The Amber Spyglass – Philip Pullman
The task of summing up my reaction to the whole of the ‘His Dark Materials‘ trilogy is somewhat daunting, and I am coming to the conclusion that one read is simply not enough. Certainly in The Amber Spyglass, that very slight loss of momentum observed in The Subtle Knife is overcome. Certainly the big set-piece dramas, such as the descent of certain parties into the abyss, winning the war at the cost of the battle, are superbly effective. The ending puts the reader through the emotional mill and, narratively speaking, is exactly the right one, just as the ending of Frenchman’s Creek is the only one possible. I like the way that Pullman doesn’t shy away from the big things – such as going down a totally different branch of evolution to create a civilisation, or demoting God to ‘just another angel, only more successful’, or having him appear in person in the narrative, or having the baddie living inside a flying mountain.
The theme of the Harry Potter novels is that the true source of evil is in the hearts of humanity and therefore must be actively resisted – where would Voldemort be without his followers? Is this in fact the reason why he is often dismissed as a pretty poor villain? Because he is just the figurehead and the true source of evil lies with his supporters and the people who refuse to actively oppose him? And so, what is the underlying morality of the Pullman books? He is certainly not denying the existence of the supernatural since we meet angels, and even God at one point, face to face. Is he positioning them as ‘just another race’ alongside the humans, witches and bears? Certainly most of the evil we see – the actions of Mrs Coulter, various awful scientists and practitioners of different branches of the church, the small-minded police officers and manipulative security operatives, in ‘our world’, the portrayal of Will’s mum with a mental illness and unable to get any understanding, treatment or sympathetic help, are the actions of humans. But there’s a figurehead in this narrative too, Metatron, whose power is portrayed as genuinely terrifying. How does all this fit together and is there a conflict?
I have come to the conclusion that I have read the trilogy through fast for the adventure, to find out what happened. I think that if I want to understand the theology – the nature of Dust, Lyra’s role in things, the relationship between the human and the supernatural, I am going to have to go through and read it again much more carefully. And also to read this Guardian piece by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to see if he can shed any light on it. In the fantasy crossover department, I should say I was powerfully struck with some of the similarities between this and events in Ursula le Guin’s latest Earthsea novel, The Other Wind. In both books, humankind seems to have got itself down a spiritual dead end, in both novels people die only to go to a horrible, dark, lifeless place like some kind of dreadful transit camp, holding out their hands to the living, begging them for release. In both, when the spiritual conflict is resolved, the dead are released by ceasing to be. The le Guin was written at the end of the 90s, The Amber Spyglass I think in 2000. This is a terribly interesting glimpse into the issues that may have been preoccupying us towards the end of the millennium.