Twenty years ago, I visited the Botanic Garden in Oxford for the first time. Among the winding pathways lined with flowers, about halfway back, stood a bench under a tree, largely identical to the others throughout the park. Was this the one? I wondered.
I didn’t have to question it for long. A closer look revealed words and images etched along its wooden slats, all along similar lines: “Lyra + Will”, they said. Or: “Pantalaimon” and “Kirjava”. Tucked between the bench’s arm and seat was a folded-up scrap of paper with a handwritten message of thanks.
That was five years after The Amber Spyglass, the final novel in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, was published; this was the bench at the center of the book’s heart-wrenching conclusion. Visit it today and there’s no doubt about its literary significance: a statue of two of those characters, the animal-shaped Pantalaimon and Kirjava, was placed behind the bench in 2019.
After His Dark Materials, Pullman wrote The Book of Dust, a second trilogy set in the same world(s). In October, the final book in that trilogy, The Rose Field, was published, bringing readers’ time with Lyra Silvertongue, the fantasy series’ protagonist, to a close. It marks the end of one of the great literary accomplishments of recent decades: the Guardian listed The Amber Spyglass among its top 10 books of the 21st century, and the BBC, Newsweek and other prominent publications have made similar assessments. The original trilogy has inspired a film, a BBC/HBO series, a National Theatre production and a Kate Bush song. The two trilogies and companion books have sold more than 49m copies; the original has been translated into 40 languages. Many children are now named Lyra (not least Ed Sheeran’s kid).
If the first trilogy’s success – and its critical portrayal of organized religion – marked Pullman, in the words of the British columnist Peter Hitchens, as “the anti-[CS] Lewis, the one atheists would have been praying for, if atheists prayed”, the second warns against excessive rationality – or “what happens if you go too far the other way”, as another fantasy author, Lev Grossman, put it. Thirty years after the publication of Northern Lights (The Golden Compass in the US), the second trilogy has expanded our understanding of Lyra’s world, and in turn helps us process our own.
His Dark Materials tells the story of a (roughly) 12-year-old girl’s journey between worlds, initially to rescue a friend but ultimately to confront the mysteries of the universe – and save it. In the process, she grapples with threats from a powerful religious organization as well as her own parents, and falls in love with Will, a boy from our own world. She encounters witches, talking bears and scientists studying dark matter, as well as perhaps the series’ two most memorable conjurings: daemons and Dust. Each person has a daemon, an animal companion that is physically separate but fundamentally a part of them, representing a portion of their identity. Dust is the stuff of consciousness: largely invisible particles that accumulate around people as they grow up and become aware of themselves, and which guides Lyra as she reads her truth-telling device, the alethiometer, or titular golden compass.
His Dark Materials was originally marketed as a children’s series, though Pullman is skeptical of the idea that a book’s audience should be so clearly designated. I first read His Dark Materials as a teenager and found the books thrilling and deeply moving; I remember stumbling around in an emotional haze, to the detriment of my summer job, in the 24 hours after finishing them. In rereadings over the years – and especially after being forced, as a student, to read the epic 17th-century poem Paradise Lost, one of the series’ key inspirations – I have been in awe at their stunning scope. They investigate the most fundamental questions of what it means to be human – about growing up, consciousness, imagination, religion, science, morality, sexuality and the importance of storytelling – without ever losing their enormous sense of adventure.
The first trilogy is primarily about the transition between youth and adulthood, or, as the 18-19th century poet William Blake – another major influence on the series – would put it, innocence and experience, and what we gain and lose in the process. In a rebuttal to traditional narratives that understand Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden as a total disaster, His Dark Materials celebrates the acquisition of knowledge and the development of sexuality. In the books, the powerful church, known as the Magisterium, seeks in effect to prevent children from growing up; Lyra and Will are central to the fight against the organization.
In this, the books can be read as a rebuttal to another Oxford-based children’s writer, CS Lewis, whose Narnia series reflects his devotion to Christianity. Pullman called the Narnia books “nauseating drivel” in the Guardian in 1998, condemning their religious allegory and Lewis’s views on women. The character Susan, for instance, is (69-year-old spoiler alert) barred from heaven because she is too interested in “nylons and lipstick” and growing up. Pullman developed a reputation as Lewis’s atheist opposite.
And indeed, the books have faced extensive religious backlash: a 2008 list by the American Library Association found Pullman’s novels were the second-most-targeted for censorship in the US that year. The biggest driver, the ALA believed, was the film version of the first book, The Golden Compass , which faced a boycott campaign by the Catholic League.
Pullman has made no secret of his antipathy for much of organized religion. “If there is a God, and he is as the Christians describe him, then he deserves to be put down and rebelled against,” he told the Telegraph in 2002, in remarks that echo what happens in the novels. “As you look back over the history of the Christian church, it’s a record of terrible infamy and cruelty and persecution and tyranny.”
But to suggest that Pullman, now 79, is out to undermine religion itself would be a vast oversimplification. In the same interview, he called himself an agnostic: “Atheism suggests a degree of certainty that I’m not quite willing to accede to.” He valued his experience growing up in the Church of England: “The beauty of the liturgy, the hymns, the psalms, the Bible and so on – this is something that’s very deeply part of me,” he told the BBC in 2004. And in a 2014 interview with Aeon, he reflected further: “I’m religious, but I’m an atheist. I think religious questions are the big questions. Where did we come from? What is life about? What is evil?” And he has celebrated much of religion’s intent, if not its execution. “The original impulses of the great religious geniuses – with whom I include Jesus – were, as often as not, something that all of us would benefit from studying and living by,” he told the Guardian in 2002. “The churches and priesthoods would benefit more than most.”
***
The Book of Dust, the second trilogy set in Lyra’s world – and one which, Laura Miller writes at Slate, is “manifestly for adults” – adds more nuance to these questions: a sisterhood of nuns, for instance, plays a heroic role, and the books make it clear that Pullman’s assessment of organized religion does not equate to an embrace of ruthless rationality. He is critical of Richard Dawkins’ skepticism of fairytales, which the biologist has called “very unscientific”. In The Book of Dust, a 20-year-old Lyra falls victim to the writings of two popular authors who are determined to see the world as a collection of meaningless facts and circumstances: “It was nothing more than what it was,” one writes. The authors are so enamored of doubt that they question the very existence of daemons in a world full of them.
Her interest in these writers drives a wedge between her and her own daemon, the strong-willed pine marten Pantalaimon, leading him to leave her side – an extraordinary separation in Lyra’s world – in an attempt to restore her imagination, a faculty that daemons themselves may represent. As she pursues him, and becomes entangled in a far-reaching conflict involving roses with mystical properties, she is often reminded, by other characters and her own experiences, of the potency of an unseen world of fairies, ghosts and other fantastical creatures that operates just out of our sight. As Lev Grossman writes in the Atlantic, Pullman is “adding to his religious skepticism a skepticism about skepticism itself”. In one of the more recent novels’ many parallels with our own universe, a leading figure in the Magisterium suggests that “we should delicately and subtly undermine the idea that truth and facts are possible in the first place. Once people have become doubtful about the truth of anything, all kinds of things will be open to us.”
And while the Magisterium retains its stranglehold on Lyra’s world, others compete or join with it for the title of Most Evil. They include familiar figures such as a self-serving polemicist, and shadowy alliances between governments and corporations seeking to take advantage of a precious resource. A company boss manipulates the media, touting his ability to “curate” the news. Those few dedicated to justice are driven out of government, and the public is fed false explanations for political acts. As a wise character points out, nefarious forces always have an advantage because “evil can be unscrupulous, and good can’t.”
In reading the six books, along with the short companion stories Pullman has written, it becomes clear that the antagonist is not spirituality – or even organized religion per se. The chief threat is something closer to dogma or absolutist thinking, and the authoritarian mindset that often accompanies it. There’s no question that His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust criticize certain worldviews – but they are less an attack on specific factions or sects than they are a testament to “the spirit of free inquiry”, as Sophia Nguyen puts it in the Washington Post.
And perhaps more than religion, more than investigations of consciousness or authority, Pullman’s greatest commitment may be to storytelling itself – an essential, “nourishing” human function that helps us to grow. “I think we can learn what’s good and what’s bad, what’s generous and unselfish, what’s cruel and mean, from fiction,” the author said in a 2005 lecture at the University of East Anglia. He has discussed at length a sense of responsibility to the stories he tells; 30 years spent shaping Lyra’s world is a testament to this ethic.
It is also a testament to the vividness of his writing that, unlike other wildly successful fantasy series – Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, the Hunger Games – and in spite of several attempts, his stories have never felt like a multimedia franchise. Lyra’s adventures are most potent when rooted to the page, perhaps because no one else has quite figured out how to convey Pullman’s themes so convincingly.
Pullman’s stories, for me, have provided a framework for understanding the world. For instance, visible or not, we all have something like daemons: sides of ourselves that can offer clarity, act as a check on our behaviors, or reinforce our worst impulses. Dust, particles akin to dark matter, suggests a self-awareness in the universe, a celebration of consciousness, and is probably the most appealing depiction of a force outside ourselves I have ever encountered, as a committed agnostic. The flow state Lyra achieves when studying the alethiometer offers an aspirational concept of creativity.
“The books understand that children crave stories on the epic scale, that infinity is not too large for them,” the children’s author Katherine Rundell recently told the New York Times. And child or no, when I read these novels, their boundlessness, their wrestling with the most profound questions we face, makes me feel somehow more alive and grateful to be part of a brilliant, unique, altruistic and infuriatingly selfish species.
Pullman has spoken at length about his trepidation about the fantasy genre; he never wanted to be a JRR Tolkien type, inventing a world for its own sake. Instead, “I had to try to use all my various invented creatures – the daemons, the armored bears, the angels – to say something I thought was true and important about us, about being human, about growing up and living and dying,” he said in a 2002 speech. “This, finally, is what I think the value of fantasy is: that it’s a great vehicle when it serves the purposes of realism, and a lot of old cobblers when it doesn’t.” Two trilogies have shown us Lyra’s world is very real. A much-graffitied bench in the Oxford Botanic Garden is proof.
