More than a handful of dust
Claudia FitzHerbert
THE AMBER SPYGLASS by Philip Pullman Scholastic Children's Books, £14.99, pp. 548 Northem Lights (1995) and The Subtle Knife (1997), the two volumes which pre- cede this one in Philip Pullman's trilogy, are big books with big themes filled with people who aren't human, animals who are, and angels who once were. Now The Amber Spyglass completes Pullman's subversive retelling of Paradise Lost. Here is a writer prepared to shout from the rooftops a heresy as old as the hills but which we are used to hearing as a whisper in the work of others: there was once a war in heaven and the wrong side won. But the big idea is more heretical backdrop than driving force — the pleasure of these books lies in the detail of the sweep, rather than the fact of it. Pullman delivers real goods in fantasy clothing.
This is one of many ways in which he draws children in without shutting adults out. The Amber Spyglass, like its predecces- sors, is being marketed as children's fiction, but I suspect there are as many children who wriggle free as there are adults who become hooked. Pullman has described himself as 'sitting in the marketplace, telling a story. Whoever wants to can listen, whoever they are.' It's a corny image which you can't not believe in, after reading the books. 'Tell them stories' is one of many mantras which runs through The Amber Spyglass. Lyra Silvertongue, the 12-year-old girl protagonist cast as 'the new Eve', does her best. She is a glorious creation, this Lyra, a biting, spitting, thieving slip of a neglected child, filthy, fearless, inventive without being imaginative, boastful, unworldly, clever, uneducated. Had Pull- man done no more than paint this wildcat's portrait he would have done something grand and memorable.
Lyra comes from the world first described in Northern Lights. Hers is 'a uni- verse like ours, but different in many ways'. It is a world in which the Church, an ugly mixture of Calvinist and Counter-Reforma- tion zealotry, reigns supreme and in which all humans are paired with a 'daemon', an animal familiar from whom they cannot be parted. Children's daemons change shape according to circumstances but in puberty the daemons 'settle' as the human's nature becomes fixed. From this piece of Aris- totelian whimsy Pullman creates both an elaborate plot, involving the rescue of kid- napped children from the arctic wastes where they are being used as guinea pigs in some murderous experiments conducted under the aegis of the Church, and charac- ters of credible complexity. Daemons, once described, possess the mind: it becomes a tic, to look around our own world and won- der who would have what.
In The Subtle Knife a boy, Adam, joins wary forces with the girl, Eve. Will Parry comes from our world, which is presented as a sadder, drabber place than Lyra's, for all its apparent freedom from tyranny and superstition. The two children meet in a third world, a Renaissance ghost-town peo- pled by ungovernable children and haunted by soul-eating spectres. The knife of the title, which falls into the boy's hands, cuts between myriad worlds which the Church would suppress all knowledge of. Will is on a quest to find his father — Lyra has already learnt to distrust hers. These chil- dren are quite a lot worse off than the orphans we are used to meeting in more conventional children's literature: they are the children of rebels and adventurers, their parents mainly spell trouble.
The Amber Spyglass begins and ends with painful partings between the swiftly grow- ing child protagonists. The 500 pages in between tell of their attempts, often unwit- ting, sometimes unwilling, to re-order uni- verses threatened with extinction by the Church's obsession with the suppression of knowledge which some call 'Dust' in Lyra's world. Will and Lyra must learn to love before agreeing to part, and to put their trust in a kindly frump of a bluestocking serpent sent by the rebel angels to help them on their way. Mary Malone is an ex- nun who is trying to put the faith she lost in God into science instead but retains a weakness for the I Ching and a hunger for meaning. The threatened paradise in which she finds herself, and where she waits for the children to arrive, is inhabited by crea- tures who look like antelopes on wheels, work in pairs and speak pidgin English. (The pairing is important: the crippling iso- lation brought about by human compe- tence is one of Pullman's many unhammered themes. Lyra's world is in some ways a cruder, ruder, mediaeval ver- sion of Will's — it is one where humans have not yet learnt to hide their daemons and keep their heads mistrustfully down.) Judged by itself, The Amber Spyglass is a flawed baggy mess of a book. Threads left lying about in the two previous volumes of the trilogy are picked up and re-examined in the light of the children's dawning understanding of the importance of Dust. But there's not a lot of tying up: new trails are laid, lessons learnt and forgotten, vil- lains unmasked and redeemed. The pace of invention is sometimes unrewardingly relentless: the armoured bears, knights on dragonflies, harpies, witches, angels, ghosts and spectres all play a part and jostle for a slice of the action as it hurtles towards Armageddon, and there are times when I wished for longer in one world, with one, or maybe two, tribes rather than the exhausting multitude of life-forms fighting their patch. But it is an exhaustion brought about by a sense of the book's richness. Pullman rivals Chekhov in his refusal to write small parts.
Or simple ones. Pullman carries his war against dogma into the delineation of char- acter. After losing her faith Mary Malone comes to believe that 'good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are', and so too does her creator. Nearly all of Pullman's villains have moments of pathos and/or greatness, and some of them are given a quicksilver elu- siveness which itself provides a narrative thread. Mrs Coulter, Lyra's scheming temptress of an unnatural mother, is a case in point. Again and again we see her as others see her: playing first the devoted mother/nurse, then the subtle mistress, then the dutiful daughter (of the Church) — and we do not know, until late in the scene's unfolding, to what end she is acting. Sometimes the scene closes and we still don't know, for sure, the meaning of the deeds described. In this and other ways The Amber Spyglass reads like a book written by the subtle knife — the action moves between multiple worlds, on which win- dows are opened by the apparently careless author. The craft lies in the closing of the windows, while leaving sufficient cracks for the seeping through of stories.
Of the many competing worlds in The Amber Spyglass it is the world of the dead which Pullman brings most to life. Just as the first two books had episodes which bore disquieting similarities to the workaday bleakness of our daily bad news fare — experiments on animals and children, abuse behind church doors, inner- city riots — so this last volume contains a lyrical depiction of the dead and dying which depends for its power on our famil- iarity with pictures of the displaced living. There is a holding area, on the way to the land of the dead, where the inhabitants await their turn. The latter have mild, cour- teous expressions on their faded faces, and dry, nasal voices. They are all the more haunting for not being more horrid.
Only in his portrayal of the Church does Pullman put his fist on the scales. Not only are there no good priests but there are no good moments, even for the sadistic bigots of the Consistory Court in Geneva. There is something not quite of this world in the fervour of Pullman's humanism. In another world his work would at least put him in danger of persecution. His loathing of mar- tyrdom would make an interesting starting point for the sort of highly educated cleri- cal torturers who litter this trilogy. But it won't happen, not here, now. Alpha Course Christianity wouldn't be what it was if it stretched to an Index.
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