Slicing through the dark materials. Phillip Pullman’s The (not-so) Subtle Knife
Before all this garbage like Acolyte, the Han Solo movie and the latter sequels (and prequels), Star Wars was one of the best movie franchises ever. Scrap all the shit that’s happened since Episode I, Star Wars for me will always start at Star Wars (none of this episode IV crap) and ends in the imperfect but gratifying Return of the Jedi. But most Star Wars fan would agree that The Empire Strikes Back is the best of the three, though my personal favourite is always going to be Return of the Jedi.
The Empire Strikes Back was dark as fuck with a climatic ending which leaves the audience hungering for more, when the bad guys runs away with a home run and this fucking happened:
Yeah, when I was a kid, I fucking hated The Empire Strikes Back, but as an adult, I loved it for its uncompromising darkness and nihilistic tone. Though I haven’t read The Amber Spyglass, I feel like The Subtle Knife is Pullman’s Empire Strikes Back. Yes, it’s dark as shit. It’s multi-threaded taking place in different universes with a plethora of interesting characters. Yet, we never feel lost, and each storyline is relevant and each character shines.
Stepping into Pullman’s multiverse. Will Parry meets Lyra Silvertongue.
The universe of the Northern Lights (or the Golden Compass if you prefer) is a universe unlike our own, where each human is attached to their shape-shifting daemon, witches are more or less tolerated and polar bears wear heavy armour and could contrary to popular belief, flick off Khabib Nurmagumedov with a flick of their finger, unlike those weak as piss Russian bears from our universe.
Will, in the middle of the night, snuck out his mother (who’s in a vegetative state) to his old piano teacher’s house, the only person he could trust. That same night, mysterious men visited his home unannounced to find a briefcase, which Will was also searching for to look for clues for his missing father’s location. Will is a bit of a tough nut, and managed to even kill one of the men and retrieve the briefcase, which contains his father’s old letters.
Perchance, he found a portal which took him to another universe that is almost frozen in time, an imitation of Italy. Yet, despite the beauty of the city with its piazzas and palm trees, there was not a single human in sight, unless you call Lyra Silvertongue a human. Lyra, in search of her own father for different reasons than reconciliation, quickly made friends with Will.
Meanwhile, other things were happening in the borders of Lyra’s universe. The witches (the good ones) led by Serafina Pekkala are trying to find Lyra, procuring the help of Lee Scoresby who fought alongside Iorek Byrnison, now the king of the polar bears. The up-to-no-good Mrs Coulter is brewing something with the Church, though this relationship was already precarious to begin with. All this time, Lord Asriel is preparing troops from all universes combined for a war unheard of in any scale against The Authority.
Subtle, but weighty
To summarise what happens in the book in less than four short paragraphs is a task in itself. There is too much going on in different universes (I think four), and the book was kind enough to give us placeholder symbols for where we are in the universe. Our universe is represented by a tree, the portal universe where Lyra and Will met is a knife and Lyra’s world is represented by the compass.
Despite this jumping back and forth, we seldom feel lost, or itching to go back to our preferred characters. All the storylines are compelling and the exposition of things make sense and fit to what we expect from the story. Why are there no inhabitants in Cittagazze? We find out later that the spectres roam the city to devour the souls of adults. But why not the children? We can speculate that this has to do with the dust that accumulates as a person becomes an adult.
But there is grit in the story and Pullman underplays but does not exclude the adult components of the plot, subtly implying sexual relations and innuendos, while death and violence is commonplace. He assumes intelligence from the reader, further than the surface of the storyline. It is not a series that can be defined by the fantasy genre or young adult (of which the romance tropes and cringe dialogues are sorely missing).
The dust never settles: The dark side of dark matter.
At the centre of the story is Dust, as it was in the Northern Lights. But we find in The Subtle Knife that Dust is prevalent across universes, including our own. Only that we know it as dark matter, a concept that its experts still fail to understand tangibly and only exists as unproven theories. But we know that there is something that glues the universe together, that without it, the galaxies will fail to revolve and function. That therefore, life will not exist without it, that the explanation of gravity itself is not enough to define the mechanism of the universe, that Einstein and Hawking have grappled through with it in the past and failed, and sadly, that it is unlikely for us to prove the existing theories of this matter which defines the universe.
The Subtle Knife also addresses that intersection and collision between science and religion, and in the world of His Dark Materials, religion is equivalent to the dictatorship of institutions. The church is fighting tooth and nail to conceal the theories and concept of Dust, thus opposing Lord Asriel who’d want to master Dust. Both angles are flawed from an ethical and common-sense points of view, but Pullman warns us of man’s unbridled power of control over truth and the obsession over truth itself.
Can dark matter really solve our worldly problems? Perhaps. Acknowledging the existence of dark matter may be the first step to find the use cases for the theory in practice. It might make space travel and other planetary colonies remotely possible. But as we see in the example of Dr Malone, funding is hard to come by for theories of little practical use, though in practice, especially in recent years, the tide seems to be turning as there are extra fundings for universities recently to delve deeper into the study of the subject.
Still confused about dark matter? Don’t worry I was fucking lost too. But here’s a nice YouTube video that lays it out simply to laypeople like us. But the consensus is that there is something out there, and it’s the elementary fibre of our existence. Pullman’s speculation of the dark matter being conscious is a like reading horror — that we are under constant surveillance.
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But don’t let the talk about dark matter distract you from the multi-faceted but bone-chilling plot of The Subtle Knife. It is The Empire Strikes Back of the series: By the end of the book, the witches die horrible deaths, Lyra is kidnapped, Will lost the father that he had just recognised for a split second. By this time we have known the characters for the previous 500 pages of The Northern Lights and some of the losses of these characters might leave you with a sour taste, but that’s what good storylines do. They weave in and out of your expectations and hit you right where it hurts.
