The dish

The Golden Compass.

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is about to get a new adaptation this fall, with the BBC and HBO distributing a television series based on the three books, starting with The Golden Compass (also known as Northern Lights). That book also appeared on the Guardian‘s list of the 100 greatest novels ever written that I’ve sort of been working my way through, which seemed to make this an apposite time to start Pullman’s work with this book, which is a cold, dispassionate counter to the very fantasy novels Pullman seems most apt to criticize. It appeared on the Guardian‘s list of the 100 greatest novels that I’ve been working my way through the last few years.

The protagonist is Lyra Belacqua, around 11 or 12 years old at the start of the book, whose somewhat idyllic life in a castle in England in a universe parallel to our own is interrupted both by the mystery of children vanishing around London and the arrival of an enigmatic woman, Mrs. Coulter, who takes a specific interest in Lyra’s future. In this universe, all humans have familiars known as “daemons” who can shapeshift while their humans are young but who eventually take on a permanent form when their persons reach adulthood. The mystery of the children, which of course eventually merges with the story of Mrs. Coulter (and more), appears connected to something known as Dust as well as to the phenomenon of aurora borealis, colloquially known as the northern lights. The quest to solve the mystery takes Lyra on a voyage north to the archipelago Svalbard, which (in our universe) hosts the northernmost permanent human settlement on earth, on board a vessel filled with “gyptians” (essentially Roma), some of whom have lost children to the kidnappers.

Everything in this book is cold, including the setting and the weather. Svalbard sits at 74 to 81 degrees latitude, so in the winter it’s dark and average temperatures are below freezing. Much of the book’s action takes place there or on the trip there, and it is perpetually dark and cold in the prose, which mirrors everything about the main characters. Lyra, the ostensible star of the book, has very little charm or character of her own; she has the drive to find her missing friend, and believes she’s on a mission to help her uncle Asriel and thwart Mrs. Coulter, but she’s surprisingly inert compared to the child heroes of other classics of YA fiction. None of the gyptian characters is memorable, and even Mrs. Coulter is on the dull side for a villain in either YA fiction or in the sort of sci-fi/fantasy genres in which Pullman is treading. Great YA genre fiction endures because of readers’ connections with the main characters as much as the plot, and The Golden Compass misses on that point entirely.

The plot, however, has much more going for it, although much of the question at its heart remains unresolved at the end of the first book. The conceit involves the many-worlds hypothesis of quantum physics, although the exact mechanism by which it works in the books isn’t revealed in the first part of the trilogy – discovering that is tied into the various mysteries of the missing children and Mrs. Coulter. Pullman abjectly despises C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, writing in a 1998 essay of “the misogyny, the racism, the sado-masochistic relish for violence that permeates the whole cycle” of Lewis’ books, and at the very least he’s right about the violence part. There’s some violence in The Golden Compass, but it’s secondary to most of the action and is never glorified. What Pullman doesn’t mention in his essay is his antipathy for Lewis’ specific version of Christianity; in response, his novels rely not on myth but on science, trading elements of fantasy for the grounding of science fiction, but in the process he loses some of the whimsy of better fantasy series like the Harry Potter novels or even the more mature Magicians trilogy.

The second book in the series shifts the setting to our version of earth, and the third combines the two to finish the story. I’m mixed on whether I’ll continue; I’m a completist by nature and hate dropping series without finishing, but I’m also not driven to complete Lyra’s story or see how Pullman resolves the Dust mystery.

Next up: Hilary Mantel’s first Booker-winning novel, Wolf Hall.

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