This essay was published in The New Welsh Review just before Philip Pullman was awarded the Whitbread Prize.
1. Introduction
In an interview with Amazon.com1 which can be found on the internet, Philip Pullman talks about the embarrassment felt by some contemporary writers of adult literary fiction with telling stories. He sees the postmodernist trick of foregrounding the idea of story-telling within the text as a sign of disdain for the art and a means of maintaining a sophisticated surface whilst having one's cake and eating it. Now Pullman himself is anything but an unsophisticated writer. The importance of story-telling is itself a significant theme in his masterpiece His Dark Materials, and comes clearly into the foreground in the third volume, The Amber Spyglass, where telling stories is the key to releasing the trapped souls of humankind from the bleak timelessness of the world of the dead. Pullman, however, is no postmodernist: the difference between his foregrounding and theirs is that his emerges towards the end of a massive work in which story-telling has been embraced from the start wholeheartedly. But that's not all. In emphasizing the necessity of stories to humankind he is saying one of the most important things he knows. Here, as elsewhere in His Dark Materials, a didactic impulse is lightly masked. Pullman has spoken on a number of occasions of his repugnance for the Narnia books of C.S. Lewis. Some readers, however, - notably in America - have responded as strongly to what they have taken to be an anti-Christian pressure in the trilogy as Pullman himself has to Lewis - a writer whose fictions famously contain a pro-Christian subtext. Pullman is a masterly story-teller, but he is at the same time in love with ideas; he is in fact an extremely self-aware and literary writer. His Dark Materials is the most densely intertextual work for children one is ever likely to read, but its intertextuality is not that, say, of the disarmingly agreeable Harry Potter books. From it - to my way of thinking, at least - emerges a view of the world and of human belief-systems which is anything but value-free.
To turn to His Dark Materials after a diet of contemporary literary fiction is a liberating experience. The qualities which Alain Robbe-Grillet declared dead in his theoretical work and did without in his novels - plot, character, linear development - return with a vengeance. The trilogy might, I suppose, be subjected to the analytical vocabulary of modern-day literary theory, but that vocabulary could have nothing to say about the work's capacity to move the emotions, to delight the senses and to stimulate the mind. Disdained by the theorists these things may be, but it's because fiction does them that we read it, whether as children or adults. In the following discussion, then, I want to focus upon the kind of writer Pullman is and the kind of work he has written in His Dark Materials - a process which will involve examination of his powers of invention and his emotional range, and his ideas and their sources. In my concluding section I will return to the novel's dealings with Christianity.
Back to top ^
2. Romance and realism
Pullman is resistant to the classification of His Dark Materials as fantasy, and it's easy to see why. For him "fantasy" signifies a fundamentally shallow genre, one in which event dominates character and the story is everything: where what might be called vision is entirely lacking and the writer has nothing of significance to communicate about the world. He sees himself, rather, as a realist because his interests coincide with those of writers of naturalistic stories: he is fascinated by human psychology and by the perennial human preoccupations - identity, sexuality, morality. Fantasy is a sub-genre of romance, and romance may be defined by the appearance in it of beings and events that do not exist in real life, by a thinness of psychological presentation and by an incipient or pronounced didacticism. Now certainly there are creatures and objects in His Dark Materials which belong not to real life but to the broad realms of romance - even to the narrower regions of fantasy or science fiction: creatures such as angels, ghosts and spectres, armoured bears, witches, Gallivespians and mulefa; and objects such as the alethiometer, the subtle knife and the intention craft. At the same time, however, it's impossible not to recognise that Pullman has imbued his mixed world of humans and fantastic beings with an uncompromising moral complexity. And it isn't just his humans who manifest that complexity - it's there in other beings and creatures too - in Iorek Byrnison, the bear king, in his witches, Gallivespians and angels - most notably Baruch and Balthamos, the couple who play a key role in The Amber Spyglass. His Dark Materials therefore represents a fusion of romance and realism. Once upon a time, literary critics used to speak of a writer's powers of invention: well, Pullman's, like Tolkien's, are remarkable. But still more remarkable is his ability to persuade us that what matters to his human beings, what shapes them morally and motivationally, are what shapes his non-humans. Many of his beings, in fact, are evolutions, or devolutions, of humans. His angels were human once, and yearn for the embodiment they have lost. His witches are specialised humans, and by the end of the book his hero and heroine, Lyra and Will, have each acquired a degree of witchhood. His ghosts are unfleshed human spirits, diaphanous but still able to speak and, to some extent, to do. And, notably, all these beings are mortal.
It's perhaps this bedrock fact of a ubiquitous mortality which enables Pullman's rich and varied cast of beings to exhibit the range of emotions they do. Out of the consciousness of death come fear and despair and, in counterbalance, pity, love and joy. Pullman's powers of invention are staggering, but his emotional range is no less impressive, and without the latter his achievement in His Dark Materials would be less than half of what it is. And here is where Pullman scores heavily over many writers of adult literary fictions. Less damaging (to my mind) than postmodernist tricksiness (which can release its own brand of pleasure) is the emotional inhibition which literary sophistication sometimes brings with it. Postmodern fictionists value irony and a brilliant surface above the creation of overt emotional resonances which can catch readers up and make them exclaim. Among the many moments in the novel which worked on me in such a way are these: to illustrate despair, I choose the witch Lena Feldt's death by torture in the final chapter of The Subtle Knife (SK 329); to illustrate pity, I choose Lyra's response to the severed child Tony in chapter 13 of Northern Lights (NL 217), where compassion struggles with repugnance and wins; to illustrate love, I select Lyra's confession to Will about her feelings for Iorek Byrnison in The Amber Spyglass (AS 207); and to illustrate joy, here is Ruta Skadi in The Subtle Knife:
Tirelessly they flew on and on, and tirelessly she kept pace. She felt a fierce joy possessing her, that she could command these immortal presences. And she rejoiced in her blood and flesh, in the rough pine bark she felt next to her skin, in the beat of her heart and the life of all her senses, and in the hunger she was feeling now, and in the presence of her sweet-voiced bluethroat dæmon, and in the earth below her and the lives of every creature, plant and animal both; and she delighted in being of the same substance as them, and in knowing that when she died her flesh would nourish other lives as they had nourished her. And she rejoiced, too, that she was going to see Lord Asriel again. (SK 148)
In this passage one encounters the essence of Pullman's project as a writer. Here is his ability to convey intense inner feeling, life-affirming vitality in a way that precludes any charge of naivety. The witch experiences a unity of body and spirit that recognises the fact of mortality and integrates it with the life of the senses and the larger rhythms of nature. It is quite beyond the reach of any fantasist I have read, and would simply not figure on the agenda of the vast majority of literary novelists, who would squirm with embarrassment at the thought of portraying such naked emotion. The passage builds momentum though an accumulation of phrases linked by simple connectives. The repeated use of "and" ought to give the writing a biblical ring, but it is perfectly modern. Pullman's style avoids the ponderous pseudo-biblical language that mars the concluding part of The Lord of the Rings.
In His Dark Materials two children move from childhood to adolescence. Lyra begins as half Brontë child of nature, half Alice in Wonderland. In her Jane Eyre's wilfulness and Catherine Earnshaw's wildness and unpredictability fuse with Alice's self-possession, resourcefulness and curiosity (though of course she has nothing of Alice's Victorian primness, nor of her endemic truthfulness - Lyra is a liar). But she will end the novel as a sexually-aware being who has consumed the apple of loss. Pullman is unwilling to let his children off lightly. Both Lyra and Will must confront the most difficult choices. Lyra must choose whether to remain faithful to her dæmon or to honour her pledge to go to the world of the dead and seek to liberate its inhabitants. Will must debate the pros and cons of keeping or destroying the subtle knife - whether, that is, to retain or to surrender an instrument of unmatched power. And at the story's end, the two children together must decide whether to imperil the world by maintaining the option of a personal relationship, or to sacrifice that option by sealing off forever the mutual boundaries of their worlds. Romance destinies, then, involve profound and painful choices, and fantasy is rendered complex.
Sacrifice, in fact, becomes a major theme in the novel. Will and Lyra's renunciation of one another is only the most plangent example. The roll-call of characters who die so that Will and Lyra may live to carry their quests through to conclusion numbers Mrs Coulter and Lord Asriel, Lee Scoresby, the Gallivespians Tialys and Salmakia, and the angels Baruch and Balthamos. (Of the other first-rank players who line up behind the children, only Iorek Byrnison and the witch Serafina Pekkala survive.) Without exception, these characters surprise themselves into self-sacrifice, though the degree of surprise differs. None could be said to have any inkling of where his or her loyalties will lead. The death of Lee Scoresby, hard-bitten balloonist and adventurer, is devastating, and is the single greatest demonstration in the trilogy of the ruthlessness of Pullman's imagination. The deaths of Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter as they drag down the tyrant Metatron (or "deaths", since their fate appears to take the form of a perpetual descent into a kind of black hole), is morally apt if savage, as their commitment to their daughter Lyra emerges only as the story develops, and after their proud self-seeking natures have rendered them wonderfully ambiguous. Lord Asriel is a Byronic figure of towering arrogance, a man of almost superhuman will-power who sees his destiny in apocalyptic terms. Mrs Coulter is a memorable addition to the galaxy of seductive and fatal belles dames who populate Romantic and Victorian poems and prose fictions. The tradition to which this well-matched, sexually-surcharged pair belong is clearly one that Pullman knows intimately and loves.
Back to top ^
3. Poetic myth and physical science
In the Acknowledgements which appear at the end of The Amber Spyglass, Pullman writes:
I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read. My principle in researching for a novel is "Read like a butterfly, write like a bee", and if this story contains any honey, it is entirely because of the quality of the nectar I found in the work of better writers.
Unduly modest, no doubt, yet this demurral underscores the astonishing degree of intertextuality present in His Dark Materials. If ever a writer deserved the epithet eclectic, it is Philip Pullman, and the fact that he is categorized as a children's writer only renders the eclecticism more remarkable. In the same Acknowledgements, he mentions three particular debts: to "On the Marionette Theatre", an essay by Heinrich von Kleist2 , to Paradise Lost, and to the works of William Blake. These are not, one might think, models which would fire the imaginations of most children's writers. But then, Pullman is not a typical children's writer (if such a thing exists). Each of the 37 chapters in The Amber Spyglass opens with an epigraph. Here is my breakdown of their sources:
| 10 | Blake |
| 6 | Milton |
| 6 | The Bible |
| 3 | Emily Dickinson |
| 2 | Marvell |
| 1 | Coleridge, Spenser, Ruskin, John Webster, Byron, Donne, Keats, George Herbert, Christina Rossetti, Pindar |
Blake's eminence is unchallenged. Blake and Milton together contribute almost half the quotations. Beyond that, what one notices is the predominance of poets: it is poetic speech which moves Pullman. The six extracts from the Bible only serve to emphasize this point: five are from the Old Testament (Job, Exodus, Genesis, 1 Kings, Ezekiel); only one is from the New - St John.
Blake and Milton form a pairing whose work lies at the ideological and mythic heart of Pullman's project in His Dark Materials (itself a phrase from Paradise Lost). Half-visible, half-submerged in the novel there exists a creation myth which represents a revision of the visions of these two massive forbears. Pullman says in his Amazon.com interview that he wrote down this myth several times in order to get it clear in his mind. Blake's relationship with Milton, of course, is famously oppositional. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the key source-book to his imaginative system, Blake, among other things, offers a witty critique of Milton's values; in his poem Milton, he resuscitates the spirit of the earlier poet so that he can be instructed, cleansed of his errors and rise again, new-made in a Blakean mould. But in taking aim at Milton, Blake is lining up a still more powerful foe - the Bible itself, whose apologist Milton is. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a half-satirical, half-serious inversion of the creation myth to be found in Genesis. His objection to Genesis and Milton was that they made Reason (or the abstractive intelligence) fundamental, and Energy (or the sensual body) subordinate. Milton's God is Reason, his Satan Energy. The Hebraic creation myth portrays Energy rising in revolt against Reason and being cast out of Heaven; Energy then creates an oppositional Hell from which it plots the seduction of humankind - Reason's new creation. But Blake contends that Reason is incapable of creative acts. These are possible only for Energy, which is Imagination and the divine power. Thus a truthful account of creation, as myth, must take the form of an inversion of Genesis. In Blake's Marriage, Satan or Energy is the original archangel, Hell his domain. When God, or Reason, revolts, Energy triumphs and casts him and his angels out; who then form an oppositional Heaven out of the materials in the abyss. And now it is Reason which seeks to pervert humankind by persuading it to reject the promptings of the sensual body and make the prudish mind its guide.
Blake was at war with all forms of institutional authority - political, religious, philosophic - seeing them as modes of control over the instinctive human individual, and life-denying. Blake was a Christian, but his Christ was the furious figure who cast the money-lenders out of the temple, not the pale Galileean of a million crucifixion scenes. As soon as the religious spirit subjects itself to systematisation in churches, hierarchies, doctrines and dogmas, it suffers distortion. It is in this sense that Pullman is a Blakean. His imaginative impulses are anti-authoritarian, his creation myth a kind of half-way house between Blake and Genesis. The fullest reference to his creation myth appears in chapter 2 of The Amber Spyglass. Here the angel Balthamos tells Will that "The Authority, God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty" (AS 33) are all names that the first-created angel gave to himself. "He told those who came after him that he had created them, but it was a lie." When a later-created angel discovered the truth, the Authority banished her, so initiating an oppositional state of affairs, angel versus angel. Balthamos and Baruch, the angels who become Will's helpers, follow the banished angel. But the Authority is now senile, and a far more powerful angel, Metatron, has become his Regent and is seeking to cement and extend his power. The repressive, heresy-hunting theocracy which controls Lyra's world worships the Authority, and if Metatron's forces succeed in vanquishing the armies ranged against them (led by Lord Asriel, and called the Magisterium), Metatron will intensify the Authority's efforts of control, instituting "a permanent Inquisition" (AS 393). The struggle within the novel is therefore one of Authority versus Freedom, with Asriel seeking to establish what Pullman calls "the Republic of Heaven", a world in which individuals are free-thinking and self-determining - a utopian anarchy.
Pullman's Authority is Blake's Ancient of Days - so shrivelled and pathetic a being that when in The Amber Spyglass he leaves his protective litter he simply dissolves into thin air with "a sigh of the most profound and exhausted relief" (AS 432). Blake impishly called this false God "old Nobodaddy" because, though he claimed to be the Father, he was nobody's daddy. Metatron is identified as Enoch, son of Jared, who appears in Genesis 5 - just six generations removed from Adam. Enoch, we read in the King James bible, begat Methuselah, lived 365 years and "walked with God" until God "took him" (verse 24). Pullman's warring contraries represent a melding of Milton and Blake. In Blake the ongoing ideological battle is fought between Heaven and Hell, angels and devils; Pullman makes no mention of devils or Hell - terms which would be problematic for a contemporary non-satiric writer to handle. Angels appear on both sides in his conflict, but represent only a part of the forces ranged against each other.
One of Blake's major objections to received Christian doctrine, and to Milton its poetic apologist, focuses on the Christian trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. This did not seem to Blake a creative triad. It excludes the feminine and elevates the abstract. In the Marriage, playing the devil's advocate, he writes: "...in Milton the Father is destiny, the Son a ratio of the five senses, and the Holy Ghost vacuum!" Glossing the second of these terms, David V. Erdman3 offers "a rationale, a logical abstraction derived hypothetically from what the senses observe"; on the third, he comments "Because he is ignored by Milton". Yeats, good Blakean that he was, reacted with similar disdain to the Christian tradition, preferring the cabbalistic trinity of man, woman and child, which is dynamic and creative (see, e.g., "Supernatural Songs"). It's therefore interesting to note that Pullman's portrayal of the human self is trinitarian and subordinates the abstract to the corporeal. The self consists of the embodied person ("Lyra", "Will"), the dæmon, an embodied spirit ("Pantalaimon", "Kirjava"), and the soul, which after death becomes a ghost possessed of a tenuous and mortal materiality. Pullman has said that the dæmon was partly suggested by Socrates's daimon4 , partly by the old idea of the guardian angel. The dæmon is an animal guide or advisor that accompanies the person through his or her life, and is without doubt the richest single invention in the trilogy. The idea is one of great subtlety. For one thing, the dæmon's form remains unfixed until the person reaches adolescence, at which point it acquires a form expressive of the person's innermost nature. For another, its sex differs from that of the person's, thus suggesting also an embodied version of Jung's animus or anima. The self, therefore, in Pullman's conception encompasses both the masculine and the feminine. The embodiment of person and dæmon offers a contrast to the abstract character of Milton's hypostases. Pullman's trinity is entirely in accord with the philosophy of life which emerges from his books. It is celebratory and experience-embracing. It fully recognises suffering and death, but offers no supernatural wish-fulfilment consolations. The supremacy of embodied experience is attested everywhere in His Dark Materials. The passionate mutual love of the male angels Balthamos and Baruch aches for a material consummation which their forms cannot provide. Metatron yearns after the incarnation he long ago lost: his desire for the magnetic Mrs Coulter is an absurdity, as only beings of flesh can possess one another. In this sense Pullman's text powerfully rejects the Christian tradition's doctrinal insistence on the body as the source of sin, and canonic Catholicism's insistence on a celibate and patriarchal priesthood.
The poetic intertextuality of His Dark Materials is, however, only the first of the novel's two major sources of inspiration. For Pullman has intertwined with the literary and mythic elements, in an original and remarkable way, elements of contemporary scientific theory - most notably, quantum physics. From Pullman's obviously extensive reading in scientific ideas come two of his most important conceptions: multiple worlds, and Dust.
In Lyra's world, dominated by a repressive and hierarchical Church, the many worlds theory is known as "the Barnard-Stokes heresy". Experimental scientists are the priesthood of this Church, and the Church imprisons those who hold heterodox ideas. It is Church dogma that there is only one world. Lord Asriel, who in Northern Lights plans to build a bridge through the aurora borealis which will enable him to cross to another world, is therefore a dangerous heretic. In Will's world (which is our world) the many-worlds theory is identified as that of Everett (SK 253). Many-worlds theories (I pluralise the term, since there are now a number of them) are a product of quantum theory. Quantum theory is a theory based on the observed behaviour of subatomic particles and seeks to account for the nature of reality. Its defining characteristic is its probabilistic nature. Many-worlds theory was born in a famous paper of 1956 by the American Hugh Everett III (1930-1982). Everett proposed that reality "splits" at moments when more than one outcome of an irreversible process is possible, and all possibilities (or probabilites) are realised. Humans, however, can know only the single reality they inhabit. Other realities exist elsewhere, spread out on what contemporary quantum theory calls "the universal wave function".5
Unvisitable many-worlds would be of little use to a fiction-writer. Pullman therefore invents a number of means by which his characters can access them (the aurora borealis, where the boundaries between universes thin, the subtle knife which cuts a hole between universes). The worlds he portrays are of course only a tiny number amongst the vast panoply which the wave function contains, and they are all significantly differentiated in order to entertain us. A moment's quantum-conscious thought, however, will suggest that alongside the world which contains the Pullman novel that you and I have read, or will read, there exists a host of others in which he made different fictive choices, there to be consumed by parallel versions of us... The mind boggles.
Quantum particles are responsible for the working of two of the most intriguing of Pullman's mechanical inventions in the novel - the alethiometer, the truth-telling device which Lyra is magically able to read almost as soon as it is given to her by her guardian, the Master of Jordan College; and the lodestone resonator, which the Gallivespian spies use to communicate with their masters in other worlds. We're told of the latter, in fact, that it operates by virtue of entanglement, a concept of great importance in the elaboration of particle behaviour in the subatomic realm.
Then there is Dust, which seems to have been suggested to Pullman by the "dark matter" which cosmologists believe exists in the universe, but remains undetectable. In Lyra's world, the Church calls Dust "Rusakov Particles" and regards it as an abomination: "an emanation from the dark principle itself" (NL 97). Dust is attracted to humans as soon as they reach adolescence, but not before. The General Oblation Board (known to Lyra and her friends as the Gobblers) has been set up to find a way of discouraging its attentions. Perhaps if people can be separated from their dæmons... "Oblation" means sacrifice, and the Gobblers abduct straying children, take them to the far north where the Church's experimental theologians, using a kind of guillotine, cut them off from their animal spirits. As a result of which, unsurprisingly, they die.
Mary Malone is a very different sort of scientist. She belongs to Will's - our - world, and is conducting research into Dust, which she calls "Shadow-particles". When her research project is cancelled, she finds her way to the world of the mulefa, which is in crisis. His Dark Materials is, among many other things, a work of fiction that's intensely ecologically conscious, and this consciousness manifests itself not only in the shrinking ice-caps of Lyra's world, but in the crisis faced by the mulefa. The trees on which these strange creatures depend are dying. Mary, bringing her skills to bear on the problem, realises that the trees require Dust to fertilise their blossoms. Not only has the flow of the Shadow-particles changed direction so that fertilisation no longer takes place, Dust is actually leaking out of the world through a rift in its fabric. Mary's investigations in two worlds produce a very different account of Dust from that proffered by the Church of Lyra's world. The Shadow-particles, she believes, are conscious. Moreover, Dust and matter are mutually attractive.
...Dust came into being when living things became conscious of themselves; but it needed some feedback system to reinforce it and make it safe, as the mulefa had their wheels and oil from the trees. Without something like that, it would all vanish. Thought, imagination, feeling, would all wither and blow away, leaving nothing but a brutish automatism; and that brief period when life was conscious of itself would flicker out like a candle in every one of the billions of worlds where it had burned brightly. (AS 476)
Some quantum theorists, albeit a minority (it isn't an experimentally demonstrable hypothesis), hold to the view that subatomic particles are, as the fundamental components of material life, endowed with consciousness. This is the view that the novel reflects. Through Dust, Pullman's ecological concerns achieve a holistic vision. The directional flow of the Shadow-particles in the mulefa's world changes when Lyra and Will come to consciousness of their love for one another. Flowing downwards towards them, it can again fertilise the trees. Love, in this world as in all others, is the key to everything.
It is, in my view, its original, suggestive and far-reaching interfusion of poetic myth with ideas derived from modern science that gives His Dark Materials its particular imaginative character. Poetic myth enables it to tap into the deep wells of culture, and achieve a remarkable resonance. Its play with scientific ideas gives it a powerfully contemporary charge. With one foot anchored in the past and one in the present, it can enjoy the benefits of two realms sometimes thought mutually-exclusive, but here shown to be perfectly in harmony. Pullman's is a many-layered as well as a many-worlded work, a polyphonic text the reading of which enables the mind engaging it to grow: a process highly appropriate to a work written for children - and perhaps for adults too.
Back to top ^
4. Rehabilitating temptation
In the first section of this essay I referred to the fact that some of Pullman's readers (especially on the other side ofthe Atlantic) have taken the book as anti-Christian, and on my own account I suggested that the view of the world and of human belief-systems which it conveys is anything but value-free. Pullman himself has rejected the idea that the work contains a "message": he's not, he maintains, that kind of writer. Now, as I hope my discussion has shown, these books are extremely complex, and articulate a dialectic between warring forces. Furthermore, complexity is embodied in individual characters who are required to make difficult choices in fraught situations, and who in some instances (most notably Mrs Coulter) surprise themselves in the process. We're not faced here, that is, by some simplistic Hollywood-style face-off between good and evil. But even sophisticated writers have their beliefs. One person's belief is for another prejudice, and I finished this book with a definite sense that religious and philosophical ideas had been dealt with in such a way as to guide my thoughts in a certain direction. As a free-thinking individual, of course, I take it that I have the option to assent to these ideas or to reject them - and that is true of any book. A book cannot put us under compulsion: we're at liberty to toss it into the bin whenever we wish. It is, however, a sacred article of contemporary belief that not only children but adults are affected by what they read, and that children, with less experience of the world, are more impressionable than their elders. So, then: exactly what is the direction of the guidance that I detect, and why is it that one of many strands of meaning should acquire pre-eminence over so many others?
To address the why first. The crucial character here is Mary Malone. The curve of her life-experience is revealing. Mary is a scientist and an ex-nun. In her early adulthood she was driven by an intense sense of vocation and belief in God. Abruptly, however, she lost that belief. Discovering human love, she became convinced of its superiority to the love she'd entertained for the deity, which suddenly struck her as self-serving and narcissistic. At the same time, the departure of God from her life left a hole which nothing seemed to fill - until, that is, Mary much later in life becomes persuaded of the consciousness of the Shadow-particles, and hence of the holistic nature of the universe, its positivity and purposiveness. The hole in her world is filled: she has recovered belief again. Now, as one isolated character among many, Mary's life-experience would merely offer one curvature among many. But Mary is a character whose idealism the text seems to underwrite. As a disinterested and altruistic scientist, her example is implicitly admirable. Nor does she remain an isolated figure - despite the alone in "Malone": she plays a key role in the novel's mythic pattern.
This pattern constitutes a reworking of the story of Eden. Into the crisis-ridden world of the mulefa come the awakening adolescents Lyra and Will. Not only are they Eve and Adam; Lyra is a version of Lyca - Blake's little girl lost and found - and Will of his little boy lost and found. Lost because in their different ways they have been deprived of one or both parents. Found because they recover parents - though they lose them again. Parental surrogates abound in the book, but Mary is the most important of these. And, curiously, it is her destiny (as she knows) to combine the role of surrogate mother with that of temptress - she must be the serpent at the heart of paradise. And this serpent - teasingly, blasphemously - bears the name of the mother of Jesus.
What is the nature of this temptation? It consists in Mary telling her life-story to Lyra and Will. In one sense hers is the temptation of all stories - to immerse ourselves in something that is both not ourselves and is perfectly ourselves, since the best stories fit our imaginations like gloves. Beyond that, it lies in the substance of the story. Mary's story is not value-free - it is the reasoned account of one person's journey from belief to unbelief.
"I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn't any God at all and that physics was more interesting anyway. The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all." (AS 464)
Mary follows this reflection with an account of her discovery of human love as a young girl. Her story of how a boy puts a piece of marzipan in her mouth and awakens her love for him has an extraordinary effect on Lyra: "She felt something strange happen to her body. She felt a stirring at the roots of her hair..." (AS 467). Stories are not just stories: they can make things happen. Lyra's subsequent Eve-like offering of fruit to Will constitutes a re-enactment of Mary's experience with sex roles reversed. When she tells him she loves him:
The word love set his nerves ablaze. All his body thrilled with it, and he answered her in the same words, kissing her hot face over and over again, drinking in with adoration the scent of her body and her warm honey-fragrant hair and her sweet moist mouth that tasted of the little red fruit. (AS 492)
This passage has all of Pullman's characteristic sensuality. It pulls no punches, and authentically recreates the intensity of one's first adolescent kiss. Sexuality and the life of the body are located in a counter-Christian context created by an atheistic storyteller, liberated from the associations of sinfulness which religion teaches, while at the same time bathed in the transgressive thrust of the biblical temptation myth. It would not be too much to say that for Pullman sexuality is inseparable from ideology. It's in the light of such considerations that I maintain that His Dark Materials is not a value-free work of literature. If some readers feel it to be an onslaught on what their religious instructors have instilled in them, they may not be mistaken - as they would not be mistaken, I would argue, when sensing the exceptional power of the writing at work on them.
Back to top ^
Notes
1 "Darkness Visible: an Interview with Philip Pullman" (interviewer unidentified). Pullman also speaks revealingly in his "ACHUKA interview" (www.achuka.co.uk/ppint.htm).
2 Pullman describes and discusses Kleist's essay in "Darkness Visible".
3 See Blake, The Complete Poems (Longman 1971) p. 107.
4 A "prophetic voice" that had been about the philosopher since boyhood, "which, when it comes, always turns me away from doing something I am intending to do, but never urges me on". (The Apology, in Great Dialogues of Plato, trs. W.H.D. Rouse (Mentor Books 1956 p. 437) />
5 See, e.g., on the internet, The Everett FAQ, whose author, Michael Clive Price, contends that a majority of contemporary cosmologists and quantum physicists are many-worlders (www.hedweb.com/manworld.htm).
Back to top ^