Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, an epic saga of a battle between good and evil fought across multiple worlds—comprised of Northern Lights (1995), The Subtle Knife (1997) and The Amber Spyglass (2000)—has rightly taken its place atop the pantheon of classic children’s literature. His follow-up trilogy, The Book of Dust, extends the story of Lyra Silvertongue, whom we first met as a wild 11-year-old. Initially, in La Belle Sauvage (2017), Pullman takes us back in time to her very first adventure, when she’s just a baby, saved from a would-be kidnapper and the swirling, dangerous waters of the flooded Thames by 12-year-old Malcolm Polstead. But the main tale recounted—that which begins in The Secret Commonwealth (2019) and is now brought to a conclusion in the recently published The Rose Field—takes place seven or eight years after the action of His Dark Materials and follows a 20-year-old Lyra on a journey through Europe, Turkey and Syria, across the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea and on into Central Asia, as she searches for the fabled Red Building, the secret of “rose oil” and her own lost imagination.
“She needed another adventure,” Pullman told the New York Times when asked why he’d decided to return to Lyra’s story. “Besides, she was getting to a stage in her life where interesting things go on.” This comment might be considered antithetical when applied to such a beloved heroine of children’s literature; a canon that isn’t just removed from the realm of adult experience, it’s often intrinsically dependent on this removal, with events happening in a territory of wonder and magic that only a child can enter. Think of Susan’s exile from Narnia once she becomes preoccupied with “nylons and lipsticks and invitations”, or Peter Pan describing Wendy’s growing-up as a gross “betrayal”—of Neverland, of him and of her own self.
We shouldn’t be surprised at Pullman’s bucking of this trend, however. As Sam Leith reminds us in The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, the author’s “project in His Dark Materials is, in some sense, an assault on the nature of children’s literature itself – or, at least, the species of children’s literature that seeks to fetishise childhood innocence, to set childhood in amber or to portray growing up itself as a tragic fall from grace”. Pullman’s vehement antipathy towards CS Lewis’s Narnia books is now legendary—his description of them as “dodgy and dishonest” has been quoted ad infinitum—for in them, he argues, the damaging religious doctrine that looks on the fall of man as something shameful is bound up with similarly harmful notions about the sanctity of childhood. His Dark Materials is Pullman’s great riposte to Lewis’s ideology: a rallying cry against the dangers of institutional religion (as symbolised in the novels by the Magisterium, the ecclesiastical body that wields incredible power in Lyra’s world) and an impassioned plea in favour of the attainment of knowledge and experience.
More than 50m copies of His Dark Materials have been sold worldwide to date, so cynics could claim that, with this second series, Pullman is simply cashing in on his earlier success, dishing up more of the same for fans of the first trilogy. But if there’s a lesson to be learnt from history for children’s authors, it’s that following one’s creation into the rockier terrain of maturity is not without its risks. Take those readers of Little Women who can’t forgive Louisa May Alcott for shackling their beloved Jo to Professor Bhaer, a man two decades older than her and a decidedly dampening influence on her more endearing harum-scarum qualities. Or consider the earth-shattering revelation in LM Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series when we learn that the seemingly indomitable Anne Shirley never becomes the writer she longed to be, swallowed up instead by the demands of motherhood, her dreams laid to rest in the “perfect graveyard of buried hopes” that she’d invoked in youthful, overly dramatic hyperbole.
But Pullman’s masterstroke is the way he makes these perils of growing up—the loss of wide-eyed dreams and imaginative thinking—utterly central to both the workings of the plot and the ongoing development of his main protagonist. Lyra is facing what is perhaps her greatest challenge to date: she has to learn how to embrace the gaining of adult knowledge without losing the wonder with which she’s thus far been able to see the world. Early on in The Rose Field, an agent from The Magisterium uses a “tonnerre double” device—a bomb so powerful it’s “prohibited in warfare between civilized nations because of its abominable effects on the victims”—to try to destroy a window onto another realm. The results are, as expected, cataclysmic: “small shreds of vacancy […] patches of oddness, scraps and tears in the air.” Pullman does something similar with The Book of Dust itself. In it, he explodes the world of His Dark Materials from within; and where that trilogy dismantled a certain pervasive trope of thinking that held sway in children’s literature, now The Book of Dust rewrites the rules of the game.
With ‘The Book of Dust’, Pullman explodes the world of ‘His Dark Materials’ from within
The Amber Spyglass was brought to a close with a deft, hard-earned payoff. Lyra and Will—the young boy from our world who comes into the possession of a blade that can cut through the fabric between universes and who teams up, and subsequently falls in love, with Lyra (and she with him)—had not only vanquished the evil forces that threatened the multiverse, but had taken their places as the new Adam and Eve, their impending fall from innocence in this now Godless world a cause for celebration rather than shame. That they were subsequently forced to give each other up—Lyra returning to her world, and Will to his, the “windows” between them permanently sealed—gave the trilogy a meaningfully melancholy note. Readers’ hearts were broken, like those of the young lovers, but this was in the service of narrative satisfaction: a monumental separation that had a fated, almost fairy-tale-esque inevitability.
As an adult who grew up reading the original trilogy, however, there is a neatness here that no longer fully satisfies—in the adult world there are no fairy-tale endings, and our choices can have real, irreversible consequences. If she’d remained encased within the pages of His Dark Materials, Lyra wouldn’t have had to reckon with the aftermath of her experiences. In continuing her story, Pullman forces her to contend with her trauma and grief. In The Book of Dust, Pullman is writing for his now grown-up audience, exploring the harsh realities of the choices his characters made in the service of saving their worlds.
Although outwardly she’s doing well, inwardly Lyra is struggling with varying degrees of grief. She’s mourning the loss of Will, with whom she’s still in love, but more problematically—because they’re being forced to maintain the semblance of an ongoing relationship despite an increasingly bitter rift between them—she’s also lamenting the breakdown of her relationship with her dæmon Pantalaimon. Every human in her world has a familiar-like animal companion who’s the physical manifestation of their soul, psyche or innermost being, with whom they exist in symbiosis.
Pantalaimon has never quite been able to forgive Lyra for abandoning him in order to search for her friend Roger in the Land of the Dead—a realm which dæmons are unable to enter, their fate being to melt into nothingness on the death of their human. The pair survived the physical aspect of the separation—as a rule, human and daemon must remain in close proximity, with large distances between them causing agony or worse—but the emotional betrayal runs much deeper. Rather than having been reunited, as we might have expected following their reconciliation in His Dark Materials, any shared sympathy between them has vanished, and instead they can hardly bear each other’s company. It’s a dynamic that’s inconceivable to most others around them, and thus they nurse it as a disgraceful secret. Fear of discovery and eventual pariahdom only exacerbates their distress, while at the same time transmuting their more simplistic relationship in the original trilogy into something richer and multifaceted.
His Dark Materials is a feast of wildly ingenious creations: the armoured bears, clad in their protective sky-iron; Lyra’s alethiometer, the compass-like tool that gives truthful answers to those skilled enough—as she is—to decipher its symbols; the Mulefa, elephant-like creatures who travel by means of wheels they craft from seed pods. But of all these delights, the existence of dæmons remains a stroke of pure genius. Yet, despite how thoroughly and brilliantly conceived it is as a concept, and the lengths to which Pullman went to drive home the sacredness of the bond between human and dæmon—the intercision scenes, for example, in which children are forcibly severed from their dæmons, call to mind the barbarous experiments Josef Mengele conducted at Auschwitz—there is an underlying straightforwardness to the presentation of these relationships in His Dark Materials. The beautiful but evil Mrs Coulter has an equally beautiful but evil golden monkey; there’s the plainspoken, dutiful and good Lee Scoresby with his loyal and brave Hester, a plain arctic hare; and so on. These pairings worked not dissimilarly to the way the young witches and wizards are matched with their Hogwarts house in the contemporaneous Harry Potter books—the baddies scuttle off to Slytherin, while the courageous kids parade proudly into Gryffindor—and inspired the same interactive excitement in fans who could find both “What’s your dæmon?” and “What’s your Hogwarts house?” generators online.
But now Pullman torpedoes this cutesier child’s interpretation, and heads to much darker waters. In The Book of Dust we’re treated—or should that be subjected?—to an expanded litany of dæmon-related torments and horrors, most of them previously unimaginable. The villain of La Belle Sauvage is a violent rapist with paedophilic inclinations, yet the scariest thing about him is his unholy relationship with his dæmon, whom he’s beaten so badly that she’s lost one of her legs. She, meanwhile, is a hellhound-like hyena who marks her territory by urinating in Malcolm’s path, an act of such “contempt and hatred” that it leaves him feeling “soiled and belittled”.
In ‘The Book of Dust’, we’re subjected to an expanded litany of torments and horrors
This first glimpse of a different kind of dæmon-human relationship—and a dæmon who’s more like an actual demon, in the traditional meaning of the word—is a harbinger of the contortions to come. In the final two volumes, we encounter one who doesn’t vapourise on their human’s death, but is left in physical and mental agony; humans who’ve been abandoned by their dæmons, now forced to inhabit a sort of shadow life (the wealthy ones are able to live as eccentrics, while the poverty-stricken are outcasts, pitied or feared to differing degrees); and a black market that buys and sells dæmons in a manner that’s akin to illegal organ harvesting.
“Children are not less intelligent than adults,” Pullman once said, “what they are is less well informed.” Although often insignificant in terms of the broader narrative, these portraits of suffering play a vital role in helping us see things that Lyra wasn’t privy to in the first trilogy; those jagged edges that aren’t deemed suitable for immature minds. And while Pullman had convinced us that Lyra hitting puberty was not something to be mourned, but rather the beginning of a new chapter, we now realise that he never claimed that her next few years would be easy. Adolescence is hard on everyone, and Lyra has experienced more loss than most other people her age. It’s eminently believable that she’s searching for certainties that might help her make sense of what she’s gone through, so she can make peace with a world in which she’s feeling increasingly isolated and alone.
Indeed, this would account for the fascination that Lyra develops for a German novel that romanticises extreme rationality, and which has inspired an almost Randian cult-like following among her peers, united in their “fashionable disparag[ing of] any sort of excessive emotional reaction”. Pantalaimon is truly sickened by the influence the work is having—some of the author’s acolytes are going as far as to ignore their own dæmons, pretending that they don’t exist—and Lyra’s embrace of such excessively dispassionate thinking forces the final schism between them. Pullman isn’t saying that her fetishisation of this form of rationalism is wrong, per se, rather that it is misguided because Lyra is still thinking in a child’s world of absolutes. Where the great fracturing in His Dark Materials was between parallel universes, in The Book of Dust it takes a different form: a cracking-open of Lyra’s own internal world and her associated discovery of the grey areas that exist where once she saw only black and white.
Lyra has to learn to look beyond what Malcolm—now a scholar and secret agent, and a valiant ally for our heroine–describes as a “binary absolutism”. Some of this education appears in the guise of other characters whom she encounters on her travels; a decidedly more slippery bunch than those in His Dark Materials. Their own motivations loom larger, muddying their involvement in Lyra and Malcolm’s quests, from the gryphons’ obsession with accumulating gold, which dictates their every move, or the machinations of Abdel Ionides, a disgraced scientist who becomes Lyra’s guide and sometimes-protector, and a man neither she nor we are quite sure can be trusted. Not only were the virtuous and the wicked so much easier to identify in His Dark Materials, so was the truth. The once formidable power of the three deus ex machina-adjacent truth-telling instruments that dominated the first trilogy no longer holds sway. The amber spyglass is out of reach. So too the subtle knife, the darker side of which has also been revealed. This leaves only Lyra’s alethiometer, that object of both very real and talismanic power that’s shielded and guided her since the very first pages of Northern Lights. Yet, in a moment of what can only be described as daring symmetry, Pullman destroys it in The Rose Field’s opening pages.
Rather than devastation, Lyra instead experiences an unexpected feeling of release—“she couldn’t bring herself to use the word burden, but she was certainly free from something”. Her final connection to both childhood innocence and its more simplistic thought processes has to be destroyed before she can embrace a more mature and subtle way of imaginative thinking: one that isn’t about making things up or connected to child-like naivety, but rather the state of “seeing things properly, real things, seeing them fully in all their contexts with all their connections in place, all the things they mean around them”.
The Book of Dust delivers all the pleasures one associates with His Dark Materials—Pullman’s incredible worldbuilding; his talent for spinning tales rich in mystery, intrigue and danger; the sheer audaciousness of his own imaginative prowess—but its finest achievement is that it invites readers to look on his incredible world more deeply, with greater nuance. He’s teaching us, too, not just Lyra, to balance wisdom with childish curiosity, while warning that “without imagination you think you see more truth, but in fact you see less”.
