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juushikaIt has been a long and difficult two days of weeping over His Dark Materials.
Pullman's mythos grows too precise for me at times: spirit and soul and ghost is too much delineation, there's a focus on Christian(/Abrahamic, but let's be honest: Christian) mythology and social institutions that erases a lot of human experience/consciousness, and the relationship between Dust and spectres and windows and the abyss seems to exists only to create the book's final quandary. It's for a good cause, because Will and Lyra's respective fates well hammer home much of the book's final message—and it's a message I appreciate—but it feels contrived; perhaps more importantly, re-isolating the many worlds defies the theme of rebellion against externally-created rules. Then there are little details, like the role of the harpies in the afterlife, which don't jive with the redefined Christian mythos; I like them, they're inventive, but they seem out of place.
I'd also argue with the emphasis placed on human consciousness as superbly unique and valuable, which is not a view I share, but honestly Pullman seems to waver on it: dæmon take animal forms, panserbjørne are not human and define their self/soul relationship differently (but are still susceptible to spectres), the mulefa have more naturalistic/less advanced interactions with the world but also have the most direct known relationship to Dust—Pullman still treats consciousness as the Most Important, and I don't agree, but there's at least some wiggle room around the definition/proof of consciousness.
I first read The Amber Spyglass is 2001; I was sixteen. I don't remember having too many arguments with the details of Pullman's mythos; what I remember was the best coming of age that I had ever seen. In literature, adolescence is sometimes the death of childhood and sometimes a period of hell (and fodder for Problem Novels) and sometimes the sudden transition into being a real person; Pullman's coming of age is all and none of that. Childhood is limited, not idealized, by its lack of repercussions, identity, personal growth. The bridge towards adulthood is troubled and exceedingly painful, but it is also built of joy and discovery. And always, it is the process that matters most: the choice to create and become oneself. Judy Blume had given me a dozen ways to survive the evils of adolescence, but Pullman said that this, here, was the most important thing I could do: I could become myself, and it was difficult and it was beautiful and it was indescribably important. Lyra is robbed of her childhood self-assurance, and that's a good thing; you're not supposed hunker down and try to outlast the storm of adolescence, but instead should try and fail and learn and create within and because of it.
I can't say that Pullman's one counter-example redefined my adolescence, but His Dark Materials remains my single favorite coming of age story; I have never seen another author handle it with such compassion and hope.
I take from these books dæmons, the conversation with soul, the desire for a heart's companion; characters lit from within by an intense force of will that surpasses boundaries of age and gender; the intimacies that arise from and overcome the meeting of two such wills, and companionship born of everything but nicety and polite society; the choice to lay down a life for a person or goal, even if the goal is far away and unknowing, because the life and the fight matter; the knowledge that my experience and my actions, not any external guide, defines me and determines my worth, and that all the difficulty of choice and experimentation and creation is the most important thing that I can do; that Dust, my will and consciousness, is beautiful.
In some ways it's a mythos as highly structured as the battle with the Authority and the passage of souls though the world of the dead—and equally as flawed—but few books give me such a mythos. The series's stories and characters fascinate me, but that's true of many books; few books make me cry as I read them, and fewer give me something so vast and highly constructed and yet deeply resonant as this. It's the opposite of regret and survival and Problem Novels; it is sometimes just as fallible as them, but it is much more meaningful and necessary for me to know.
See also thoughts on the first half of the series, and on characters and dæmons.
Pullman's mythos grows too precise for me at times: spirit and soul and ghost is too much delineation, there's a focus on Christian(/Abrahamic, but let's be honest: Christian) mythology and social institutions that erases a lot of human experience/consciousness, and the relationship between Dust and spectres and windows and the abyss seems to exists only to create the book's final quandary. It's for a good cause, because Will and Lyra's respective fates well hammer home much of the book's final message—and it's a message I appreciate—but it feels contrived; perhaps more importantly, re-isolating the many worlds defies the theme of rebellion against externally-created rules. Then there are little details, like the role of the harpies in the afterlife, which don't jive with the redefined Christian mythos; I like them, they're inventive, but they seem out of place.
I'd also argue with the emphasis placed on human consciousness as superbly unique and valuable, which is not a view I share, but honestly Pullman seems to waver on it: dæmon take animal forms, panserbjørne are not human and define their self/soul relationship differently (but are still susceptible to spectres), the mulefa have more naturalistic/less advanced interactions with the world but also have the most direct known relationship to Dust—Pullman still treats consciousness as the Most Important, and I don't agree, but there's at least some wiggle room around the definition/proof of consciousness.
I first read The Amber Spyglass is 2001; I was sixteen. I don't remember having too many arguments with the details of Pullman's mythos; what I remember was the best coming of age that I had ever seen. In literature, adolescence is sometimes the death of childhood and sometimes a period of hell (and fodder for Problem Novels) and sometimes the sudden transition into being a real person; Pullman's coming of age is all and none of that. Childhood is limited, not idealized, by its lack of repercussions, identity, personal growth. The bridge towards adulthood is troubled and exceedingly painful, but it is also built of joy and discovery. And always, it is the process that matters most: the choice to create and become oneself. Judy Blume had given me a dozen ways to survive the evils of adolescence, but Pullman said that this, here, was the most important thing I could do: I could become myself, and it was difficult and it was beautiful and it was indescribably important. Lyra is robbed of her childhood self-assurance, and that's a good thing; you're not supposed hunker down and try to outlast the storm of adolescence, but instead should try and fail and learn and create within and because of it.
I can't say that Pullman's one counter-example redefined my adolescence, but His Dark Materials remains my single favorite coming of age story; I have never seen another author handle it with such compassion and hope.
I take from these books dæmons, the conversation with soul, the desire for a heart's companion; characters lit from within by an intense force of will that surpasses boundaries of age and gender; the intimacies that arise from and overcome the meeting of two such wills, and companionship born of everything but nicety and polite society; the choice to lay down a life for a person or goal, even if the goal is far away and unknowing, because the life and the fight matter; the knowledge that my experience and my actions, not any external guide, defines me and determines my worth, and that all the difficulty of choice and experimentation and creation is the most important thing that I can do; that Dust, my will and consciousness, is beautiful.
In some ways it's a mythos as highly structured as the battle with the Authority and the passage of souls though the world of the dead—and equally as flawed—but few books give me such a mythos. The series's stories and characters fascinate me, but that's true of many books; few books make me cry as I read them, and fewer give me something so vast and highly constructed and yet deeply resonant as this. It's the opposite of regret and survival and Problem Novels; it is sometimes just as fallible as them, but it is much more meaningful and necessary for me to know.
See also thoughts on the first half of the series, and on characters and dæmons.
