The natural reaction to this opening gambit (or, at least, one of them) is, "This is children's literature?" And that's a fair question that becomes even fairer as the novel progresses and eventually involves not only dense mythology and a complicated web of characters but also castration, decently frank sexuality, and, my favorite, a vivid description of a bear's jaw being torn off and the "red tongue loll[ing] down, dripping over his open throat." And for the crowd who was already traumatized by the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, there's even a scary, evil monkey thrown into the mix. Toto, we're not in Narnia anymore.
Now, to be fair, what we mean by "children's literature" when we refer to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and what we mean by "children's literature" when we refer to The Golden Compass are two very different things, exacerbated, even, by the forty-five years that separate the two works' publication dates. Lewis clearly had young children in mind when writing Narnia, whereas Pullman is working with an intended audience who is, at youngest, pre-teen and therefore fits much more comfortably into YA literature, a genre nuance that didn't exist in Lewis's day. But, given the marketing and general library and bookstore classifications of both series, it's clear that both are working within the same broad literary milieu, and within that scene, Pullman is clearly trying to set himself apart in terms of what children should read [2]. This is, after all, a series in which the good guys are part of a concerted effort to overthrow the Judeo-Christian god. Pullman's not fooling around.
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| I didn't have a good place to mention it in the post, but the trilogy is actually sort of a retelling of Milton's Paradise Lost. |
The funny thing is that while all these specifics set up The Golden Compass pretty easily as an anti-Narnia, this generally cavalier sentiment toward genre conventions shares quite a bit with Lewis's conception of Narnia. Diligent readers of the blog may remember that in my entry on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe from the Narnia project, I mentioned that at the time Lewis was writing the first Narnia book, fantasy literature was highly unfashionable, especially for children, for whom the day's literary gatekeepers considered fantasy to be frivolous and even harmful [3]. Of course by 1995, fantasy was nowhere near as on-the-outs, especially for younger readers, for whom Narnia and a whole slew of subsequent fantasy novels that include the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, Lloyd Alexander, and Ursula K. Le Guin had practically formed the entire modern canon of children's lit. But even so, Pullman's specific approach to fantasy—resolutely grounded in a violent, uncompromising world with gigantic philosophical and theological underpinnings—lands him on the vanguard of boundary-pushing children's lit luminaries alongside other banned-book-list homies like Robert Cormier, Judy Blume, and, of course, that old Oxford scholar himself, C. S. Lewis. With these authors, and especially Lewis, Pullman shares a firm belief that children, under no circumstances, should be talked down to, particularly on life's most important truths. For Lewis, this means an unguarded discussion of the importance of imagination and myth and devotion in imbuing life with meaning. For Pullman... well, this is going to take some explaining.
Because I haven't even really talked about The Golden Compass at all yet, and hey, isn't that what this post is supposed to be about in the first place?
Put shortly—and I'll have to be short, because The Golden Compass is rich in plot and incident—the book is about a girl, the aforementioned Lyra, living in a world much like our own was 100-125 years ago, with a couple key differences: the most obvious being that every human being on the planet has what is called a dæmon, an animal companion that is basically the embodiment of that person's soul. Lyra's dæmon is named Pantalaimon, or Pan for short (thank goodness for nicknames). A second important difference from our world is that in Lyra's, the Protestant Reformation seems never to have happened, and so the Catholic Church, called the Magisterium [4], remains the sort of pan-European political and intellectual ruling body that it was in the Middle Ages and along with this, its tendency to suppress subversive information or scientific discoveries considered heretical. They also control the major universities, including Jordan College at Oxford, where Lyra grows up parentless, raised in a piecemeal fashion by the university scholars, many of whom practice "experimental theology" (basically, science but often more specifically particle physics).
Depending on your view of the Catholic Church, I suppose, the world of the novel that I just described may have come across as a dystopia, but that's not how Pullman presents it, especially not in the book's opening chapters, which are as filled with wonder as any of Lewis's fairy-tale gawking. This is, in fact, yet another way in which Pullman and Lewis seem in-step. In praising the series, many go right to the plotting and theme, which I will get to eventually (I promise); however, it's not recognized nearly enough just how rich Pullman's writing is nor how much of a joy it is to be immersed in the world he creates in this novel. In an interview in which he talks about the values he thinks are important, he first lists that "life is immensely valuable and this world is an extraordinarily beautiful place," and in The Golden Compass, that's no more apparent than in the Jordan College chapters, where Lyra spends her time exploring all the strange and wonderful corners of the world presented before her with a curiosity and no-nonsense bravery that, given Jill Pole and Aravis and the older iterations of Lucy, it seems like C. S. Lewis would have found admirable in a protagonist as well. And even beyond the novel's opening, that sense of wonder never truly goes away; large portions of the book, while driven by a meticulousness in world-building that feels very Tolkien, contain a love of just sitting back and watching cool fantasy creations that feels very much in-step with what Lewis is doing with a lot of Narnia.
So then what's up with all this talk of His Dark Materials being the anti-Narnia?
Well, the novel doesn't stop there. And that's crucial. Remember that attempted murder? Buckle up, because it gets a little hectic.
Lord Asriel, whom Lyra knows as her uncle (but will eventually find out is her father, who left her for adventure), is one of these "experimental theologians," and what he's researching is Dust, a new elementary particle that the Church—and thus mainstream scholarship—views with intense suspicion, given that (as we find out at the end of the book [5]) it seems Dust is the physical evidence of Original Sin. His work gets him labeled as a heretic, hence the attempted murder (which he survives thanks to Lyra's warning), and eventually, he travels to the far reaches of the North to continue his research. Not too long afterward in novel time, one of Lyra's dear friends, Roger, disappears, the latest in a long string of missing children whom have been taken by the General Oblation Board ("Gobblers," for short), an organization formed by the Magisterium to further research the effects of Dust on children. So under the care of Ms. Coulter (a woman Lyra finds out later to be her mother and whose demon also happens to be the scary monkey I warned all y'all about), Lyra heads north to find both Lord Asriel and Roger. I specify these plot points not just because they're the major narrative of the novel but also because they are key to understanding what Pullman is doing with his novel. Because no sooner have we experienced the wonder of the world's fantasy are we told that it is fundamentally corrupt. This is a world in which information is not just suppressed but its bearers are murdered; this is a world in which the primary governing body of the land kidnaps children and subjects them to involuntary experiments; this is a world in which parents abandon their children and only reveal their true identity under duress. This world is not cozy, and its awe mixes quickly with horror.
In a sense, this is similar to the Narnia that Lucy and Edmund first find in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which is, you'll remember, ruled by a wicked queen who has fundamentally corrupted this world that Lucy initially finds so wondrous; this queen also manipulates children. The same is also true in Prince Caspian and, to some extent, The Last Battle, all of which present corrupted iterations of Narnia. However, The Golden Compass handles this device to entirely different effect. In the Narnia stories, the protagonists are informed promptly of the evil in charge of the land and of the pure Narnia to be revealed once that evil is deposed: after a brief attempt at kidnapping, Tumnus spills the beans about a land where it is "always winter and never Christmas" [6]; shortly after meeting the returning Pevensies, Trumpkin tells the former Narnian royalty all about the treasonous Telmarines; and in The Last Battle, the narrator himself shows us Shift's corruption of Aslan as we see his whole plan unfold before our eyes. In short, the characters always know something is wrong with the world. In Lyra's case, though, knowing the full extent of everything that is wrong with the world is the destination, not the starting point. That changes everything.
The Golden Compass begins with the first hint of the world's darkness, the attempted murder of Asriel, which suggests that the institution she has relied most on growing up—the scholars at the college and, by extension, the Church itself—is not nearly so benevolent as she had been led to believe. And that's only the start of it. The rest of the book is, among other things, a sequence of attempts by Lyra to recontextualize her world within the new and damning information she finds about her former safe places, only to have to readjust again as new information knocks that new context askew. After leaving the college, Lyra aligns herself with her mother, Ms. Coulter, who at first seems to offer Lyra a new life outside the authority of the college until Lyra learns that she is one of the chief authorities at the Oblation Board. Again, a trusted figure having turned out nefarious, Lyra runs, this time assuming that it is her father, Asriel, with whom she must align herself. But even this turns to ash when at the book's end, Lyra finally finds her father, whom she has assumed to be the virtuous opposition to the Church's horrors, and, in one of the most horrifying passages of all time in children's literature [7], watches him murder Roger in one of his experiments. For a final time, Lyra learns that something she trusted to be good in this world is, in fact, a lie.
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| Imagine Lyra like this, only without a beard. |
That's what Lyra does the entire book: learn. On a traditional dramatic metric, she's actually rather unengaging as a protagonist; her stiff-upper-lipness that makes her such an easy vessel for an adventure narrative also imbues her with a blankness that makes her seem distant and confoundingly accepting of new environments, often with a cheerful shrug that betrays an empty emotional landscape [8]. But despite the emotionally distressing situations she's put through, it's not emotional dramatics that form her most dramatic journey throughout the book; no, this is a book about the process of learning about the world, about acquiring information piece by piece until the binders every child grows up with are pushed away and the universe can be viewed in wider and wider panorama. Early in the book, Lyra is given (by a college scholar, no less) an alethiometer [9], a fantastic device of which the scholar simply says, "It tells you the truth." What this turns out to be is something of a fortune-telling tool, wherein Lyra eventually learns to ask it questions and then received cryptic answers. It is, in short, a tool for harvesting information, for learning. And this is the great narrative of the novel: of one girl's quest to find the truth: the truth of her parents' identities as ambassadors of the Church (her mother) and uninhibited Science (her father), the truth that the Church (and by extension her mother) is a cruel mechanism that tortures children in the name of virtue, the truth that Science (and by extension her father) exploits human life as a mere means to a higher end, the truth that those in charge of the world are capricious, selfish, and cruel. It is the truth of the cavernous gap between "should" and "is"—"Fathers are supposed to love their daughters, en't they? You don't love me," Lyra tells Asriel near the novel's end, and his heartbreaking reply is of the same brutal pragmatism that leads him to kill Roger: "If you're going to be sentimental, I shan't waste time talking to you." There are the ideals we tell children, and then there are the realities by which powerful adults act.
The Golden Compass is the story of a girl whose light, awe-struck worldview is slowly and brutally pounded out of her by cruelty and betrayal that undermines her beliefs again and again, until at last she must come to grips with the fact that every single institution she has known in her pre-adventure life is fundamentally rotten. This is the true anti-Narnian sensibility of this first book in His Dark Materials. C. S. Lewis, for all his swipes at tyrants and progressive educators and religious frauds, is ultimately affirming of the institutions controlling the world provided they are the right institutions, insisting that those right ones always exist, even if temporarily buried beneath evil. And so his protagonists' jobs are almost to find that existing righteousness that undergirds the mechanisms of the universe.
The Chronicles of Narnia is a collection of stories about the basking in the imaginative beauty of the various ways in which that righteousness manifests itself and overcomes darkness. These are stories that affirm the basic wisdom in the awestruck perspective of a child toward the world. They are, basically, myths—and I don't mean that in the sense that they are false or lies but in the way that Lewis would have meant it: stories that are about an ineffable beauty and deep, ancient order that supports reality. But The Golden Compass, despite its pileup of religious and mythological allusions, is not myth. By grounding its story in Lyra's gradual accumulation of knowledge as she navigates the adult world, the book becomes a coming-of-age tale, wherein its protagonist must grow out of childhood's naivety in order to come to grips with a previously unknown adult world. There are happy or even wistful coming-of-age narratives, but The Golden Compass is not one of them. It is deeply cynical about the world and the people who run it, and ultimately, that is what Pullman's narrative here is about.
As distressing as that is, I'm not here to tell you that Pullman is wrong. Neither is Lewis, I don't think—at least in how he characterizes the fundamental fabric of the universe, Lewis is right; there is a mystic spirituality present in the world's beauty that I can only attribute to a divine mover. But when it comes to actually describing the day-to-day experiences of humanity in total, Pullman is spot-on about the institutions built atop that metaphysical framework. I defy anyone to name me a large national or religious governing body that has not been responsible for unquantifiable reservoirs of human suffering, one that does not exploit human life for its own gain. We don't even need to get into secular government here [10], since that doesn't seem to be of much concern to Pullman's narrative. We can just look at religious organizations, the big villain in this installment, and not even have to go that far. We don't even have to look back to the pre-Reformation Catholic Church that The Golden Compass evokes. Right there on eye level is the decades-long—perhaps centuries-long—Catholic conspiracy to protect priests who raped children. That's not a Pullman-invented villain; that's real life. And lest we Protestants get feeling too high-and-mighty about that, let's remember that the Southern Baptist Convention—the closest America has to a religious government—exists only because a large enough body of Christians believed that the enslavement of an entire race was a God-given mandate, to mention nothing of how the trauma of decades of LGBT youths at gay conversion camps rests on our hands like Lady Macbeth's spot.
And while we're at it, let's talk about the specific experiment that the Oblation Board performed on the children in the book. What the Magisterium has found is that Dust (Original Sin, remember) only begins to accumulate on humans once they hit puberty, and in this world, puberty happens when a child's dæmon, which is able to change shapes throughout childhood, settles on a permanent form. So what the Oblation Board does, in order to prevent the accumulation of Dust, is use a special scalpel to cut the link between child and dæmon, an operation that, when it doesn't kill children outright, leaves them sick and essentially lobotomized, but without Dust (hurray?). So afraid is the Church of sin that it mutilates children in the hopes of eradicating it [11]. They have basically castrated children en masse, and before you think that's an extreme extrapolation for me to make, it's an extrapolation that the book itself makes, because apparently like the real-life Catholic Church way back when, the Magisterium in this world has also castrated children to serve as eunuchs in the choir. And again, Protestants, we're not off-the-hook either: genital mutilation as a way of preventing "sin" has happened on our side of the Reformation, too, even as recently as the 20th century.
Philip Pullman, an ardent atheist, has said in interviews that he believes that Christianity is irredeemable, and while I don't share that view (I am with C. S. Lewis in believing in redemption as part of that fundamental fabric of the universe), it's impossible for me to shake off the critique of large religious institutions presented in the book [12]. The horrifying coming-of-age that Lyra experiences is not based in some fantasy hypothetical; it's something that real children in real life must come to grips with.
So, bringing this back to the question I posed forever ago: this is children's literature? And I say why not. Every child must, one day, come of age, and the realization that the adult world is more complicated and painful than previously assumed is as universal a coming-of-age experience as acne. Maybe not four- and five-year-olds, for whom I doubt this book would make sense anyway, but people Lyra's age? Older? Why not? Because it's bad to learn about these things? Innocence is not something you choose to keep except with great privilege, and after a certain point in one's life, even that becomes a liability. There is room in the world for both the myth-makers and the comings-of-age, the Lewises and the Pullmans. Both are vitally important.
I worry that I've made The Golden Compass out to be some sort of horrid, unpleasant read, but if you have not read it and somehow made it to the end of this blog post, I both commend you and beg you to give the book a read. It's exciting, elegant, and riveting, and Pullman is one of the best prose stylists that children's lit has ever seen. And that sense of wonder and awe I talked about up the post never really goes away, even when the novel is at its darkest. As antithetical as it may seem to the overall bleak sentiments of the themes, Pullman's belief that the "world is an extraordinarily beautiful place" comes through loud and clear, both in his lyrical writing and in the way the characters constantly find joy despite the horrors. I've framed the story's themes very negatively here to prove a point, but a more positive way to say it is that it's a story about how love and beauty are found not in the traditional institutions of social order but in unexpected corners, at the fringes of society among the outcasts and the poor, in the small, unobtrusive moments between the furtive lunges for power that motivate society. In a very un-Lewis-like way, it is still a story about beauty, and how it becomes even so much more achingly beautiful within a world that does not regard it as worthwhile.
But more on that next time, in The Subtle Knife. See you then!
EDIT: Read the next entry, on The Subtle Knife, here.
1] Well, technically her father—see plot synopsis.
2] It's also worth noting that the broadening of the scope of children's lit has been a bit of a passion of Pullman's in his personal life as well, as demonstrated by his 2008 campaign against labeling children's books with suggested ages and by his 2014 campaign to remove labels suggesting specific genders for books. He's said, "I'm against anything, from age-ranging to pinking and blueing, whose effect is to shut the door in the face of children who might enjoy coming in."
3] Interestingly, Philip Pullman insists on calling His Dark Materials "stark realism," which, for a series that includes prophecies, talking animals, and flying witches, is definitely metaphor. But it shows you where his sympathies lie—and for what it's worth, most of Pullman's other work is a bit more realistic. It at least doesn't involve magic (although Ruby in the Smoke, the first book in his other popular series [a sequence of Victorian-era mysteries], the protagonist does solve the mystery by smoking opium, so...).
4] Wikipedia: "The magisterium of the Catholic Church is the church's authority or office to establish its own authentic teachings." This is the kind of series that rewards extensive Wikipedia-ing.
5] In a scene that is absolutely thrilling, by the way. People often roll their eyes at info-dump scenes in speculative lit (think the Architect scene in The Matrix Reloaded), but this scene, which is basically just a long lecture given by Asriel, lights the pages on fire. It helps that the particular info given—a mix of philosophy, theology, quantum physics, and actual Bible verses modified to work within Lyra's world—is as thrilling an intellectual voyage as it is the resolution to several ongoing mysteries in the novel.
6] Still one of the most chilling phrases in the English language.
7] I'm really not kidding—the final two chapters of this book are harrowing and brutal in ways that literature, children's or otherwise, very rarely is.
8] The most troubling of which is in the sequence in which Lyra herself is captured by the Gobblers and put into their childcare facility, which the book tells us Lyra "soon found herself enjoying."
9] Which, due to its appearance in the book's marketing, many have mistakenly assumed to be the "golden compass" of the book's title. The title is actually an allusion to the mythological object God supposedly used to draw the spheres of the universe—not a compass that tells you cardinal directions, of course, but one of those hinged geometric tools with the point at one end and the pencil at the other.
10] Though goodness, we could spend days listing off the atrocities committed on behalf of those institutions alone.
11] Instead of, I don't know, relying on the grace of Christ to deal with sin, like it says in the Bible. Interestingly (I'll almost definitely return to this point in a later blog post), Jesus is not mentioned once in the entire His Dark Materials trilogy.
12] And, to be frank, is one of the main reasons I have not become Catholic or Anglican, instead remaining with small, nondenominational church bodies.
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