BOOK REVIEW: His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman)

Last October I went to a very exciting conference at CERN, birthplace of the Web.  It was an OAI conference, and afforded many great bloggable moments (some of which you may wish to review in my October archives, he opined shamelessly).  One of my favorite talks at the conference was  by Wilma Mossink, an intellectual property attorney for the  SURF Foundation in the Netherlands.

Wilma made several welcome book recommendations to me, including the longest novel in the English Language, which I will review as soon as I can take a trip long enough to finish it.  The following review is of a fantasy science fiction trilogy that she recommended. 

Allegorical adventure fantasy has assumed a popular place in our cultural: the Tolkien trilogy, Harry Potter, the Star Wars series, and of course the Wizard of Oz, are prominent examples. Philip Pullman’s trilogy (His Dark Materials) may not reach the levels of acceptance and commercial success of these others, but it is worthy of attention, and full of philosophical and moral questions that comprise a curriculum for emerging sentience.

As a whole, the books deconstruct human nature into competitive or cooperative factions (warlike, but trustworthy armored bears, ghastly ghosts and ghoulish ghasts, Lilliputian spies, witches who breed with men, but outlive them many times over, eventually to succumb to accumulated heartbreak (an interesting model). The three books (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass) comprise a thousand pages of swashbuckling adventure, page-turning peril, courage, betrayal, sacrifice, yearning, and the coming of age played against a background of titanic struggles and epic battles.

There is plenty to engage and, delight, and make you read faster for the suspense of it all (though, never a doubt that justice will out… they don’t call it fantasy for nothing). And quandaries a plenty… is it better to suffer a gray eternity, identity intact, than rejoin the vibrant world of the living, but without one’s personal consciousness? Is there anything to choose between soul-less rationalism and the crushing, duplicitous control of religious bureaucracy? Is there a fate worse than losing one’s soul… or a cause worth risking it for?

The protagonists of this multiple-world epic are a young girl, Lyra, as heroine-of-destiny and a young boy, Will, of stolid courage and uncompromising perseverance. In Lyra’s world, humans wear their souls as metamorphic anima, literally, sometimes, on their sleeves. Their ‘daemons’ change form with mood and circumstance… mouse, sparrow, dog, snake, eagle, ermine… until they eventually ‘settle’ into a totem suitable to their host at the time of puberty.  No fate could be crueler than to lose one’s daemon… and no propriety stronger than its inviolate sanctity. Too bad reality isn’t like that.  But her world is one of many, and the interconnection of those worlds is a dominant motif of the story, woven across centuries of conflict and sovereignty, locales as divergent as Oxford, Muscovy, Alaska, Texas and myriad underworlds. Will comes from a time and place similar to our own (also near Oxford, but in a modern UK), without a daemon, but by no means soul-less.

 Tolkien, a biblical scholar and editor of the Jerusalem Bible, gave us a rich allegory of romance, temptation, and the triumph of good over evil. His detail (including maps and language) imparted a sense of reality, but I am among those who read them more out of duty than delight, (consuming all of a summer in the task). The movies have made them more accessible in their cinematic reductions and embedded them deeper than ever in our popular mythology.  I found Pullman’s work less scholarly but more engaging, but also inclined to wander in overly-complex constructions of time and space.

There is more caricature than character in many of Pullman’s secondary actors, and its is easy enough to get lost in the metaphorical maze of twisty little passages. Still, not for a moment could I have considered abandoning Lyra and Will in their quest. The story works on many levels, and offers infinitely more substance than most of the media pap fed to children and adults alike. They are commendable as allegory, and full of entertainment and delight as adventure stories.