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Tuesday
My Christmas present this year was Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field, the last volume of his Book of Dust trilogy (which in turn followed the His Dark Materials (or Golden Compass) trilogy. Pullman fans like myself have been anxiously awaiting this book for a while, given that it was supposed to have appeared in 2022. Indeed, I would have stood in a bookstore line at midnight, like a Harry Potter fan, if that’s what it took to speed things up. Anyway, I’ve now read the Lyra Silvertongue’s story arc in its entirety, which has given me a clearer sense of Pullman’s project. Major spoilers ahead.
In the first trilogy, Pullman appears to be working through his beef with organized religion in general and with fundamentalist Calvinists and Opus Dei Catholics in particular. The Magisterium is a cross between Calvin’s Reformation and the Spanish Inquisition’s Counter Reformation. More generally, however, Pullman objects to those religions that demand that their members be mindless followers, allowing the church to dictate their thinking.
Key to his vision is “dust,” which appears, when all is said and done, to be consciousness. Since consciousness is associated with original sin (the tree of good and evil), the church regards it as evil. And because this dust is not detected on human beings until they become adults, it is associated with puberty and sexuality and declared sinful.
Integral to this drama are the animal daemons, the most captivating element in Pullman’s fantasy. These function as some combination of animal spirit guide and the anima/animus side of ourselves that (according to Carl Jung) we must open ourselves to and accept if we are to find completeness. The daemons of children can be a variety of animals but, once their human has entered puberty, they settle upon a single form, a way of signaling that the basic structure of the individual has become more or less fixed. As they are thus connected with the end of childhood experience, Mrs. Coulter in Golden Compass seeks to render children perpetually innocent by separating them from their daemons, a gruesome experiment resulting in death for some, zombi existences for others.
In his second trilogy, Pullman widens his focus. His critique of repressive orthodox religion hasn’t ended—in fact, Magisterium has joined forces with fundamentalist Islamists, who share some of the same goals—but now he is interested in threats to the imagination as well as to independent thought. Thus we are introduced to three other villains: soulless materialism, empty skepticism, and predatory capitalism. The Magisterium finds ways to co-opt or make use of the first two, even though it has radically different goals. It doesn’t appear to have fully registered the threat represented by the third, however, which threatens to dissolve everything.
Let’s step back for a second. By attacking both religious orthodoxy and various forms of godless materialism, Pullman shows that he believes spiritual forces to be at work in the universe. Orthodox religion, unfortunately, cares more for power than in connecting people with those forces. As bad as the Magisterium is, however, at least it doesn’t threaten people’s daemons, which skepticism, blinkered science, and global capitalism do.
Let’s look at each of these three in turn. Simon Talbot is the radical skeptic or Berkeleyan idealist who sees everything as a construct and nothing as real. (There are deconstructionists who think this way.) In his essay “On the Non-Existence of Daemons,” he contends,
From our earliest childhoods we are encouraged to pretend that there exists an entity outside our bodies which is nevertheless part of ourselves. These wispy playmates are the finest device our minds have yet developed to instantiate the insubstantial. Every social pressure confirms us in our belief in them: habits and customs grow like stalagmites to fix the soft fur, the big brown eyes, the merry tricks in a behavioral cavern of stone.
And all the multitudinous forms this delusion takes are nothing more than random mutations of cells in the brain.
Although Talbot himself has a daemon—a blue macaw—it seems perpetually nervous and we never see them interacting.
As an aside, I note that one of the funnier lines in the novel is when Talbot, who has been spying for the Magisterium, realizes that he is functioning as their tool or useful idiot:
He stood and shook hands, and Talbot gathered his cloak and his briefcase and left, obscurely humiliated, although he wasn’t sure how; but his philosophy soon made that feeling disappear.
If Talbot is slippery, able to bend his rhetoric in whatever way will serve him, materialist philosopher Gottfried Brande is rigid and entrenched. In his mind, daemons are irrational delusions that only the weak-minded believe in. When Pan attempts to initiate a conversation with him, he closes his eyes and ears and thinks he is being attacked by ghosts (even though he doesn’t believe in ghosts either). His own daemon, meanwhile, is a large dog tormented with misery, as is the case with any creature that is thoroughly neglected.
The daemons of the industrialists and capitalists in the book, meanwhile, are in zombie states. Essentially they are ignored by their humans, who deny their own complex humanity as they tear apart beauty, custom, and tradition on their way to maximizing profits. Their daemons, unable to converse with them or with anyone else, essentially shrivel up.
Lyra’s daemon Pan, who has settled into the form of a pine marten, sees her human falling under the spell of both skepticism and soulless materialism, schools of thought that she encounters as a student at Oxford. In the process, Lyra loses the ability to imagine, which she had as a child. Pan therefore separates from her—an agony to both of them—in order to find where her imagination has gone. Put another way, if Lyra is to be healthy and whole, she must reconnect with this side of herself that she has lost. And she must do so in a world that is increasingly hostile to the imagination.
I’ll do a deeper dive into the imagination in a post later this week. Suffice it to say that Pullman draws on the great Romantic poets to articulate its power—I pick up allusions to Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats in the course of the novel—and that he sees it the way that 18th and 19th centuries saw it, a force that could change history. If Lyra is to save the world a second time (the first time her embrace of sexuality and sensuality saves both the living and the dead from orthodoxy), she will need to prevent religious fundamentalism, soulless materialism, empty intellectualism, and predatory capitalism from destroying the portals through which the imagination works.
It is through these portals that come Pullman’s own marvelous creations, so in a sense he is making a case for the urgency of his own fantasy. A genre that some dismiss as fanciful and others as ungodly (he contends) in actuality reveals a deep and urgent truth: we must have the rich products of the imagination if we are not to end up a dry, desiccated husks living meaningless lives. At the end of the novel, when the Magisterium appears to have closed the final portal, Lyra as artist finds a way to open it back up.
In the act of doing so, Lyra finally reconnects with Pan in a moment of ecstatic joy. This is what it feels to overcome inner alienation and step into the real and full self. Just as she provides us with one model of wholeness at the end of the first trilogy, so she provides us with another model of wholeness in the second.
