I have read the book at least three times before, and I've taught it at least twice before. It is a book that fascinates me, but I can't say the same for the other two in the trilogy, oddly. I guess that I'm here writing just to sorta collect my thoughts on the first portion of the book before we discuss it in class tomorrow morning.
SIDE NOTE: My panic has subsided! I'm drinking chamomile tea and pondering the cool knee socks that Dolce Carina sent me that I plan to wear tomorrow.
Back to Pullman: So he opens with an epigraph from Paradise Lost, and the trilogy becomes this weird response to Paradise Lost and by extension to traditional Christianity. But it's this really strange, unsettling, distasteful, almost adolescent response to Christianity. But that becomes more evident later in the trilogy. Now you may be wondering (sometimes I myself wonder) why I, a professed Christian, am so fascinated by this really weird, juvenile attack on Christianity. Maybe it's because I find the criticisms hard to take seriously. Several years ago at a conference this trilogy came up in a round table discussion of YA fantasy, and I remember one participant saying that Pullman comes off like a teen ager who has decided that God doesn't exist and is angry at God for not existing. And I think that observation gets at what it is about Pullman's critique that strikes me as groundless, silly, and even adolescent in nature.
At the same time, I find this first installment in the trilogy fascinating. I suppose that one thing that is interesting about it is the way in which the conventions of fantasy as a genre seem to be questioned. But then maybe not. WARNING: THIS POST WILL BECOME A PLOT SPOILER, SO STOP READING NOW IF YOU ARE SO INCLINED!!! Really, Lyra, the heroine, discovers by the end of the novel that the people she's been idolizing are really her biological parents. But THEN she discovers that both biological mother and father are the real villians of the piece; it really hearkens back to "I'm your father, Luke!" But that's troubling. Maybe this is the larger issue: in Pullman's world good and evil, right and wrong are never clear-cut. Some would argue that this is realistic. But it's so unlike the way that fantasy typically works. This is interesting.
Pullman writes, in this particular novel, of a world that is different from ours, yet very like ours in this way. I keep meaning to ask my physicist friend about all this, but apparently there's some theory (maybe part of quantum physics?????) that there are these alternate worlds out there, one created each time a major historical event happens. Only in the alternate world, it happened the other way. And so, horror of horrors, I suppose there's some world where Hiltler lived and dominated the Western world. In the case of The Golden Compass, it seems that Lyra's world is a world in which the Protestant Reformation deviated from what we know. This seems to be this historical point of departure. Again, this fascinates me. I say that the Reformation seems to be the separating point because there is a reference to trouble which began when "Pope John Calvin" moved the papal seat from Rome to Geneva. SIDE NOTE: John Dee is also mentioned along the way; I am always on the lookout for references to Dee.
I don't know what to make of this novel. How can I so much enjoy something that so overtly attacks what I really believe in and trust and love? I suppose it's because that Pullman is critiquing a version of Christianity that, really, is unlike the Christianity to which I hold. Maybe that's my way of justifying my interest in this novel.
So I've written all this and haven't even gotten to the most ineresting, engagin thing about Lyra's world--the presence of daemons. Each human is attached to an animal daemon, which is rather like a soul, a conscience, and a familiar all rolled into one. Humans are constantly with their animal daemons, who are physically present, and they communicate with them. Daemons work to structure the development of the characters, and here is Pullman's particular genius. This is really interesting to read about.
Oh, I've not really said all I've wanted to, and I'm not sure that I've clarified my ideas at all. But just writing through some of these things is helpful. I don't really assume that any of you really want to read all of this; I write it for myself. And it is useful to me.
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