Worth waiting for
HBO’s excellent His Dark Materials finally gets The Golden Compass right, writes Robert Lloyd.
IN 2007, The Golden Compass, the first volume of His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman’s alternateworld, cosmological science fantasy for young people, became a movie. It had a starry cast that included Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, with a Kate Bush song over the closing credits, and wasn’t very good at all. It underperformed at the box office, and plans to adapt the remainder of the trilogy evaporated.
Now HBO, in partnership with the BBC, has begun what looks to be, if the weather holds, a new, threeseason, 24hour translation of all three books. (Only the first four episodes have been made available for review; they cover the first half of The
Golden Compass.) Even with modern blockbusteronabudget technology, one should not expect this to happen again soon, if ever, and fans of the books will be glad to know that care has been taken to get it right this time. From what I’ve seen so far, nothing of consequence has been left out. Changes should alarm only nitpickers, and additions, mostly in the spirit of the text, are good — fleshing out characters and character relationships, converting description to action, and making a workable motion picture out of words on a page.
As kids’ books go, His Dark Materials is grownup stuff, an adventure story influenced by freethinking poetprintmaker William Blake, with a title and epigraph borrowed from Milton’s Paradise
Lost, whose lapsarian argument it inverts. (It has also often been seen as a riposte to C.S. Lewis’ Christological Chronicles of
Narnia, which Pullman, an atheist, has characterised as misogynist, racist, antilife and fatshaming, among other things.) But it has talking animals, too, and balloon rides.
As is not uncommon in fantasy fiction, it is set in a world like yet unlike our own. Visually, the TV series recalls postwar Great Britain; technologically, it is both newer and older: There are metal zeppelins and mechanical ‘‘spy flies’’, but I don’t remember anyone talking on a telephone. Quantum theory is in there somewhere, and mathematics that imply other worlds and dimensions. (‘‘Dark materials’’ has a nice incidental resonance with ‘‘dark matter’’.) Politically, it is dominated by the Magesterium, a militarised Churchstate with fascist tastes in building and branding. (Series writer Jack Thorne adds what I took to be a timely — if vague — reference to paedophile priests.)
Lyra, our heroine (the excellent Dafne Keen), is a brave and clever child, ‘‘halfwild, halfcivilised’’, living as a kind of ward of a college at her world’s version of Oxford University — a ‘‘scholastic sanctuary’’. Unlike her nearpeer Harry Potter, who entered the world two years after The Golden
Compass was published, her prophesied specialness is unknown to her, and to most every other character here. She is not burdened by messianic celebrity, but only trying to find her missing best friend and work out why so many of the adults in her life are so screwy.
These include Lord Asriel (James McAvoy), whom she regards as her uncle, mostly away exploring and experimenting in ‘‘the north’’. (Lyra would like him to take her along when he goes.) And there is Mrs Coulter (Ruth Wilson), a beautiful woman of means — also familiar with the Arctic — who takes Lyra under her wing with plans to convert her from half to wholly civilised and groom her for power. (Thorne adds a feminist fillip here.) Both McAvoy and Wilson are well cast as obsessive sorts driving the plot from different ends towards a reckoning.
His Dark Materials is an antitheist, antideist work, but full of supernatural characters and happenings all the same. (That is, supernatural by our standards. In context, it’s just physics and biology.) There are witches and polar bear warriors, a clockwork gizmo that will answer any question if you have the rare ability to read it, something called Dust that comes from space, and what looks like a city in the sky beyond the aurora borealis. Pullman’s most vivid invention is the daemon, a sort of externalised soul in animal form that accompanies every human.
Children’s daemons are changeable — Lyra’s, whose name is Pantalaimon (Kit Connor) and serves as helpmate, playmate and sceptical interlocutor, is most often an ermine — but settle into permanent form with the onset of adulthood, reflecting their person’s basic nature. (Puberty is central to the mythology.)
Many elements of His Dark Materials were already familiar when Pullman wrote it, and more so since: the orphan child with a special destiny, adult treachery, threatening institutions, science gone too far, the journey into unknown lands with helpful new friends also in need of help. Lyra’s fellow travellers include the Gyptians, waterborne nomads; Lee Scorseby, a Texan ‘‘aeronaut’’ and Iorek Byrnison (Joe Tandberg), a polar bear down on his luck.
Although there are some large set pieces coming later in the season, the special effects budget early on has primarily been spent on making the CGI animals look good, and they do. More generally, the series has not been made to thrill you with marvels. Wideeyed delight is not what its makers are after. The story takes place in an only slightly altered version of our ordinary world, and everything in the production is tailored to serve that story — the story is not, as can often be the case in bigbudget fantasy films, cooked up just to serve the production.
And it is often quite terrifying. There are passages in the book that are difficult to read even for a relatively thickskinned grownup, horrible not in the gory or spooky sense, but as violations of wholeness and identity. You don’t need to live in Lyra’s world to know what it’s like to be intimately connected to an animal, to feel the physical ache when a pet goes missing even for an hour. For the reader and viewer, this arrangement only amplifies the tension: You worry for Lyra for Pan’s sake, and Pan for Lyra’s sake.
I didn’t say this would be easy. Or fun. But it’s worth your while.
µ His Dark Materials premieres at 3pm today on SoHo (the same time as it airs in the US). It also screens at 8.30pm on SoHo2 and is available to stream on Neon.