Module 8:
Science Fiction Fantasy
Book: The Golden Compass
Author: Philip
Pullman
Plot
The first book
of three, The Golden Compass introduces
us to characters such as Lyra Belacqua and her daemon Pantalaimon. In this
novel, we learn of Dust and the children of the gypsies being kidnapped and
taken to the Arctic. There, we speculate and are proven accurate that the children
are experimented on and being ‘cut’. Lyra, having realized that her friend
Roger has been taken as one of the kidnapped, goes forth and attempts to save
him with friends along the way. Fardar Coram, John Faa, Serafina Pekkala, Lee
Scoresby, Iorek Byrnison, Lord Asriel, Mrs. Coltier…all of these character help
and try to protect Lyra from Nature, the Church, and herself because of the
prophesy that was told about her and the alethiometer. The Golden Compass is full of science fiction in its aspect of
physics and even more filled with fantasy with characters such as witches and
king bears. The beginning of one of the most epic fantasy novels in the history
of literature, The Golden Compass is
sure to please those fans of outstanding writings and push those buttons of the
conservative few.
Impression of the Book
This book/series
belongs to epic/high fantasy. I read this quote from Bestfantasybook.com: A
popular subgenre that's often used interchangebly with Epic Fantasy. We feel
there is a distinction, however. High Fantasy tends to focus more on the
setting and the change and choices made by the protaganist while epic fantasy
tends to focus on the SCALE of conflict which affects the world at large. Epic
fantasy features a large cast of characters while High Fantasy usually fewer.
Because these two genres can include elements of the other, it's easy enough to
see why people call HIgh and Epic fantasy one and the same. The classic
definition of “High Fantasy” often refers to the secondary or parallel world
created for readers. The world we live in may be acknowledged, in the form of
visitors, or exile, or some other oblique reference; but it is not the world in
which the story’s action takes place. There, magic is a commonplace tool much
in demand due to the power and cunning of evil characters attempting to thwart
our heroes’’ attainment of their objectives (which tend to be grand and involve
saving the world and all its good inhabitants).
The type of
reader that would enjoy this book is any reader who enjoys a very deep science
fiction/ fantasy book. Golden Compass really is a mix of both worlds. The
subjects range from Christianity to Physics and is actually an inverted
retelling of Milton's Paradise Lost. It talks about Science and Religion as
interchangeable, has parallel universes, has daemons that can only exist in the
world of fantasy, has the most awesome clan of witches...my favorite ofcourse,
being Serafina Pekkela-the Queen of the clan of Lake Enara Witches. A Prince
Polar Bear who gets casted away and reclaims his throne, adults wanting to get
rid of "original sin" aka dust, gypsies, love stories, parents trying
to protect their kids, misguided adults, an aeronaut who flies a hot air
balloon to the ends of the world, and war-the most epic of wars that reaches
all universes. I mean come on!! This book is so epic but somewhat underrated
that it makes me feel like I am part of a secret that everyone should know.
Golden Compass is a good intro to the series and Lyra Belacqua is a great
heroin. The trilogy consists of Northern Lights (Golden Compass), the Subtle
Knife, and Amber Spyglass. By the end of the trilogy, I was in tears with the
way Will and Lyra ended up...there are three series/trilogies that have endings
that will always be a part of me: Harry Potter Series, The Hunger Games
trilogy, and His Dark Materials trilogy. I would rate the Golden Compass and
the rest of the books as 100 on a scale of 50. These books have to be read, are
meant to be read, and are meant to change...to move a generation. It not only
is a good sci/fi fantasy book but it is the definition of such and should be
the model of which other books are based upon. His Dark Material is science
fiction and fantasy...and at the very heart of it is humanity. So, I believe
that everyone can read this book and get something out of it.
Usage in a Library Setting
Librarians can explore the Physics side of the books and study what
formulas/laws/ hypothesis in this particular Science within the book is
actually plausible in real life. Theologically, kids can compare and
contrast the similarities of the books philosophical and theological ideals to
that of modern day philosophy and theology. Kids can also explore what
their daemons may be by comparing themselves to the characters in the book,
seeing who they like most or are most like.
If two more character are like the reader then the reader can combine the
daemons and see what comes of it.
Reviews
“The bestselling novels of J. K. Rowling have
tempted many reviewers to divide publishing history in two-The Potter Era and
Before the Potter Era-so often are the tales of our favorite Gryffendorf held
up as the standard for all children's literature. There are some who dissent
from this view, not simply out of spite, but because they think this is the era
of an even greater author who writes for children. The Harry Potter novels are
fun, which is why every reviewer seems to use the same
I-read-it-before-my-kids-could-get-to-it-ha-ha gambit. But few serious critics
praise Rowling with the superlatives-"sophisticated,"
"ambitious," "complex," "realistic"-regularly
applied to the novels of Philip Pullman, especially his fantasy epic series His
Dark Materials, whose third book, The Amber Spyglass, just won the prestigious
British Book Award for the Children's Book of the Year (the first book won in
1996), and is currently just behind Rowling on the New York Times children's
bestseller list.
Now I love the Harry Potter books. But there is no
passage in Rowling's series that compares with this delightful description of Lyra
Belacqua, the child heroine of Pullman's novels: In many ways Lyra was a
barbarian. What she liked the best was clambering over the College roofs with
Roger, the kitchen boy who was her particular friend, to spit plum stones on
the heads of passing Scholars or to hoot like owls outside a window where a
tutorial was going on, or racing through the narrow streets, or stealing apples
from the market, or waging war. Just as she was unaware of the hidden currents
of politics running below the surface of College affairs, so the Scholars, for
their part, would have been unable to see the rich seething stew of alliances
and enmities and feuds and treaties which was a child's life in Oxford.
Children playing together: how pleasant to see! What could be more innocent and
charming?
Few
authors have captured the terrific energy of children of a certain age as well.
Although he writes for children, Pullman refuses to be pigeonholed as a
children's author, arguing that "When you say 'this book is for children'
what you are really saying is 'This book is not for grown-ups.'" He also
doesn't think of himself as a fantasy author, insisting that His Dark Materials
is "stark realism," because the fantastic elements of the story are
there just to support and embody a vision of what man really is,
psychologically, metaphysically, and spiritually. "Why shouldn't a work of
fantasy be as truthful and profound about becoming an adult human being as the
work of George Eliot or Jane Austen?" he asks, and rightly so. Pullman
thinks Milton's Paradise Lost is just such a mature fantasy, and His Dark
Materials is supposed to be a modern retelling of the Garden of Eden story
after a very Miltonian fashion. Pullman conceived of the series after writing
down its first words, "Lyra and her daemon." The idea of daemons
(pronounced "demons") has antecedents in the daimon or spirit that
Socrates claimed as an aid in his judgment, and in the tradition of guardian
angels. A daemon is a part of the human soul that takes the visible form of an
animal, or many animals-the daemons of children change shape constantly, but
settle down at puberty into just one shape as a person's character becomes more
definite. So the helmsman of a boat might have a seagull as his daemon, while
Pantalaimon, Lyra Belacqua's daemon, begins the series as a moth but shifts
into a mouse, a dragon, an ermine, a mountain lion, a cat, and just about any
animal shape you can think of. It is extraordinarily painful for daemons to go
far from their people (it feels like your heart is being torn from your
breast), and when Lyra sees at one stage a boy without a daemon, she is
revolted: The little boy was huddled against the wood drying rack where hung
row upon row of gutted fish, all stiff as boards. He was clutching a piece of
fish to him as Lyra was clutching Pantalaimon, with her left hand, hard,
against her heart; but that was all he had, a piece of dried fish; because he
had no daemon at all. The Gobblers had cut it away. That was intercision, and
this was a severed child. Her first impulse was to turn and run, or to be sick.
This device of the daemon, which is one of the great inventions of fantastic
fiction, frames Pullman's whole trilogy. The reader comes to love daemons,
especially Lyra's Pantalaimon, and one can easily imagine thousands of children
(and not a few adults) wishing they had one.
The Golden
Compass really begins when
street urchins and servants' children begin disappearing all over Europe (in
the parallel world in which the action takes place). Word spreads on the
streets that the Gobblers have stolen them, and are performing terrible
experiments on them way up in the Arctic Circle. A mysterious substance called
Dust seems to be involved, but the Church has forbidden any discussion of Dust,
for it falls in the realm of philosophical speculation rather than theological
research, and because it may have something to do with Original Sin. When
Lyra's best friend Roger and another boy are taken by the Gobblers, Lyra
becomes determined to rescue them, and her adventures begin. There is a
prophecy about Lyra that she will determine the fate of the universe, although
she must do so without knowing what she is doing.
In The Subtle Knife, book two of the series, we meet
Will Parry, a boy from Oxford in our world, who also is destined to play a
major role in the history of the cosmos-he finds and bears a knife called
God-killer that can cut a passage between worlds. He and Lyra meet in
Cittigazze, an Italianate city in yet a third world. Will is looking for his
father, an explorer who Will thinks has travelled into a different world, and
Lyra's alethiometer (a truth-telling device, the golden compass of
the first book) tells her she should help him. Lyra wants also to help her
father, the mysterious Lord Asriel, who is preparing to overthrow the Authority
("God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father,
the Almighty-those were all names he gave himself," an angel tells Will).
He can do this, he thinks, because what the Church calls God is really only the
name for the first angel, who tried to trick all the other creatures into
submitting to him. Some of the angels rebelled centuries ago, but lost, and now
Lord Asriel is rallying the remnant of those who favor truth over the
Authority's lies to overthrow the Kingdom of Heaven and replace it with the
Republic of Heaven.
The Amber Spyglass adds to the mix a fourth world,
where the mulafeh, elephant-like people who roll around on wheels made from the
giant seeds of giant trees, are starting to die off from the raids of giant
swans and because the giant trees are dying as Dust leaves the world. So by the
end of the series, Lyra and Will have to overthrow the Authority, rescue the
dead (did I mention they make a trip to the realm of the dead a la Dante?),
save the mulefah, heal the breach between the worlds, prevent the Gobblers from
intercising children's daemons, and establish the Republic of Heaven, all the
while remaining in a state of innocence so that they can either relive or
renounce Eve's choice in the Garden of Eden.
Pullman
has set himself an ambitious task, trying to tell a complex yet realistic tale
about the death of God and the true nature and destiny of man. He has the
talent to have pulled it off, but unfortunately, his atheism gets in the way.
For unlike John Milton and his other hero William Blake, Pullman is a Richard
Dawkins-type materialist, and his atheism fatally flaws The Amber Spyglass, and
therefore, retroactively, the whole series. Pullman, who raised more than a few
eyebrows with an article in the Guardian excoriating C. S. Lewis' Narnia
stories for their tendency to lapse into preaching, falls prey to that same bad
habit himself. Indeed, to facilitate his preaching, he breaks many of the rules
of fantasy-writing in this third volume, and although this probably makes his
novel more appropriate for children, it seriously weakens it as art.
Atheists
can write perfectly good and realistic fiction, because there is nothing about
being an atheist that prohibits a person from understanding human motivation
and the physical world. But being nonreligious does deprive you of the one
thing an ambitious fantasy author needs: a plausible cosmology, a myth that
tells us how things got to be the way they are. The great religions all provide
this. One could even hold, as did Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, that a religion
is just a story of the world, which in the case of Christianity (they held)
happens to be true. A Christian fantasist in his act of subcreation can borrow
heavily from the true mythic world created by the Christian God; the fantasist
might change some of the names and other details, but the basic infinitely rich
story has already been told.
The nonreligious fantasy author is forced to play
the mythmaker twice, as it were. He has to develop a cosmology of the way the
world really is, the nonreligious account that replaces the account given by
the religions he rejects. And he has to write the fantasy story, obeying all
the rules of the larger account and then creating his own world within it. In
the first two books of the trilogy, Pullman merely alluded to the larger
account while telling an imaginative and exciting adventure, which promised to
be one of the best ever. In the third book, however, he needed to explain his
theory of innocence and adulthood, which he thought required him to tell a
different story of the Fall, which in turn tempted him to explain how
everything we think and feel can be explained simply by scientific materialism.
As
one might expect, it is hard to accomplish all this and still tell a good tale,
and despite the extra work he put into writing it (Pullman took two years
longer than he originally promised to finish the third volume), and despite his
attempts to make the book consistent with cutting-edge research in physics (he
alludes to aspects of quantum nonlocality and multi-dimensional string theory),
The Amber Spyglass is not a success. There are moments of brilliant writing,
but Pullman's imagination is not up to his ambitions, so that what should be
the breathlessly anticipated climax is instead rather dull.
It
is clear through Pullman's many hints that the destiny of all the universe is
tied up with the budding love between Will and Lyra. After the long buildup,
and with all the turmoil caused by the Armageddon-like battle, one expects the
series to end with a Garden of Eden moment, where Lyra and Will have to make
some important choice that determines how things will be from now on. I was
waiting with no little trepidation to see what sort of fascinating gnostic myth
Pullman would offer in place of the Christian one. If Pullman were to
accomplish his transvaluation of all values, where good is evil and evil good,
and God and Christian morality and all that organized religion stands for are
to be shown for the lies that they are, this is the scene where it ought to
take place.
Yet no such alternative theory is on offer. In
Pullman's telling, the fate of all creation hinges, not on some difficult
choice between good and evil, but merely on the moment when Will and Lyra first
kiss. Somehow (and in the 1,100 pages of the trilogy there is nothing that
suggests why this is of literally cosmic significance), after this kiss-and
that's as far as they go-the Dust that had been flowing out of the universe
flows back in, and an age of peace and love is suddenly possible. Because these
two young teenagers are basically innocent, as the shifting of their daemons
reveals, their innocent love is supposed to show that sex and things of the
flesh are very good, when properly ordered. Pullman mistakenly attacks
Christian asceticism when he really is rejecting only heretical Manicheism.
Religious people should find nothing objectionable
in the moral message (though Pullman seems to think they will), but the failure
of imagination here is unforgivable. Kissing may be great and all, but only a
lovesick teenager can believe that everything is different after the first
kiss. As we saw above, Pullman captures the complexities of childhood too well
for us to accept that it is simply sexual innocence, and adulthood sexual
experience. What is supposed to be the moment of high drama for the trilogy
disappointingly provides only maudlin banalities.
Fortunately,
there's a little bit more to the story. Soon after The Kiss, Will and Lyra are
forced to make a very painful choice between their own happiness and keeping
their promises to others-and they choose loyalty and the common good. The
possibility of great happiness is presented to them, and they give it up at
great cost to themselves. This melancholy ending redeems the earlier banality,
both morally and narratively-but only by appealing to the very Christian notion
that we should put aside even good things like kissing in the name of the last
things. The choice that Lyra and Will make is analogous to the choice a young
man or woman considering religious celibacy makes: though I can reject my
destiny, and it will require great strength to carry out, I am clearly called
to forgo the great good of marriage in order that others may enjoy life and go
to heaven.
It
is not surprising that as acute an observer as Pullman inadvertantly develops
such a powerfully Christian scene. I'll let a passage from The Amber Spyglass
explain why. In the land of the dead, harpies have been appointed by the
Authority to shout to all the souls of the dead and call to mind all their
anxieties and misdeeds. Over time the ghosts lose their memories of being
alive, in part, it seems, as a defense against the harpies' painful reminders.
When Lyra and her party arrive in the underworld, the harpies attack them with
great delight-being still alive, their painful memories and doubts are still
fresh and strong. Lyra tries to bargain with No-Name, the chief harpy.
"What
do you want with us?"
said
Lyra.
"What
can you give me?"
"We
could tell you where we've been, and maybe you'd
be
interested, I don't know. We saw all kinds
of
strange things on the way here."
"Oh,
and you're offering to tell me a story?"
"If
you'd like."
"Maybe
I would. . . . Try then," said No-Name.
Lyra,
who is a terrific storyteller and whose quick-thinking and skillful lies get
her out of trouble throughout the series, begins to spin one of her best tales,
when "Without a cry of warning, the harpy launched herself at Lyra, claws
outstretched. . . . 'Liar! Liar!' the harpy was screaming. 'Liar!'" Later,
though, when Lyra recounts to the dead spirit of a little girl true stories of
her childhood and travels to help the girl remember what the world of the
living is like, Lyra looks up to see the harpies listening in, "solemn and
spellbound." Why?
"Because
it was true," said No-Name. "Because she spoke the truth. Because it
was nourishing. Because it was feeding us. Because we couldn't help it. Because
it was true. Because we had no idea there was anything but wickedness. Because
it brought us news of the world and the sun and the wind and the rain. Because
it was true."
Though
it is heavy-handed, I found this a powerful image, the putrid harpies enthralled
by simple truths well told. Even the monsters in Pullman's world are attracted
by innocence and truth. Even they are not beyond redemption, are in need of
true stories. This passage reveals Pullman's philosophy of literature to be
identical with the "true myth" philosophy of Lewis and Tolkien. And
if the Christian myth actually is true, you would expect a gifted storyteller
trying to tell a true story to arrive at many Christian conclusions about the
nature of the world we see.
The
Christian myth has such a powerful hold over our narrative imagination that it
is probably impossible to write a believable epic, especially one about the
Last Things, without relying on it extensively. Pullman challenges the most
fantastic and yet most persuasive parts of the Christian myth-Creation, the
Fall, Sin, Death, Heaven, Hell-and one credits him for gumption. If his
alternative were more compelling, I would recommend parents keep their children
away. (Pullman has just signed to do a "reference work" called The
Book of Dust which will lay out the creation myth in full, and thus probably
won't be appropriate-or interesting-for children.)
As
is, I can fairly characterize His Dark Materials in this fashion: imagine if at
the beginning of the world Satan's rebellion had been successful, that he had
reigned for two thousand years, and that a messiah was necessary to conquer
lust and the spirit of domination with innocence, humility, and generous love
at great personal cost. Such a story is not subversive of Christianity, it is
almost Christian, even if only implicitly and imperfectly. But implicit and
imperfect Christianity is often our lot in life, and Pullman has
unintentionally created a marvelous depiction of many of the human ideals
Christians hold dear.”
~~~~~~~~ Reviewed by Daniel P.
Moloney ;Daniel P. Moloney is Associate Editor of First Things.
APA CITATIONS
Moloney, D. P. (2001). The Golden
Compass / The Subtle Knife / The Amber Spyglass (Book Reviews). First
Things: A Monthly Journal Of Religion & Public Life, (113), 45-49.
Pullman, P. (1996). The golden
compass. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
This
book is so expressive in its adjectives that I would ask the children to listen
to the novel very intently as we read it together because I would ask them to
draw at least two of the characters in the novel. Then, as an exercise in
storytelling and imagination, I would ask each of the kids to write a
mystery story about the characters they chose thus creating a mini story from the
bigger story. Those who would like to share their stories are welcome to say it
out loud. 
