His Dark Materials - wow. [Spoilers]

Cafe Society
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This thread inspired by Politzania here - didn’t want to start it until I’d finished the trilogy, which I did last night.

More than a year ago, micilin gave me the first two books in the His Dark Materials series. Being an ex-fantasy reader (The Lord Foul’s Bane series did for me - hated it and it put me off the genre for a very long time), I picked up Northern Lights with trepidation, and when I got to the word “daemon” I did an involuntary :rolleyes: “oh God not more of the same shite”, and put the book down. Well, serves me right for stereotyping.

Recently I decided to give them another go, and after I got over the first few pages, I then roared through the trilogy, my jaw open at the breadth of the imagination, the philosophical ideas raised, the consummate storytelling.

This really is the most astonishing piece of children’s literature I’ve ever read. Though I loved Harry Potter, these books expose them as bubble gum for the mind, compared to the roast swan of HDM. However, I think the books could prove too disturbing for really young children.

I haven’t really got my thoughts in order about this, so here are some random observations:

The ambition! Not many books would place the protagonists in a battle against God in a floating mountain and a billion angels.

Pullman’s vision of the abyss scared me: a hole with no end and no sides, that, if you fall into it, you fall so long that you starve to death, but your ghost carries on “forever falling, forever conscious, forever alone”.

Being from Oxford, I was particularly intrigued with the points of divergence between the worlds - Oxford itself, as well as anbaric/electric, the mulefa’s earlier divergence, etc. Do you think Pullman suggesting an infinite number of worlds, all divergent, or merely a multitide of worlds?

I thought there was one inconsistency: people from our world discovering their daemons. John Parry found his on entering Lyra’s world, but Will didn’t. Am I mistaken?

When Lyra left Pantalaimon at the edge of the World of the Dead, I cried.

I love the fact that, while rooted in “supernatural”, there is a “scientific” explanation for most things. His conclusion that fighting ignorance is the self-feeding source of consciousness. That there is no “good and evil” as seperate entities, merely that these concepts are borne out by actions - that conscious beings are too subtle for such simple labels - should make it something of a trophy book for the SDMB.

I was quite intrigued by the humanist manifesto at the end. Pullman was interviewed on the BBC on Sunday, and said that he despised C.S. Lewis, and this was sort of his answer to the Narnia books. The Republic of Heaven (rather than the Kingdom) should be built right here, right now, because there is no afterlife. The right-wing press in the UK has called him “dangerous” because of the “atheism”, aimed at children. I say “why not?”. Some of it is propaganda, but then so is Narnia.

Finally I don’t see many merchandising opportunities. :wink:

That’s all so far.

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When I saw the thread title I was all excited about telling everything I think about these books. And now I see that the OP has pretty much covered everything I was gonna say, just the way I’d say it.

They are fantastic books - I did think that the moral was pushed a little too hard at the end, but after such great storytelling I didn’t mind.

I think they would be best for young teenagers rather than the Harry Potter market (although the HP segment doesn’t stop getting older just because Rowling takes forever to bring out the next in the series). I love HP, but His Dark Materials fills an altogether different niche.

I’d have to check again about Parry’s daemon compared to Will’s, but I think you might be onto something.

And Iorek Byrnison can keep me warm in winter anytime.

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stringy, me too, I’ve been unable to stop evangelising about them since I read them.

Oh, there’s another wonderful thing: the unjudgemental manner in which he was able to portray cultures utterly alien to our own. Iorek ate the carcass of his friend Lee Scoresby out of honour, and because “he was hungry”.

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I enthused about this series a few months back here. Opinions on it seem pretty polarized, to say the least.

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I too thought the books were very daring and subversive for children’s literature. As an adult, I enjoyed them immensely. If I were to give them to my children to read, I would be sure to engage my kid in a serious, in-depth discussion about the ending.

I think it’s quite refreshing to see atheism portrayed in such a positive manner; the idea that ceasing to exist can be a good and highly desirable state is radical to say the least. That said, some children might find the idea of dissolution of their individual identity troubling or scary. However, I think it’s a conversation many parents would never even think to have with their kids, and should.

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I’m one of the people who loved the first book, was okay with the second book, and barely made it through the last book. I found everything that made the first book special to be sadly lacking by the third. There’s an enthusiasm and sense of fun in the first book that, in my opinion, has been transformed into bombastic trudging at the end.

One thing I’ll ask, if I may, is this. I’ve seen many a thread, here and elsewhere on the books, and I’ve noticed that these books have the strange ability to cause swelled heads in their readers. Please understand that just because folks like me weren’t bowled over by them doesn’t mean we “didn’t get it” or “were offended by it”.

I agree that the author’s stance on religion, science, and such was pretty bold for a book that, inexplicably, is being marketed towards children, but that doesn’t make his approach any less over the top, in my opinion. Being beat over the head with athiesm isn’t any more fun for me than being beat over the head with religion.

I loved the character of Lyra and was disappointed to see her degenerate in the second book to such a pale shadow of herself. I never found Will to be interesting at all. And going from a world as interesting and well-done as the one in the first book to the incredibly bland and artificial worlds in the second and third books was very disappointing to me.

I think the first book was incredible. Great characters, great ideas, great setting - I just feel that the other two sacrificed all of that so that Pullman could ride his hobbyhorse into the ground.

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Don’t know how to tell you this, Legomancer, but I am in fact the final arbiter of taste. If your opinion differs from mine, then you’re clearly an intellectual midget.

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I am also one of those people who “didn’t get it” - didn’t get why anyone liked these books, why they won awards, why they were published,etc.

Now, everyone has a right to their own opinion & to like whatever books they want. I have a right to hate these.

(I feel I should add I have a Master’s degree, have worked most of my life, have traveled a little bit, work in libraries, have read a lot and have lived on this earth for 50 years. … I feel like I have to defend my intelligence when I say I didn’t get/like these books).

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I found the books enjoyable, but I felt that the best target audience would’ve been teens (13-15). Harry Potter is easily accessible to children much younger, but HDM has some rather deep themes that many younger children might not be able to get into. I would recommend HP to a 10-year-old before I recommended HDM (just as I would recommend lighter fantasy fare to an adult before handing them volumes 1-10 of the Wheel of Time).

And I wouldn’t recommend the series at all to children without first okaying it with their parents. Some people would be very, very offended by the atheist aspects of the book and they might perceive the idea of God as an upstart angel as blasphemous. As I believe parents should be responsible for what their children read, it’s only fair to give them censorship, even if I wouldn’t.

And the first 1/3 of the first book confused the hell out of me. With no background knowledge of Pullmann’s world, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what was going on. I wish he had sped up the revelation that it was a parallel world a little faster.

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I got the impression that the daemons were souls. In Lyra’s world, they’re outer manifestations rather than internal concepts. Children’s daemons changed forms frequently, because children themselves don’t form solid identities until they reach puberty. When denied their daemons, the children become sullen and unmotivated. Touching or acknowledging another’s daemon is considered rude much in the matter that asking personal questions of a complete stranger would be considered rude in our daemonless society.

I thought the big battle scenes against Heaven in the third book were underwhelming, mainly because it seemed so out of place with the more intimate nature of the first books. But all in all the series had its own flavor, and wasn’t derivative of the standard fantasy formula of wizards and elves etc.

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Plus he doesn’t know that asking something usually involves a question and not a series of statements. :slight_smile:

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Who, Pullman?

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No, no. That was a gallery-tossed peanut to add to the breaking of the sad news of Legomancer’s midgetdom. Only by the time I hit submit (I got distracted by something shiny, happens all the time) approximately eighteen posts (you cannot expect those with correctly-aligned taste to expend valuable resources on such petty things as counting) had happened in between. Thus, I am robbed of context, and said peanut of all kinetic energy.

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Pullman may have been trying to advocate/portray atheism with the HDM series, but that isn’t what I got out of it. My spiritual truths have a lot in common with the ones that were described in HDM, and I’m not a humanist or an atheist.
Becoming one with the Universe after death doesn’t necessarily mean not having an afterlife. Not prostrating oneself to a deity who tells you what to think doesn’t mean not having a deity at all.
When John said to Will “Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.”
That was what I took away from HDM. That was the entire point to me. Not the non/existence of God.

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:frowning:

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:wink:

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On a serious note, I’m in full agreement with this. The first time I ran across criticism of HDM as the ranting of atheist fundamentalism and so forth, I was a little baffled. I didn’t read atheism into the setting at all–rather, I read non-theism. Dust, atoms, matter–in a theistic framework, they’re dead things, meaningless things, things utterly separate and apart from the divine. Thus things like the climax of the Narnia tales, where the world being destroyed is a fine thing–because the material world is simply a dead meaningless thing.

In HDM, Dust, atoms, matter–they’re not dead things, they’re not meaningless things. They’re conscious, very much alive though their configurations may change with death. The world and the divine are wedded together.

Didn’t sound a blessed thing like atheism to me; I viewed it as downright mystical. I felt a definite resonant chord in the bit in the middle book when Lyra is the catalyst for the Dust communicating directly with the doctor lady, and the hosts state something like “spirit is what we are; material is what we do.”

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Re. the Creation - he said “nobody knows” where the universe came from, but the Church (clearly Catholic) was a “mistake” IIRC.

Metatron is also biblical/quasi-biblical, based on Enoch.

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Wow, Drastic, such a relief to see I’m not a total idiot!

“The world and the divine are wedded together” is such a beautiful way of describing the theo/cosmology that I saw in HDM. And it perfectly describes the way I feel in my own spiritual practice. The word “mystical” is fitting too. I felt as though I’d had a mystical experience when I read the books. I can hardly wait to share them with my (as yet unborn) children.

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Will did discover his Dæmon. It just took a little time to do that. Remember after they had come back and went off on their own their Dæmon’s came to them? Notably unchanging because they had ‘grown up’.

Will’s was a cat. Mary’s was a raven. Only she couldn’t see it in this world, she had to look at it sideways. Will could though, but because they had gone to the land of the dead he could be seperated from it and in our world it would just seem like a beloved pet.

Personally I did enjoy the books but there was something about them that makes me hesitant to read them again. Perhaps it was a little much for my mind at the time, or maybe just the way he presented ideas. I’ll admit I couldn’t put them down once I started to read, but once read… I don’t want to read them again.