of the Church, she is party to numbers of its worst acts and joins in enthusiastically herself with the torturing of a young witch. Manipulative, scheming, insincere and ruthless, she is the mother from hell. Flattering Lyra with soft words and shows of affection at one moment, acting like a cruel bully the next, she is never to be trusted. Unlike Lord Asriel, she takes no major role in the great battle between good and evil. Instead she always chooses to play her own game, seeking out every advantage first for herself and then, if it seems convenient, for her employers too.

  Mrs Coulter uses her great beauty to maximum effect, charming not just Metatron but also Will, when he is on his mission to rescue Lyra. Sensing his guilt about having been away from his own vulnerable mother for so long, she works on him to the extent that he ends by breaking his precious knife under the emotional strain. But as everyone who temporarily falls for her soon discovers, feminine allure is a false friend unless also accompanied by love and kindness. Like the wicked Queen in Snow White, Mrs Coulter is additionally frightening simply because she is so seductively beautiful as well.

  Discovering that appearances are often deceptive is a lesson every child has to learn at some stage. Should the person concerned also be their own parent, this lesson can prove a particularly bitter experience. Although most children are more fortunate than Lyra with their mothers, Mrs Coulter’s presence in the story is a powerful reminder that evil can be just as bad even when it is hiding behind not just a pretty, but also a familiar face.

  So what are readers to make of Mrs Coulter’s final discovery that she does love Lyra after all, even to the extent of giving up her own life so that her daughter might live? There is no doubt of her sincerity here, since her author has admitted that it was only when he had got to the end of the trilogy that he discovered for himself that
because of her self-sacrifice, Mrs Coulter must indeed have really loved her daughter by this time. But doubts remain whether she genuinely regrets all the other evil things she has done in her life, even though she is fully aware of how low she has descended over the years. Instead, it seems that her maternal instinct, however deeply suppressed before, has at last come to the surface in a way that won’t be denied. Having been loved by many other people in vain, she at last has the experience of loving someone back in return. So while Lord Asriel stands for intellectual ambition gone mad, Mrs Coulter symbolises the emotional world of strong, distorted feelings, where self-love battles against an underlying need to provide maternal care when it is most needed.

  Both characters also serve as reminders that any final division of characters into good and evil is never easy and often impossible. Just as Milton’s Satan has his darkly attractive side, so too do Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter refuse to behave either entirely admirably or disgracefully. As Pullman has written elsewhere: ‘No-one is purely good or purely evil … I would much rather we thought in terms of good actions, bad actions.’

  In his other novels he has also shown that conventionally bad characters can still sometimes get the better of an argument. But despite these qualifications, it is usually clear where Pullman’s sympathies lie. This is particularly so with his minor characters, where there is less time to spell out any of their possible accompanying moral complexities. As in the Victorian melodrama and children’s adventure comics he so loves, there is no shortage of truly villainous beings in his books, particularly at those moments when it is time for another twist in the plot in order to bring about yet more excitement and suspense.