Shedding Light on His Dark Materials: Exploring Hidden Spiritual Themes in Philip Pullman's Popular Series (Hardback)

Chapter One

* * *

Lyra's anxiety rose as her view from the wardrobe became obstructed. The Master, arriving late for the meeting, blocked the otherwise perfect view she'd created by leaving the doors slightly ajar. Fortunately, he moved away from the gap before calling his fellow scholars to attention. The time had come for Lord Asriel's presentation.

The room had been off-limits to children, especially girls. But to Lyra it was just another forbidden corner of the university campus to explore. When she'd heard approaching footsteps, she'd decided to hide in the wardrobe and spy. As Lyra pushed the collection of soft and prickly coats aside, she had no idea that her latest adventure would pull her into worlds she didn't know existed.

So far, no one seemed aware of her hidden attendance. No one, that is, except for Lord Asriel. But Lyra had saved his life moments earlier by alerting him to the poison in his drink, so he welcomed her nosy alliance as he presented his most recent findings to his academic benefactors, at least one of whom wanted him dead. Lyra sat stealthily watching and listening, hoping to pick up unwitting confessions from the whispered conversations of those seated near the wardrobe. Like her own, each of their daemons seemed to betray feelings of intimidation and jealousy at Asriel's dominating presence. Clearly, he was a very important and powerful man.

As part of his talk, Lord Asriel showed several slides. And what mysterious slides they were; photogramic images like none Lyra or anyone else in the room had ever seen.

The first slide showed a snow-covered hut on the distant horizon surrounded by various philosophical instruments, complete with aerials, wires, and insulators. In the foreground stood a man clad in heavy furs to protect him from a harsh, arctic cold. Beside the man stood a smaller figure, perhaps a child.

As he prepared to show the second slide, Lord Asriel explained that this image of the same scene had been taken one minute later with a specially prepared emulsion.

The image changed drastically, the man now bathed in a brilliant light.

His hand was raised, and glowing particles seemed to flow from his fingers.

"What is that light?" asked the Chaplain.

But it wasn't light. As Lord Asriel's punch line clarified, "It is Dust."

A sudden and ominous silence immediately overtook the room, and Lyra sensed that he meant something more significant than ordinary dust with a small d. Moments later the room filled with exclamations of surprise.

Lord Asriel replaced the slide with another, also taken at night, containing a small group of tents and travel gear resting beneath the Aurora, or Northern Lights.

Again, Asriel replaced the traditional slide with one containing the same scene moments later using his special photogram technique-revealing an even more mysterious and troubling image.

Peering more intently through the tiny gap, Lyra could see within the illumined sky the unmistakable outline of buildings, towers, and streets. A city! Suppressing a gasp of wonder, she listened to equally amazed reactions from beyond the wardrobe doors.

All of the Scholars noticed the city. It couldn't be missed. Some seemed to show a reserved giddiness, as if they were seeing a living, breathing specimen of a creature long assumed merely mythical. Others reacted with skepticism, even disapproval.

The conversation continued, but Lyra understood very little. She drifted off to sleep and was awakened by Lord Asriel after the others had departed. She could hardly contain her excitement, eager to discover more about what she had heard. But Lord Asriel seemed uninterested in expanding her education, ordering her to keep what she knew to herself and announcing he would be leaving shortly to go back to the North and continue his work.

Despite his pronouncements that he would go alone, Lyra begged to join him. "I want to find out about Dust. And that city in the air. Is it another world?"

* * *

Who among us hasn't longed for a chance to explore other worlds? As babies, our sense of wonder and curiosity kept our anxious mothers on their toes as we crawled toward what- ever room remained uncharted. Lacking the developmental sophistication to do anything else, we popped most of the objects we discovered into our mouths in an attempt to taste our way to understanding. Every stairway, every table, every closet, and every container afforded an entirely new realm of learning.

The older we got, the further we traveled to scratch the itch for adventure. Human history includes a long tradition of exploration as we've edged our way further away from the tiresome and familiar to places where, in the words of Star Trek's Captain Kirk, "no man has gone before." We've pushed the boundaries to find something new, something more. We risk life and limb to climb Mount Everest and build gigantic Apollo missiles to carry us to the moon. Our robots touch the bed of the Atlantic Ocean and analyze the floor of Mars. And while our diligence and technology provide the leverage, they would be useless on our quest of discovery without that which gives them focus and purpose; something at the core of what it means to be human: imagination. Children pretended to be space travelers long before engineers designed the first rocket. Neil Armstrong's "giant leap" owes more to imagination than to science. The latter merely built what the former conceived.

Nothing has motivated our imaginings more than the desire for other worlds, be they around the corner, part of a mythical history, or through a wardrobe door. Few of us will ever have a chance to climb the world's tallest mountain or board NASA's next spacecraft. But millions of us can travel to new worlds through the power of the pen in the hand of great writers.

One of the greatest, J. R. R. Tolkien, wrote an essay describing the purpose and power of fantasy stories, a literary genre he introduced to twentieth-century readers-opening the door and creating an audience for those who would follow in his footsteps, including Philip Pullman.

"Fantasy is a natural human activity," wrote Tolkien. "It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make."

Imagination is not the enemy of reason, but its lover. Both represent uniquely human capacities, gifts that allow us to discover realities beyond the obvious and mundane. "For creative Fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it."

So while reason enables us to calculate, decipher, and apply logic, imagination lets us conceive, explore, and invent.

Philip Pullman proves himself a master when it comes to conceiving other worlds worthy of the reader's exploration. Like genre predecessors Tolkien, Lewis, Madeleine L'Engle, and others, he seems a student of ancient poets who created mythical realms and heroic characters. But Pullman does something new. While he joins a great tradition of whisking readers off to imaginary lands filled with witches, daemons, angels, and other supernatural beings, Pullman's worlds also draw inspiration from cutting-edge scientific theory.

Throughout the three books, characters refer to a heretical doctrine suggesting the existence of many worlds. "Is this the Barnard-Stokes business?" a member of the Jordan College faculty asked Lord Asriel while looking at an inexplicable city in the sky. Everyone in the room knew what he meant. So can we.

The concept is based upon the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. In layman's terms, it suggests that there are myriad worlds in the universe in addition to the one we know. In particular, every time something with potentially different outcomes occurs-such as a coin toss-one possibility becomes the reality in our world, while the other carries forward in another. In fact, Lord Asriel uses this very illustration to explain his research.

Take the example of tossing a coin: it can come down heads or tails, and we don't know before it lands which way it's going to fall. If it comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal.

But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart.

So Lyra's world, while much like our own, contains traces of coins landing on the opposite side; for the most part, these are slight variations rather than fundamental differences. We have jet planes with pilots. In her world, air travel is in balloons navigated by aeronauts. Our Oxford has Queens College. Lyra's has Jordan College. We take pictures. They take photograms. And unlike our pictures, theirs never move. No wonder Lyra finds Will's local cinema a wonder.

While traveling from one world to the next with Lyra and the rest of Pullman's characters, readers experience a delicious combination of two rarely mixed ingredients-the wonder of fantasy and the mystery of science. In the process, however, Pullman comes close to diminishing some of the magic that more traditional fantasy literature engenders. That may be due to an internal tension every writer must resolve.

In his essay "Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's to Be Said," C. S. Lewis describes the conflict between a writer's "Author" and his "Man." The Author, driven by an unscratched itch and a desire to discover what might be, allows his story to unfold on its own momentum, unfettered by the practical, the profound, or the preferred. The Man, on the other hand, stands firmly grounded in the real world and his own philosophical predispositions, critical of the Author's work when it defies either. Subconsciously, the Man meddles with the Author's craft-turning a story that should affirm the soul's quest into something that forces an agenda. Good writers master both extremes, finding ways to allow both Author and Man to play their parts effectively. Fanciful stories lacking consistency won't ring true, but didactic sermons don't please the soul either.

His Dark Materials shows signs of this all-too-common tension. The world Pullman creates seems to vacillate between a latent desire for the God of Christianity and hostile criticism of the same. As subsequent chapters will show, the Man's philosophical agenda repeatedly spills onto the pages of the Author's work, leaving periodic stain marks on the dialogue of characters and on what becomes an upended moral center.

Tolkien warned of this possibility, suggesting fantasy "can, of course, be carried to excess. It can be ill done. It can be put to evil uses. It may even delude the minds out of which it came."

On the whole, however, Pullman follows the best tradition of fantasy writers by satisfying his readers' yearning for the wonder of other worlds-worlds that allow us to explore new possibilities, encounter new creatures, and taste the mystery of what it means to be fully human. After all, since we were made in the image of the Creator, we are never more human than when we create.

LIGHT

Wonders of the imagination connect us to the wonder of being human.

(Continues...)