False Azure

It has been a long time since I was grabbed by the beginning of a book as much as I was by the first chapters of Northern Lights, the first book in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. The creaky, dark-textured version of Oxford, so near and yet so far, the sparkish characters with their wonderfully blurred moral compasses, the mad science, the high politics -- and, best of all, the daemons, so mysterious and puzzling and perfect, setting us firmly down in a world where 'ae' is still defiant and well. I loved it all.

I flagged a little over the course of the first book. For the most part, the writing style is clean and strong and no-nonsense, but in places I felt Pullman easing back in the face of his younger audience. And on occasions, the character of Lyra takes an annoying Enid Blyton turn. But the story as a whole drove me on, taking ever more audacious leaps away from fantasy clichés and into questions of strikingly topical relevance.

I also loved the grey shades and downright murky shades of the characters. Not for this world, the cheery/scowly stereotypes who fall neatly into their prescribed courses. Mrs Coulter, in particular, was like a breath of pure air to me, after having suffered through the five Harry Potter films, with their cloying insistence on the power of motherly (/god-fatherly/friendly/professorly) love as the magic ingredient that separates good from bad. (Note that this is a comment on the HP films, not the books. I read the first, because a copy came into my hands, and have not read any of the others merely because there are so many wonderful books and so little time.)

So, onto the second book, The Amber Spyglass, and another cracking beginning. The way Pullman gradually deepens and shifts the jeopardy throughout the first couple of chapters of this book should make them required reading for any writer wishing to understand how to follow through after obeying the instruction to start in media res. I was also impressed with the drawing of Will's character, much more subtle and interesting than Lyra. He could so easily have become a prig, another Enid Blyton stolid little chap. But Pullman gives him such depths of heart under his brittle exterior, it is impossible not to love him.

I flagged a little more over the course of this book. The science and the mysteries that have been hinted at become a little more corporeal in this book, and not always very convincingly. I could not at all believe in the scientist-nun; that is to say, I could believe in her as a nun, but not to the least degree as a scientist. The sentient particles were disappointing ... I had hoped for something grander. And the continual changes of viewpoint weakened the narrative drive for me. I was continually being whisked away from the big events to learn about some character I didn't much care for. But I was still hooked, still desperate to learn quite how far Pullman would push his premise.

I had to wait about six weeks to read the next book, through a combination of trivial but maddening circumstances. During this period of torture, I had several times to walk past perfectly good copies of the book in the local supermarket, because the copy I had purchased was waiting for me in an inaccessible location!

It came, at last, and I dived in. And then I read the last half of the book, and felt ready to go and bury my copy in a compost heap. What a disappointment! All the boldness of the earlier chapters had vanished, and in its place we had clunky moralising of exactly the kind that the rest of the trilogy had set its face so resolutely against. Mrs Coulter turns to the light and sacrifices herself for Lyra in a sudden fit of motherly passion. Satan (or as close as we come) is defeated by being dragged down a very big hole. The scientist-nun's response to her best chance to study the sentient particles is to have an out-of-body experience. And then, the indigenous wheeled race of one world are given an almighty slap in the face when the love of two proto-adolescents manages to do what centuries of devotion and affection amongst them could not achieve. Only human love is of interest to the sentient particles, apparently.

This last part of the plot was a particular disappointment. Throughout the trilogy, hints had been dropped that Lyra was destined to be the next Eve. Most intriguing. I spent quite a lot of the inter-book weeks speculating on what this might involve. I quickly ruled out the idea that Lyra's role was to have sex. That had never been part of Eve's particular transgression, viewed in this trilogy not as a sin but as an awakening of human consciousness. So, Lyra's task was to do something much more interesting ... to bring us to a new level of knowledge and awareness, perhaps? Something bold and fresh and satisfying, no doubt.

But no ... Lyra's great task is to be a teenager in love. It's not quite clear how far she is expected to go on her first date in order to tempt those voyeuristic sentient particles back to earth. Pullman's prose at this point because vague and evasive, breathless and embarrassed -- the textual equivalent of the camera pan up to the roses blooming on the bush -- though this may have been at the insistence of his publishers of course. Whatever the reason, it's not clear what actually happens and, more importantly, it is far from clear why it all happens.

As if this wasn't all tear-making enough, at the very end the entire message of the trilogy (that we should distrust authorities telling us what is good and bad, and what we can and cannot do) is negated when Will and Lyra calmly accept some rather ludicrous constraints on their behaviour because they have been told so. But, they have been told so by the good guys, and they are always so easy to spot, right? So that's alright, then. They tearfully obey. To make matters worse, this constraint seems only to be part of the story because Pullman wanted to ram home the message that people should try to be content in their own worlds, rather than yearning after paradises that may not exist. Well, it's a fair enough point but was it really worth sacrificing the whole intellectual drive of the book to include it?

Overall, I'm glad I read the trilogy. There is a lot to admire and I was pulled deep into the cosmos that Pullman envisages. The book also made me think -- even at the hair-pulling end -- which is always something to be thankful for. But oh I do weep for the book it could have been without that awful ending.