Rational magic
The 100 best books of the 21st century
No 6
The Ambert Spyglass by Philip Pullman
His Dark Materials III: The Amber Spyglass
Philip Pullman
500pp, Scholastic
Saturday 28 October 2000
One of the most eagerly awaited events of the children's publishing year will happen next week, when the third volume of Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy finally hits the bookshops. Publication of The Amber Spyglass completes Pullman's radical three-volume reworking of Paradise Lost. Readers who - noticing that it has taken him an extra year to publish the final volume - thought he might have lost the trail he took up in Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife need not have feared.
If anything, The Amber Spyglass is more intense than its predecessors. The climaxes are bigger; there is a fresh fire in the writing; and there is a wonderful new cast of characters - notably, a pair of gay angels. Above all, Pullman pursues his central philosophical theme with even greater passion. In his world, the temptation and fall are not the source of all human misery but the end of repression by what he calls "the Authority" and the beginning of liberation and freedom of thought. What's more, it is Lyra and Will, two children on the threshold of growing up, whose embrace of knowledge saves the world, overturning the traditional view of childhood innocence.For those who don't know Pullman's Dark Materials, it is a single story published in three volumes - an exhilarating and poetic mixture of adventure, philosophy, myth and religion enriched by a heady brew of quantum physics. It is heavily influenced by Milton and Blake, but also by Swift, Goethe, Norse legend and Greek tragedy.
Central to the story are Pullman's life-affirming belief in free will and the power of scientific rationalism and his deep dislike of hierarchical religion and the repression it sanctions. The first two volumes have already been dismissed as "the stuff of nightmares" by the Catholic Herald. Pullman won't be drawn into a theological debate, insisting that he is not setting down an argument or writing a philosophical treatise but telling a story.
This is a touch disingenuous and Pullman knows it, since he insists that his story, despite its parallel worlds and huge host of ingenious characters, is not a fantasy. It is, he says, "stark realism. The only thing that is interesting about fantasy is if you can use it to say something truthful and realistic about human nature." In his universe, for instance, everyone has a "daemon"; an aura or alter ego signifying their true soul, which may change in childhood but becomes fixed in adults.
Through his portrayal of real people dealing with weighty moral issues within a mythic story and in a fantasy setting, Pullman has rearranged the landscape of writing for children. His central characters, Lyra and Will, have fantastical adventures, but their success within them comes from knowing what is true and what is real. It is knowledge, not fate, that shapes their destiny.
Pullman's insistence on truth to human nature lies behind his dismissal of the fantasy writers to whom he is often compared: JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. "I dislike them for different reasons. The Lord of the Rings, for all its scope, weight and structural integrity, is not a serious book because it doesn't say anything interesting or new or truthful about human beings. It tells an essentially trivial story. The goodies are always good and the baddies are always bad. CS Lewis comes from a different tradition: in the Narnia books he struggles with big ideas. I dislike the conclusions he comes to because he seems to recommend the worship of a god who is a fascist and a bully; who dislikes people of different colours; and who thinks of women as being less valuable in every way.
"And it is a god who hates life because he denies children life. In the final Narnia book he gives the children the end-of-term treat of being killed in a railway accident so they can go to heaven. It's a filthy thing to do. Susan is shut out from salvation because she is doing what every other child who has ever been born has done - she is beginning to sense the developing changes in her body and its effect on the opposite sex. For all those reasons I profoundly disagree with Lewis and with the conclusions he reaches."
The conclusion Pullman has come to is that people have within them the capacity to react and respond in a number of ways. His characters change; they make choices. His children, especially, are neither all good nor all bad. Lyra has spent a lifetime lying but it doesn't stop her having integrity when she needs it; Will has killed a man. "I'm not dewy-eyed about children like Kenneth Grahame or AA Milne. I spent too long as a teacher," he says. "I'm clear-eyed about them. I like the current, non- sentimental writing for children of authors like Anne Fine and Jacqueline Wilson, where they can be good and bad. I also value the process of growing up. It's an unavoidable fact that we're going to grow up. But that's hopeful."
THE GUARDIAN
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