Hi, everybody! I'm rereading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and blogging about each book. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.
You can read part one in this series, on The Golden Compass
, here.
In the realm of speculative fiction, there are two schools [1]. One is character-based, where the excitement comes from watching people we care about live and breath and die in a fantastic world. Members of this school include
Harry Potter,
A Game of Thrones,
The Stand, and the hobbit sections of
Lord of the Rings. The other is ideas-based, where the excitement is not so much rooted in character drama (although there may be characters, even ones we care about quite a bit) as it is in the exploration of creative and thoughtful ideas within a fantastic world:
1984,
Dune,
Childhood's End, the works of Isaac Asimov, and the non-hobbit sections of
LotR all fit this description. There are works that straddle these two schools (
A Wrinkle in Time,
Ender's Game,
Slaughterhouse-Five), but for the most part, a piece of fantasy, sci-fi, or horror is going to lean one way or the other along this spectrum between characters and concepts.
What I had forgotten—and as it turns out, I had forgotten a lot—was just how hard
The Subtle Knife, the middle novel in the His Dark Materials trilogy, dives into the purely conceptual end of that range. And that makes
The Subtle Knife something of a different animal from
The Golden Compass.
It doesn't quite start out that way. I mean, you read the first few pages of
The Subtle Knife and you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you're in a very different novel from
The Golden Compass: "This book begins in our own world," says Pullman's epigraph at the novel's beginning, which is surprising on multiple counts, not the least of which is the idea that "our world" exists within the universe(s) of His Dark Materials. But in those opening pages, it's not yet clear just how extensively the book is going to veer into conceptual, Asimovian fiction. In fact, we start on a moment of both high excitement and intimate pathos as we're introduced to a twelve-year-old named Will, who lives in Oxford ("our" Oxford, complete with automobiles and free of visible dæmons) with his mother, who seems to be suffering from some sort of mental illness. At the moment we meet him, he's dropping off his mother at a friend's house to be taken care of as he returns to their own house to recover a package of letters from his father, an arctic explorer who has been missing for the majority of Will's life and whom Will knows next-to-nothing about. He must do so secretly, though, because their house is no longer safe: a group of shadowy men have begun lurking about the property, presumably searching for the very same package of letters that Will is. At the house, Will finds the letters but, in the process, nearly gets caught by the men and, in self-defense, pushes one of them down the stairs, breaking the man's neck (with "a hideous crack," the book tells us with a delicious, skin-crawling efficiency). Fearing that now he will be wanted for murder, Will flees into the Oxford streets and, by sheer chance, finds what appears to be a window in the air, through which he crawls and finds himself suddenly in a deserted, Mediterranean-style city. He's not in Kansas anymore. In fact, he's in a completely different universe, one in which he eventually finds Lyra, who, upon "walking into the sky" at the end of
The Golden Compass, found herself here as well.
And this is just the first twenty-ish pages of the novel. It's a bold, thrilling intro to the book, at least as effective as the attempted murder of Asriel that opens
The Golden Compass and even more impressive for the masterful efficiency with which it sells us on a completely new protagonist from the previous novel. It's also decidedly character-focused, giving us a clear motivation for Will (finding his father, protecting his mother) that's imbued with pathos and dramatic stakes not unlike the ones we get for Lyra in the first novel, where she's searching for her father while also trying to rescue her friend Roger. This opening setpiece is one of the best sequences in the entirety of the trilogy, and it sets us up for a tense and fantastic novel about a boy's relationship with his parents. Even more intriguing is the way this sets up Will as a potential foil to Lyra, whose crushing betrayal by her parents at
The Golden Compass's finale poses a compelling sounding wall for Will's idealization of his father and his protectiveness of his mother. This beginning is a promise of compelling character drama.
Too bad the novel has very different plans for itself.
I say "too bad" lightly, as what we get is audacious, ambitious, and generally pretty riveting—there are passages here that gave me goosebumps when I first read them in high school and they still give me goosebumps now on reread. But what
The Subtle Knife turns out being is so different from what both the novel's beginning and
The Golden Compass before it establish that it's hard not to feel that Pullman is either losing these characters or deliberately confounding expectations.
Because here's what ends up happening: Lyra and Will team up, Lyra wanting to find out more about Dust and Will trying to locate his father, and they go together via the air window back into Will's Oxford to research. There they meet ex-nun-turned-particle-physicist Dr. Mary Malone, who it turns out is researching dark matter, which turns out to be Dust. Along the way, Will and Lyra explore the Mediterranean world in which they met—it's called Cittàgazze, they learn, and it used to be home to a group of philosophers who created a knife[2] that could cut windows into other universes. Unfortunately, cutting these windows also apparently unleashes Specters, creatures who feed on Dust and, while invisible and harmless to children, devour the souls/dæmons of adults, leaving the adults zombie-like in a way similar to the severed children in
The Golden Compass—hence the city's abandonment. Cross-cut with all this are scenes that bring us up to date on the adult crew from
The Golden Compass, mostly just Lee Scoresby, Serafina Pekkala, and a few other witches (the armored bear Iorek Byrnison is curiously absent). These adults are mostly concerned with finding out just what the combating forces of Lord Asriel (whose blowing open a hole to Cittàgazze has wreaked havoc on the world) and the Magisterium are up to. What they find out is major: Asriel has decided to wage a second war against God[3] (whom the characters in this world refer to as the Authority), essentially taking up the role of Satan in an inversion of the biblical Fall narrative[4], and Lyra is to be a second Eve, whose fall the Magisterium is desperate to prevent. Meanwhile, Dr. Malone, with the help of Lyra, has discovered a way to use a computer to communicate with Dust in much the same way that Lyra does through her alethiometer, and what she finds is that she is talking with angels, who are creatures made entirely of condensed Dust. The angles tell Dr. Malone that they are the ones who interfered with human evolution to give humans consciousness and that Dr. Malone now must "play the serpent" to Lyra's Eve [5].
 |
Nowhere else in children's lit will you see experimental
physics play such an important role, and I love that. |
Notice in all this, I've barely mentioned Will's father and not mentioned Will's mother at all. That's not an oversight on my part; the book itself does much the same thing. Will's mother is invoked once by the villains to threaten Will, and there are one or two instances where Will gestures toward missing her. But otherwise, she might as well not exist. And Will's father: we do meet him, finally—he's a shaman Lee Scoresby meets in the far northern reaches of Lyra's world (he's apparently just been chilling there with a tribe of Tartars), and he and Scoresby do decide to go find Will. But by this time, the novel, along with Will, is already up to its elbows in all the mythological stuff with the knife and the angels and the Authority, and Will himself has become, through a tense and rather violent series of events [6], has become the bearer of the subtle knife, which involves all sorts of mythical weight. In the midst of all this, the original quest to find Will's father has become an issue of secondary or even tertiary significance to the trajectory of the novel, and even though Will still theoretically cares about his father, the novel doesn't give the same psychological urgency to that desire as in the novel's beginning, crowded out instead by a lot of immediate threats and cumbersome responsibilities—to say nothing of Lyra, who barely talks about her parents at all, despite having just weathered the bitter, bitter betrayal of
The Golden Compass's ending. To cap it all off, when Will and his father finally do meet, Will doesn't even recognize his father, and his father is promptly and unceremoniously murdered (
in front of Will) by a character so minor that she barely registers as a person. It's a brutal, unsatisfying, and capricious ending to what the novel's beginning promised to be its main through line.
All of which is to say that while
The Golden Compass is every bit a novel about Lyra's quest to find her father and save Roger,
The Subtle Knife is not at all a novel about Will protecting his mother, and it's only occasionally about Will finding his father. Or, to put it another way,
The Golden Compass is about the characters trying to get what they want;
The Subtle Knife is not. It is instead about discovery, that tingling feeling of having your mind blown as you learn more and more information about how the world works and the high concepts that rule the multiverse of Pullman's trilogy.
The Golden Compass had this effect to a degree, for sure—the novel's final few chapters are loaded with exposition and discovery—but this effect was always grounded in the more immediate pressures of character psychology and dramatic stakes; we care about the concepts of Dust and Asriel's experiments because we care about how they affect Lyra and her relationship with her world.
The Subtle Knife gestures a little toward this grounding, but it never feels more than tossed-off. "I thought it was heaven when I first found it," Will remarks of Cittàgazze near the novel's end, "and all the time it was full of Specters." This is a clear attempt to parallel Lyra's emotional journey at the end of the first book, the realization that a beautiful world is ruled by monsters. But it's just talk. We're not interested in Will's relationship to Cittàgazze because of his disillusionment with what he says he once thought paradise[7]; we're interested because of what we can learn from this world—the subtle knife, its mythological significance, etc. The same goes for pretty much everything else. This novel is fascinating not because of the interior lives and motivations of the characters we meet but because of what the characters we meet reveal about the mysteries of the world.
Basically, this is just a long way of saying that the further you get into it, the clearer it is that Philip Pullman has slotted
The Subtle Knife very much within the ideas-centric school of speculative literature. And to be clear, this isn't wholly a bad thing.
The Subtle Knife is a very, very good piece of high-concept fantasy, and it pushes the trilogy into undeniably fascinating territory as it fuses the fantasy adventure of the first book with hard sci-fi and straight-up religious fiction. At its best, the novel is reminiscent of works like Isaac Asimov's "The Final Question" or Arthur C. Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God," which explore the line where hard sci-fi blurs into myth.
The Subtle Knife, like these stories, is exposition-heavy, with many scenes existing seemingly for the sole purpose of dispensing information through lengthy dialogues. It's often in these places where the novel hits its highest highs, evoking that indelible sublimity of realism blending into something highly mythological—for example, the scene in which Dr. Malone communicates with angels via a computer, in which the juxtaposition of modern technology and shimmering otherworldliness is intoxicating for precisely the same reason that a film like
Ordet or
2001: A Space Odyssey is: the idea that the natural world is imbued with a profound and even religious significance. Every scientific endeavor, pushed hard enough, butts up against the supernatural and even mythical foundations of the world, from the surprising turns of Dr. Malone's particle research to the basically fairy-tale trappings of Cittàgazze, with its monsters and towers and totem-like artifacts.
The irony of this sort of mystic intoxication occurring within a series that exists in large part to critique the authoritarian impulses of religious belief is not lost on me, nor is it on Pullman either, I don't think. Because for as much as he disparages the specifics of religion and even the C.S.-Lewis-ian idea of the metaphysical/divine underpinnings of imaginative beauty[8], he still uses the dialect of religious discourse to offer that critique. I mean, he's casting his characters in a reappropriation of
Paradise Lost, one of the most explicitly religious works in the canon of Western literature. It's possible that this is all ultimately metaphorical and that Pullman is just using the supernatural as a literary device to show his conviction that "this world is an extraordinarily beautiful place." That's the easy, obvious explanation, of course. Or perhaps another explanation is that this just means that fantasy, by virtue of engaging the supernatural, has an inescapable religious bent[9]. But I think it's also possible that Pullman is attempting, through openly anti-theist fantasy, to condense what is so powerful about a religious worldview—i.e. the sense of the sublime otherworldliness beyond one's self—without the systematic and moral frameworks that make religion troubling to him. Which is an interesting thematic and aesthetic experiment, made even more interesting by Pullman's appropriation of the
Paradise Lost iconography and narrative. By putting his characters into the archetypes of existing mythology, the novel conveys the inseparability of the supernatural from the rigorously natural (even the scientific[10]).
 |
| My God, it's full of Dust. |
The problem with this—and the central tension I felt during this reread—is that fitting characters into archetypes results in an across-the-board flattening of the characters from their richer selves encountered in the first novel. All the ideas of the book are very "cool" in a way that appealed to me a lot in high school[11], but for me now, it's hard not to miss the warmth and depth of characterization seen in
The Golden Compass. Some of this is a natural function of the more ideas-centric approach to storytelling in
The Subtle Knife—Mary Malone, for example, exists pretty much entirely to dispense information—and that's one thing. What's harder to swallow is the way that existing characters from
The Golden Compass thin and distort in order to work within the larger structural and thematic ambitions Pullman is building. Take Lord Asriel, for example, whom we left in
The Golden Compass as a man so corrupted by his ambition that he was willing to kill a child in order to realize it. But in this book, his being cast in the role of Satan in the
Paradise Lost narrative means that he's largely seen as a noble rebel fighting the good fight against the Authority; any moral complexity in the character has been lost in the interest of crafting the primal clash of good versus evil [12]. It's a frustratingly simplistic approach to the character that could seemingly have been averted with a more careful approach to plotting.
The worst iteration of this problem is Lyra herself—Lyra, the bright, plucky girl who animates
The Golden Compass so powerfully, whose coming-of-age arc contains some of the most emotionally potent material in all of children's literature.
This Lyra is someone we never see in
The Subtle Knife. Instead, she seems to have been replaced by a listless, opaque character with none of the interior life that made her such a beacon in the first novel. Most frustratingly, she seems to have forgotten entirely the final chapter of
The Golden Compass, in which she experiences searing betrayal of both parents and the murder of her best friend, or at least, it's not a memory foremost in her mind, as she only mentions it once or twice—which is
craaaazy, considering that
The Golden Compass depicts the betrayal and murder as one of the most traumatic events of Lyra's life. Instead, she has become a character whose mythological significance gets discussed quite a bit by other characters but who has very little to say about herself, merely following others around without a lot of the agency or cunning she exhibited in the first book. I get that
The Subtle Knife is much more Will's story than Lyra's and that even as Will's story, it's more about the explication of ideas than character complexity. But this isn't just the subordinating of character to ideas; this is an abandonment of one of the most compelling aspects of the original novel.
It's one thing to introduce new and increasingly conceptual elements to an ongoing story—I'm fine with that. But it's another thing entirely to, without good reason, ask us to change our stances toward characters we are already emotionally invested in, and on that metric,
The Subtle Knife kind of sucks as a sequel to
The Golden Compass.
Which, as cool and interesting and thrilling as the various pieces of the book are, is a gigantic disappointment. These are issues that I remembered having with
The Amber Spyglass even back in my Pink-Floyd-worshiping high school days, but it's disconcerting to see them pop up so early in this book, too. As such,
The Subtle Knife is much more of a flawed novel than the modern masterpiece I had fixed in my memory.
Guess we'll see what happens with my trip back to
The Amber Spyglass. See you there!
EDIT: Read the next entry, on
The Amber Spyglass,
here.
1] Simplifying things a lot here, but bear with me. I need my paradigm.
2] The "subtle" knife of the title, although considering it's called Æsahættr, which means "God-destroyer," there's really not much subtle about it. More on that in a second.
3] Wouldn't it be handy if he could find something to kill God with... a God-destroyer, as it were?
4] Or, more accurately, the Fall narrative as told by
Paradise Lost, which Pullman has cited multiple times as an influence on the series and from which the His Dark Materials trilogy gets its name (Book 2 of
Paradise Lost: "Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain/His dark materials to create more Worlds").
5] Maybe some of y'all out there are reading this paragraph and dying for me to dive into the theology of all this. I've got a lot to say about it, but I think I'm going to save it all until I write on
The Amber Spyglass. But I will dive in. I promise.
6] I'll not go into it in detail because it's not really important to the larger thesis of this post, but I'll give you just one image, one of the most savory bits of gruesomeness in the series: two severed fingers "curled like bloody quotation marks." Chills.
7] Though there's little evidence earlier in the book to indicate that he actually thought this. Most of the interior monologue of the characters is devoted to plot issues, not their feelings about things.
8] There's a peculiar passage in
The Golden Compass that states that "No one with much imagination would have thought seriously that it was possible to come all this way and rescue her friend Roger," which seems to have been written as a direct rebuttal to the many passages in
The Chronicles of Narnia which lay the misfortunes of characters on their lack of imagination—Eustace, the king of the Telmarines, Uncle Andrew, etc. A few other offhanded remarks in His Dark Materials indicate the same sort of disdain for the idea of imagination as an innate good.
9] Discussion question for the readers to dissect?
10] Which, let's not forget, cannot escape the fantastic consequences of its ambition: the creation of the knife spawns Specters, while Mary Malone's dark matter research culminates with angelic contact. "D'you know how embarrassing it is to mention good and evil in a scientific laboratory?" Dr. Malone asks Lyra, and here lies another possible reason for the insistence of religious language within the book: so as not to let the secular world off the hook as somehow immune to the corruption that has infected religious organizations. By linking science to morally charged metaphysics, the novel stresses the culpability of science for the consequences of its work on human life. This is the one aspect of the book that actually seems to work from the memory of Lord Asriel's murder of Roger at the end of
The Golden Compass.
11] When I was also obsessed with similarly high-concept artists like Orson Scott Card and, you guessed it, Pink Floyd.
12] My big caveat here is to point out that we never technically
see Asriel within the novel; we just hear what other characters have to say about him. So I guess this critique will have to wait to land until we see him in-person again in
The Amber Spyglass—honestly, I don't remember a lot about his role there beyond what we already know from this book. So we'll see.
