Critical reaction to His Dark Materials over the years has proved largely positive. Some critics writing from a Christian perspective continue to take issue with what they see as Pullman’s attack upon the worst aspects of the history of their religion without taking into account any of its positive attributes. They have also pointed out that atheistic political regimes today can be quite as cruel as any of their Christian counterparts in the past. Feminist critics, on the other hand, have sometimes objected to the way that Will starts to dominate Lyra, particularly in The Amber Spyglass, when it comes to generally taking the lead. Others have complained about what they see as traces of social snobbery in the narrative, with Lyra, very much a child of destiny, the daughter of exceptional and glamorous parents. Humbler persons, by contrast, are often given away by the nature of their dæmons, with servants’ dæmons almost invariably pictured as dogs, or other domesticated animals. There have also been objections to the way that dæmons remain fixed and immutable once adulthood has been reached. Does this suggest that adults are incapable of further growth and change for the rest of their lives?
But on the whole Pullman’s achievements, celebrated when the trilogy first came out, have continued to attract far more praise than blame. In an article for The New Yorker, Laura Miller has written that: ‘His Dark Materials may be the first fantasy series founded upon the ideals of the Enlightenment rather than upon tribal and mythic yearnings for kings, gods and supermen.’ It seemed highly appropriate, therefore that in 2008 Pullman received an International Humanist Award from the World Humanist Congress. But for Hugh Rayment-Picard, in His Dark Materials, so often rooted in the texts about which it is so critical, Pullman ‘tries to out-narrate Christianity […] with a myth that is simply more appealing more powerful, and more convincing than the Christian narrative.’ As Pullman himself has always insisted, tell a good story and people will always find their own meanings in it. And there has never been any question that His Dark Materials amounts to three very good stories indeed.
Conclusion
At the moment when Will and Lyra shyly handle each o ther’s dæmons for the first time, they cease to be children. From this time forward, their dæmons will take on a permanent shape, and Will and Lyra will move towards that adult state which, throughout the trilogy, is always shown as naturally attracting more Dust than was the case with childhood. Dust, mislabelled by Christianity and the Church as original sin, clearly stands in this context for a state of heightened self-consciousness, linked in this case to a first experience of sexual delight. How far Lyra and Will actually go down this road is deliberately left unclear, with Pullman himself admitting that: ‘They have their moment of bliss – whatever it is (and I don’t know what it is).’ But given their tender ages, any first expression of physical love – even a passionate embrace – has the capacity to come over as an event of such mind-blowing proportions that ordinary life may indeed never seem the same afterwards.
The end of childish innocence that accompanies first sexual consciousness is also associated with the beginning of adult wisdom. So although Lyra can no longer read her alethiometer, having lost the particular state of innocent grace that once enabled her to do so, she can still recover this skill through hard work. As the angel Xaphania puts it to her: ‘Your reading will be even better then, after a lifetime of thought and effort, because it will come from conscious understanding. Grace attained like that is deeper and fuller than grace that comes freely, and furthermore, once you’ve gained it, it will never leave you.’
This, then, is the journey that the first Eve also had to take after she ate the apple that symbolised sexual and intellectual awareness. Lyra has to make it too, but now she is unpunished by those ecclesiastical forces that vilified the first Eve and have done their level best to eliminate the second one. She can therefore come into her adulthood without shame, showing her fellow humans an altogether better way to live and in so doing destroying the negative powers of the Church for ever. This she achieves when her own new-found state of happiness and fulfilment goes on to fill the rest of the world with the same vivid sense of loving awareness, while she and Will ‘lay together as the earth turned slowly and the moon and stars blazed above them’.
By leading the suffering ghosts from the underworld of the dead, Lyra also puts right one last great wrong that occurred when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden. Previously immortal, they were then told of the certainty one day of their own death. But liberating the ghosts, by allowing them back into a world where they can now happily disappear, replaces the Christian notion of death with the idea of a natural re-absorption into the atmosphere. Any idea of eternal punishment in hell or reward in heaven is therefore dropped in favour once again of another type of immortality. For although all ghosts disappear once they leave the underworld, they will still always be present in an invisible world where they are now at peace with everything else. Lord Asriel’s original prophecy in Northern Lights, that death itself was going to die, therefore finally comes about, although he had not known at the time that it was his daughter who was going to deliver this essential freedom rather than himself.
By making Will and Lyra – like Romeo and Juliet – separate just as they have finally found each other, Pullman also ensures that this first vision of young love remains forever unsullied by any of the practical difficulties or inevitable disagreements that creep into even the most ideal of human relationships. It would, in fact, have been difficult to imagine these two characters from different worlds living happily together in either one or the other place for the rest of their lives. Both have a lot of growing up to do, with neither of their worlds looking particularly kindly upon a passionate love affair between two people so young. But as the last and most powerful symbol in the trilogy, love at its first and most intense still serves Pullman’s overall message well. It makes an unforgettable case for the way that humans can, and should, always seek to discover and realise the state of heaven that lies within and between themselves rather than forever looking for it elsewhere.
Even so, some have found this final separation something of an anti-climax. Will and Lyra resolving to spend the rest of their lives properly and constructively in their separate worlds is admirable in itself, but hardly measures up against the enormity of their loss. When the angel Xaphania tells them how to set about living a good life, she sounds more like an old-fashioned schoolmistress than a divine presence. As she puts it, Lyra and Will can preserve the precious Dust now flowing back into the world by helping others ‘to learn and understand about themselves and each other and the way everything works, and by showing them how to be kind instead of cruel, and patient instead of hasty, and cheerful instead of surly, and above all how to keep their minds open and free and curious’.
It is also implicit in Pullman’s writing that Will and Lyra have it within them to overcome their loss by determining to give their all to the life they have remaining to them. Only then will they be able to play their part in building the Republic of Heaven which, to a certain extent, must always rely upon those concerned giving up some of what they most want in order to benefit everyone else. Had either Will or Lyra insisted on the other going with them to their world, this act of putting their own needs first would have made it impossible for them then to live the sort of life they were hoping for. It would also have deprived readers of an ending that remains extremely moving because it is also so sad.
So the whole idea of going off with each other, rather than staying in their old worlds, represents a final temptation for Will and Lyra to put their own good above everything else. The first Eve fell for the temptation of acquiring true knowledge and understanding, and again Pullman thinks she was right to do so. Lyra, the second Eve, resists the temptation of selfishness, and this time Pullman is on her side. For a true Republic of Heaven needs people who ‘have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and brave and patient, and we’ve got to study and think, and work hard, all of us, in all our
different worlds’. Backing up this fairly demanding summons, Pullman quotes the great nineteenth-century writer George Eliot’s comment after talking about God, Immortality and Duty: ‘How inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.’
16. The botanic gardens, Oxford. At the end of The Amber Spyglass, Will and Lyra agree to go to the same bench in these gardens in their separate worlds – at midday on Midsummer’s Day every year for as long as they live.
Pullman adds himself: ‘I like this earnestness. I admire it a great deal.’ Yet he feels something to be lacking here, which for him is the accompanying sense of joy that he also believes is a natural, as well as necessary, part of living. Even so, it is perhaps ironic that a trilogy written against Christianity should end on this note of self-denial. The angel’s message urging Lyra and Will towards making an even greater effort in their future lives would not have been out of place in those many improving children’s books from the past that regularly used to carry a Christian message as well.
Pullman is a strongly idealistic writer, naturally drawn to other thinkers and authors who have also striven to find morals and meanings in the universe. At a time when Christianity was the universal belief, it is inevitable that these voices were mostly Christian at base, whatever their occasional surface disagreements with organised religion. But in a modern Western world where the orthodox Christian story looks to many increasingly remote and unbelievable, Pullman provides readers with a different type of spiritual journey.
His Dark Materials is written in a religious framework in the sense that it also searches for an ultimate meaning to the age-old problem facing all readers of why exactly they are here and what they should then be doing about it. Yet while Christianity sought answers to this question in the theology Pullman so dislikes, he meets this challenge through the imagination. For it is in stories, and the way they can renew faith both in ourselves and in others, that he has always chosen to operate, and never more effectively than in this particular trilogy. Its large sales suggest that in an increasingly Godless age the appetite still remains for literature that powerfully engages readers with its own type of spiritual quest.
Uniquely for a book written for children, The Amber Spyglass won the Whitbread Award in 2001 for the best book of the year. It was also long-listed for the Booker Prize – another award normally going to novels written with only an adult audience in mind. Having once produced school plays that entertained both parents and pupils, Pullman has now achieved the same aim with these books. This success was particularly gratifying for him, given that he has always believed that the best children’s literature has universal appeal. As he said in his acceptance speech when winning the Carnegie Medal in 1995 for Northern Lights: ‘Only in children’s literature is the story taken seriously.’
In the same vein, he has stated elsewhere that: ‘Children’s books still deal with the huge themes which have always been part of literature – love, loyalty, the place of religion and science in life, what it really means to be human. Contemporary adult fiction is too small and sterile for what I’m trying to do.’ The great success of his trilogy suggests that the desire among all ages for novels which take up these big themes is as strong as ever.
There is also a universal need for convincing fantasy where the good finally prosper and the bad come to a sorry end. In real life it is often hard to tell which the good side is and even harder to assess whether it truly does come off better at the finish. A story that raises such questions and then comprehensively answers them clearly has a lot going for it. But no book ever survives on the merits of its ideas alone. His Dark Materials is also written in language that is clear, direct and easy on the ear. There is no tired English in this saga. The windy rhetoric found in some other fantasy sagas is avoided in favour of short sentences that say exactly what they mean, even when there is something complex to get across.
Pullman has himself spoken about how best to write in a lecture delivered in New York in April 2002:
The aim must always be clarity. It’s tempting to feel that if a passage of writing is obscure, it must be very deep. But if the water is murky, the bottom might be only an inch below the surface – you just can’t tell. It’s much better to write in such a way that the readers can see all the way down; but that’s not the end of it, because you then have to provide interesting things down there for them to look at. Telling a story involves thinking of some interesting events, putting them in the best order to bring out the connections between them, and telling about them as clearly as we can.
To read these books aloud, as Pullman has done as the narrator in an audio version, is to experience at first hand how easily they flow and how well each character is caught. If the many younger readers who have enjoyed these books also pick up some of Pullman’s limpid prose style at the same time, they will be learning from someone who is a master not just of the imagination but also of written English. Equally at home with both everyday dialogue and with those moments when his imagination soars to meet the challenge of describing scenes of great, sometimes unearthly, beauty, he has never written better or to greater effect. His trilogy, with its extraordinary power and unforgettable impact, represents the culmination of a long apprenticeship in writing, starting off the day after he left university and finally climaxing in one of the most ambitious and far-reaching works of imagination ever to appear in either children’s or adult fiction.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books by Philip Pullman
Galatea, London: Gollancz, 1978; New York: Dutton, 1979
Count Karlstein, or the Ride of the Demon Huntsman, London: Chatto and Windus, 1982
Count Karlstein, or the Ride of the Demon Huntsman, graphic-novel version illustrated by Patrice Aggs, London: Doubleday, 1991
Count Karlstein, or the Ride of the Demon Huntsman, with a new introduction, London: Doubleday, 2002
The Ruby in the Smoke, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985
How To Be Cool, London: Heinemann, 1987
The Shadow in the North, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987
Spring-Heeled Jack; a Story of Bravery and Evil, London: Transworld, 1989
The Broken Bridge, London: Macmillan, 1990
The Tiger in the Well, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992
The White Mercedes (The Butterfly Tattoo), London: Macmillan, 1992
The Tin Princess, London: Penguin, 1994
Thunderbolt’s Waxwork, London: Viking, 1994
The Firework-Maker’s Daughter, London: Doubleday, 1995
The Gas-Fitters’ Ball, London: Penguin, 1995
Northern Lights (His Dark Materials: Book One), London: Scholastic, 1995. Published with the title The Golden Compass in the USA, New York: Knopf, 1996
Clockwork, or All Wound Up, London: Doubleday, 1996
The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials: Book Two), London: Scholastic, 1997
Mossycoat, London: Scholastic, 1998
I Was a Rat, or The Scarlet Slippers, London: Doubleday, 1999
The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials: Book Three), London: Scholastic, 2000
Puss in Boots, London: Doubleday, 2000
The Scarecrow and His Servant, London: Doubleday, 2004
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Edinburgh: Canongate, 2010
Grimm Tales for Young and Old, London: Penguin, 2012
Plays by Philip Pullman
Frankenstein, adaptation of the novel by Mary Shelley, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990
Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Limehouse Horror, London: Nelson, 1992
Secondary Sources
Butler, Catherine and Halsdorf, Tommy (eds), Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials London: Macmillan, 2014
Colbert, David, The Magical Worlds of Philip Pullman, London: Penguin, 2006
Gribbin, John and Mary, The Science of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, London: Hodder, 2003
Lenz, Millicent and Scott, Carole (
eds), His Dark Materials Illuminated, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005
Pullman, P., One Way Home, part of a series of conversations with authors and psychoanalysts, London: Institute of Psychoanalysis, 2003
Rayment-Picard, Hugh, The Devil’s Account: Philip Pullman and Christianity, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2004
Simpson, Paul, The Rough Guide to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, London: Rough Guides, 2007
Squires, Claire, Philip Pullman – Master Storyteller: A Guide to the World of His Dark Materials, London: Continuum, 2007
Appendix
On the Marionette Theatre
by Heinrich von Kleist
Translated by Idris Parry
One evening in the winter of 1801 I met an old friend in a public park. He had recently been appointed principal dancer at the local theatre and was enjoying immense popularity with the audiences. I told him I had been surprised to see him more than once at the marionette theatre which had been put up in the market-place to entertain the public with dramatic burlesques interspersed with song and dance. He assured me that the mute gestures of these puppets gave him much satisfaction and told me bluntly that any dancer who wished to perfect his art could learn a lot from them.
From the way he said this I could see it wasn’t something which had just come into his mind, so I sat down to question him more closely about his reasons for this remarkable assertion.
He asked me if I hadn’t in fact found some of the dance movements of the puppets (and particularly of the smaller ones) very graceful. This I couldn’t deny. A group of four peasants dancing the rondo in quick time couldn’t have been painted more delicately by Teniers.
I inquired about the mechanism of these figures. I wanted to know how it is possible, without having a maze of strings attached to one’s fingers, to move the separate limbs and extremities in the rhythm of the dance. His answer was that I must not imagine each limb as being individually positioned and moved by the operator in the various phases of the dance. Each movement, he told me, has its centre of gravity; it is enough to control this within the puppet. The limbs, which are only pendulums, then follow mechanically of their own accord, without further help. He added that this movement is very simple. When the centre of gravity is moved in a straight line, the limbs describe curves. Often shaken in a purely haphazard way, the puppet falls into a kind of rhythmic movement which resembles dance.
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