Another one bites the Dust. Closing His Dark Materials trilogy with The Amber Spyglass.
The more we read about the universe, the more we know about how little we know. If we leave the universe alone, we know very little about our own world, and the mechanisms that rule it. We can measure the acceleration of gravity, we deem that our orbits around the sun is due to the space-time curvature and we can put a number how fast light travels. Though it has served us in our development as a species, I feel that we are still missing the essence of the that body of truth.
Our theories are good. They may even be exceptional, but it does not give us the full picture. Hawking tried, Einstein tried, but future astrophysicists and scientists have tweaked and disproved the ones that came before. Science, at a high level, are theories, which in a way is another branch of storytelling. In a way, we use fiction to fill in these gaps in our understanding. Thus, there are similarities in how Hawking wrote The Brief History of Time and how Pullman penned His Dark Materials.
But Pullman’s work for me, is sheer escapism. Though I’m not a follower of the fantasy genre, I’ve got a hunch that His Dark Materials belongs to the SSS tier of fantasy, though let’s face it, the author himself hates that label.
The Amber Spyglass is a beautiful, glorious mess
In my last review, I associated The Subtle Knife to The Empire Strikes Back, which for a helluva lot of people, seem to be the best Star Wars movie EVER. Then it follow that The Amber Spyglass is attune to Return of the Jedi. Empire Strikes Back is the preparation of a great war coming, where everybody in the known and unknown universes sharpen their saws. Fuck, there’s even an Ewok substitute here if you consider the tapir faced and wheeled mulefas as exotic-almost-amusing conscious aliens.
Lyra is perpetually drugged asleep by her own mother, who kidnapped her at the conclusion of The Subtle Knife. Her life is at stake. The church sees Lyra as a threat and sends its fleet to locate her to kill her. Will, now with the company of two lowly angels, is on a mission to find Lyra to rescue her. Meanwhile, Lord Asriel is still preparing his troops for the biggest fuckoff war that’s ever been against the Authority.
With the help of the two angels, Will managed to find Lyra. Accompanied by two tiny Tinkerbell-sized spies (who are faster than the average housefly and kill full grown men with their spurs), they embarked on a mission to find the ghost of Roger, convinced that this will turn the tides of war. But the alliances are fickle, and Mrs Coulter, in the midst of all this was captured and held prisoner by Lord Asriel but we know how slippery she can be. We still don’t know whether those two are still smashing or not.
The epic conclusion, which at times may be a little convoluted
I detect that despite the unexpected twists of the story that there is cohesion in the plot, that it should all make sense in the end. But I may be wrong. Mrs Coulter changes allegiances as though she was a Manchester City supporter. Suddenly the big evil villain is some sort of angel that we’ve never heard about. There is an epic battle playing out in the battlefield of fantasy land, but it ended in the background in a whimper.
As far as Star Wars analogies go, The Amber Spyglass is as messy as Return of the Jedi. There is too much going on here. It is difficult to keep track with all the characters, their relationships and some were recalled from two books back, forcing our flawed memory to do its legwork.
Despite these weaknesses, The Amber Spyglass is another strong offering. It cemented Pullman’s reputation as a “fantasy” writer, and it ties up the ending neatly. It is also a risky work, especially when we enter the realm of death and Dust, but as far as works of imagination go, Pullman conjured a world we are happy to be immersed in as readers. In fact, the realm of the dead is eerie, claustrophobic and dare I say it, make you contemplate life and death.
When the dust settles, this is a Pullman masterclass
We will not venture through Dust any further, as we’ve covered it enough in the previous two books and then some. And though Dust is quite central to the story, the trilogy ventured into territories that I did not expect for a genre plagued with fantastic animals and clichéd tropes. His Dark Materials can be read in many different angles — through the theological lens, which links to the political lens. You can also take your gendered and Marxist reading if you’d wanna go that far.
The Authority is a vague allusion to God — Pullman after all, is an atheist and is against the institutions of religions, which act to mask truths to their own doctrines, and to limit the free-thinking of men. Yet, before Christians decide to cancel the book, I think that it is a book that makes you ponder on unexplainable mysteries that science still cannot bridge. By convention of history, we bridge that knowledge gap with faith. The Authority, after all, isn’t necessarily God but the first being that came into existence.
But Pullman is using the medium of his stories to tell us that something is just ain’t right, that the tides of the world are changing and it’s not changing for the better. The seemingly invincible polar bears must move from their ice home lest they wither and die in the melting polar ice caps. Sounds familiar? The mighty must kowtow to the mightier: the inevitable forces of nature. The mulefa’s wheel-trees are dying, they are no longer to collect Dust particles to pollinate their future seeds. The spectres are claiming the souls of working adults. The rifts in the universes of the dark materials reflect our own institutional and ecological decays which will have a greater impact on us later on.
The trilogy would not have worked without Lyra and Will as the two fulcrums of the story. In a series where we jump from one universe to another, with beings of different species, though all of whom are well-crafted and interesting, the two protagonists ground the reader as we buy into the conviction of their decisions. His Dark Materials would not have worked if either Lyra or Will were unlikeable. In doing so, Pullman opened up significant questions through his novels, some which exposes how small we are in the scheme of things, how little we know. That’s why reading His Dark Materials gave me a similar vibe to when I finished reading Hawking’s The Brief History of Time. For fiction, of any kind or any genre, this is no small feat.
