Chapter One
OTHER WORLDS
* * *
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.)
