His Dark Materials Omnibus

by Philip Pullman

  Mary, absorbed and happy as she fooled around with the lacquer to make her spyglass; fooling around was something she’d never been able to explain to her colleague Oliver Payne, who needed to know where he was going before he got there. Back in Oxford, she gave three of her precious wheel-tree seeds to a scientist at the Botanic Garden, a nice man who understood the importance of fooling around. The seedlings are growing well, but she refuses to tell him where they came from.

  On the beach, the alethiometer suddenly inert in Lyra’s hands, as if it had abandoned her.

  An infinity of silvery greens and gold-sand-browns, the whispering of grass in the warm wind. Safety, sunlight.

  Mrs. Coulter in the cave, watching Will, speculating; Will watching her, speculating. Their words like chess pieces, placed with great care, each carrying an invisible nimbus of implication and possibility and threat. Both afterwards felt as if they had barely escaped with their life.

  Lyra at eighteen sitting intent and absorbed in Duke Humfrey’s Library with the alethiometer and a pile of leather-bound books. Tucking the hair back behind her ears, pencil in mouth, finger moving down a list of symbols, Pantalaimon holding the stiff old pages open for her … “Look, Pan, there’s a pattern there—see? That’s why they’re in that sequence!” And it felt as if the sun had come out. It was the second thing she said to Will next day in the Botanic Garden.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  His Dark Materials could not have come into existence at all without the help and encouragement of friends, family, books, and strangers.

  I owe these people specific thanks: Liz Cross, for her meticulous and tirelessly cheerful editorial work; Anne Wallace-Hadrill, for letting me see over her narrow boat; Richard Osgood, of the University of Oxford Archaeological Institute, for telling me how archaeological expeditions are arranged; Michael Malleson, of the Trent Studio Forge, Dorset, for showing me how to forge iron; and Mike Froggatt and Tanaqui Weaver, for bringing me more of the right sort of paper (with two holes in it) when my stock was running low. I must also praise the café at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art. Whenever I was stuck with a problem in the narrative, a cup of their coffee and an hour or so’s work in that friendly room would dispel it, apparently without effort on my part. It never failed.

  I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read. My principle in researching for a novel is “Read like a butterfly, write like a bee,” and if this story contains any honey, it is entirely because of the quality of the nectar I found in the work of better writers. But there are three debts that need acknowledgment above all the rest. One is to the essay “On the Marionette Theater,” by Heinrich von Kleist, which I first read in a translation by Idris Parry in The Times Literary Supplement in 1978. The second is to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The third is to the works of William Blake.

  Finally, my greatest debts. To David Fickling, and to his inexhaustible faith and encouragement as well as his sure and vivid sense of how stories can be made to work better, I owe much of what success this work has achieved; to Simon Boughton and Joan Slattery, I owe profound gratitude for their patience and generosity with the one thing I needed most in finishing this book, namely, time; to Caradoc King, I owe more than half a lifetime of unfailing friendship and support; to Enid Jones, the teacher who introduced me so long ago to Paradise Lost, I owe the best that education can give, the notion that responsibility and delight can coexist; to my wife, Jude, and to my sons, Jamie and Tom, I owe everything else under the sun.

  Philip Pullman