The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
How to scandalise your daemon
In this bold second instalment of ‘The Book of Dust’ , Philip Pullman lets his heroine grow up, discovers Richard Coles
The second book of the second trilogy of Philip Pullman’s life of Lyra Belacqua picks up 20 years after the first book, La Belle Sauvage (2017), ended, with the baby Lyra’s arrival at Jordan College, Oxford. In between books one and two the events told in the first trilogy, His Dark Materials, have occurred, so they must be leapfrogged to resume a narrative the evolution of which is as complex as that of the Ring cycle. Fortunately Pullman, whose resemblance to Wagner is not obvious, shares with him an extraordinary gift for constructing a compelling world that is both familiar and strange.
Wagner’s was a Valhalla of gods, caught up in eternity and the most bourgeois of 19th-century dramas. Pullman’s world is a semirecognisable Oxford of town and gown, where the eternal battle of good and evil plays out, and the forces of the Magisterium – institutionalised orthodoxy – set the story in motion with the murder of a botanist on a towpath. Semi-recognisable, for over its dreaming spires Zeppelins appear, as commonplace as Airbuses in ours; alethiometers, truthmeasurers, are consulted by the light of anbaric lamps; hot chocolatl is consumed by some, smokingleaf by others. It is the plausibility of the alternative universe, its proximity, rather than its remoteness, which makes it so compelling.
Yet it is sinister too; Lyra, still unsure of her significance to the Magisterium, is once again vulnerable, her secure place in the life of Jordan College under threat as darkness approaches from the horizon. What also approaches is adulthood, and there are episodes in this book which should ensure it is not shelved in the children’s section, where Pullman’s novels are normally, and misleadingly, found. That sense of insecurity is intensified by a crisis in her relationship with Pantalaimon, her daemon. All humans in Pullman’s universe have a daemon – a creature from the animal world, a familiar, a confidant, a symbol. Pan, a pine marten, and Lyra have acquired the rare and scandalous skill of separating, and on a solo night excursion Pan witnesses that murder on the towpath.
His detachment from Lyra is not merely one of place. Lyra is maturing into a young woman, and Pan, whose loyalty has survived even her forced abandonment of him in the first trilogy, is growing distant. Their estrangement, all the more affecting for being as surprising to them as to the reader, Pan attributes to her fascination with fashionable doctrines as unappealing as the religious orthodoxy of the Magisterium. These are reductive creeds, which seek to banish from human experience all that is magical, lyrical, imaginative, and to call into doubt the means of distinguishing truth from untruth; and they are seductive creeds for Lyra, an intelligent young woman wanting to make her own way.
This is new, Lyra forming an adult understanding of the world, and the reader may agree with Pan that it comes at a cost. Pullman is so good at imagining the world through a child’s eye, and with a child’s feelings, that we half want Lyra not to grow up and have opinions about quantitative easing and Instagram. Pan is so distressed by this change that he abandons her, as she once abandoned him, and journeys to Wittenberg to confront one of the authors of this new wisdom.
Pan journeys up the Elbe; Lyra, escaping the increasingly hostile world of Oxford, travels too – not just through landscapes and across oceans, but through the lovely jumble of names which seed the text with thrilling suggestions of strangeness, and among people who sound like folk heroes or mercenaries of the Hundred Years War. Other names are familiar – Jimmy Turner, and The Trout at Godstow, and a hero called Malcolm, 11 when we last met him as the baby Lyra’s rescuer, now a young don with different intentions. Pullman’s is a complex, multicultural world, the exotics not the moral ciphers that are so striking in children’s fiction of the past. It is a corrective to the enchantment of nostalgia that may conceal a darker heart, just as Lyra growing up is a corrective to C S Lewis’s Susan, the fast one of the
Pevensie children, whose fondness for lipstick and a life of her own as she entered adulthood hinted at a terrible fate.
Lewis, of course, was signed up to institutional religion, as I am, which so often begins with a vision of angels and ends with an Inquisition – a trajectory Pullman and his hero Blake, who provides the epigram, deplore. How to resist? Lyra’s journey is not only to the ends of the earth but also to the hope of a restoration of the imagination, and the richness of the world, which flashes like the angels Blake saw in the treetops of Peckham, or the fragrance of attar of roses, Rhinegold to this Ring, so vivid in the story that I had an olfactory hallucination when I put it down.
This is a corrective to CS Lewis, who condemned Susan for liking lipstick
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