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WHAT IS HIS DARK MATERIALS?
The simplest way of answering this question is to state that His Dark Materials is a trilogy of young adult fantasy novels. However, this is much too simple a description of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass (Book 1), The Subtle Knife (Book 2), and The Amber Spyglass (Book 3).
In reality, His Dark Materials is an epic coming-of-age trilogy that includes vast sweeps of science, theology, and magic, while speculating about topics as profound as the meaning of life and the fundamental nature of God, Satan, and hell.
Sound like a young adult fantasy series to you?
Not exactly … .
Yet millions of children and teenagers are big fans of His Dark Materials. And so are their parents. This may be part of the reason Pullman is the first author to win two of England’s prestigious Whitbread Awards for one book, The Amber Spyglass, which won the Children’s Book award and also the top prize, the Book of the Year award.
But nothing is ever simple when talking about Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and as with the simple description of the series, mere popularity among readers isn’t the key to winning the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. Much more is involved in the selection.
Juggling topics such as millions of parallel universes, quantum physics, and the existence of angels and witches, Pullman manages to write complex, nonstop action plots filled with unforgettable characters who are deeply drawn and deeply moving.
According to Pullman, as quoted on his official Web site, he thinks of the trilogy as “stark realism” not as fantasy. In fact, he says that he doesn’t like fantasy. “The only thing about fantasy that interested me when I was writing this was the freedom to invent imagery such as the daemon; but that was only interesting because I could use it to say something truthful and realistic about human nature.”1
Pullman further explains that His Dark Materials depicts “a struggle: the old forces of control and ritual and authority, the forces which have been embodied throughout human history in such phenomena as the Inquisition, the witch-trials, the burning of heretics, and which are still strong today … .”2
In 1985, Oxford University Press published Pullman’s third novel (the first two were fairly unsuccessful), The Ruby in the Smoke. His editor, David Fickling, loved the book and claimed it was “as good as Wilkie Collins.”3
Following the success of The Ruby in the Smoke came 1995’s Northern Lights, later to be called The Golden Compass. This was the first book of a trilogy that Pullman called His Dark Materials. The book focuses on questions about the meaning of life and its purpose, the nature of evil and good, how we should conduct ourselves, what really matters, and what doesn’t matter at all. These powerful themes form the backbone of adventures of galactic proportions.
In 1995, Pullman won a Carnegie Prize for the book, and shortly after, when J. K. Rowling rose to conquer the literary scene, Pullman’s book was published in the United States, as well as in France and Germany. Although Northern Lights, aka The Golden Compass, was published by the Oxford University Press as a children’s book, it was published in the United States as an adult book. Pullman followed the success of The Golden Compass4 with the final two books in the trilogy, The Subtle Knife in 1997 and The Amber Spyglass in 2000.
So enough prelude: What are these books about?
The Golden Compass takes place in a world that is much like our Earth, but there are differences. For example, it begins in Oxford, England, but the most powerful college is Jordan College rather than Oxford University. Jordan College is the leading research institution in the field of experimental theology which, loosely defined, means: quantum physics. But oddly enough, much of the science of The Golden Compass is from the late 1800s rather than from the late 1900s or early twentyfirst century.
So right away, we know that we’re in a different kind of Earth from the one we live in. The big clues, however, come in the form of daemons, soul creatures that people must keep with them at all times. These daemons are shapeshifters, meaning they can assume the forms of many different animals; yet while the daemons change form during a person’s childhood, the creatures assume a fixed appearance as soon as the child reaches puberty. If a human dies, so does his daemon. If a daemon dies, the human might as well be dead, for he no longer has any soul or passion.
In addition to the daemons, The Golden Compass introduces the notion of witches, talking bears, and other life-forms.
From the opening pages, we know that this Earth is a stifling, scary place, dominated by a Church that subjects people to Inquisition-like terror. In fact, the Church in The Golden Compass feels like ultra-conservative Christianity pushed to the extreme.
As the book opens, main character Lyra Belacqua hides with her daemon, Pantalaimon, behind an armchair in the Retiring Room at Jordan College. Pantalaimon is in the form of a moth. The Master of Jordan College, with his raven daemon in tow, enters the Retiring Room and pours white powder into a decanter of special 1898 Tokay. Lord Asriel, expected soon from a long trip to the far North, will drink that Tokay and die. Lyra and Pan, as she calls her daemon, argue about what to do.
Lord Asriel arrives with his daemon, the snow leopard Stelmaria, who tells him to rest from his long journey. Lord Asriel tells the Scholars that he went to the far North to learn what happened to the missing Grumman expedition. He displays a series of photograms that he took in the far North, and these images show men with glowing particles on them called Dust. The images also show children who seem to be only partly there. In other images, everything is bathed in the Northern Lights, or the Aurora. Indeed, it appears that embedded in the Aurora is a city in a parallel universe. A lot has happened in this exciting novel, and we’re only on page 23 of the book.
To summarize more quickly, we soon learn that Lord Asriel is performing weird research into the Dust and the parallel universe. He plans to return North, and Lyra begs him to let her go, but he refuses.
Lyra stays behind, and as she romps around the city with her friend Roger, she discovers that mysterious Gobblers are eating children, or so goes the gossip. The missing children never return, and soon Lyra discovers that a seductive woman is abducting them by unknown means. The woman’s name is Mrs. Coulter, and she tries to befriend Lyra with offers of teenage luxuries.
Lyra is destined to change the world, we learn, but she must fulfill her destiny by making her own choices. She sets off on adventures with help from the gyptians (gypsies, we assume), whose children have been eaten by the Gobblers. Lyra and the gyptians head to the far North to search for the Gobblers and the lost children. They’ve heard stories that the children’s disappearances have something to do with the Dust.
Of much help to Lyra is the strange alethiometer device, a golden compass. Only Lyra can read and interpret the symbols on the device, and she uses it to ask questions and receive instructions and explanations. The alethiometer even tells Lyra things about the future.
Lyra is kidnapped several times, she finds a few of the missing children, and she makes a good friend in the form of a talking bear named Iorek Byrnison. Iorek is an overthrown, sad, wouldbe bear king, whose title was taken from him by a humanwannabe bear called Iofur Raknison. Because bears don’t have daemons, the wannabe Iofur carries a daemon doll—clearly, he’s not fit to rule the ferocious and mighty bear kingdom.
At the end of The Golden Compass, Lord Asriel—who, as it happens, is Lyra’s father—wants to find the source of the Dust in a parallel world. He tells Lyra that there are billions of parallel worlds, that the witches have known about the parallel worlds forever, that we can see these worlds through the Northern Lights, and that the Church excommunicates anyone who believes in the parallel worlds and in the Dust. He wants to destroy the notion of death.
Lyra sees Lord Asriel with Mrs. Coulter—who, as it happens, is Lyra’s mother—on a bridge leading to the parallel world. Lord Asriel has done something cataclysmic to open that bridge, and now he intends to cross. He tells Mrs. Coulter that everyone will want to cross the bridge, that the end of the Church is near, that he will destroy all the Dust. It so happens that Mrs. Coulter, the Church, and the General Oblation Board (GOB in Gobblers) all want to destroy the Dust, too. Which makes Lyra think … .
Perhaps the Dust is good rather than evil. After all, if the adults in the world think Dust is evil, then it must be good stuff. So Lyra and Pan walk across the bridge into the other world.
And by doing so, they walk into the second book in the trilogy, The Subtle Knife.
This book begins with the story of twelve-year-old Will Parry, the son of an Arctic explorer who disappeared long ago. Will is the sole caretaker of an emotionally damaged mother. Will shops, cleans, cooks, and tries to help his mother cope with her imaginary enemies who, she claims, break into the house and demand things from her. Finally, when men really do break into the house, seeking his father’s explora...
