His Dark Materials, Revisited
Dec. 30th, 2019 05:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinI've been sick this week. It's the third cold in as many months, which is very frustrating, but what can you do? Turns out the answer is sleep. I have slept for about four days. I guess I needed it.
When I came home with a bad cold last year, I discovered the tremendous practical use of television: It is sufficiently interesting to keep me in bed doing nothing, i.e. resting, without requiring as much cognitive effort as reading, which is often beyond my decongestant-fogged brain. Last year I imbibed The Terror; this year I indulged the opportunity to catch up on the BBC's new rendition of the first part of Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials.
I remember when the first book came out. It was at the crest of the wave of post-Harry Potter YA Fantasy. I listened to the audiobook back in those days when I had a tape deck at my desk but not a computer. It wasn't notably satisfying and left me a bit hollow, but was a fun dark adventure that kept me on task, and was better than a lot of the YA fantasy audiobooks I was listening to around that time. Eventually I consumed the other two in the series, but the last one put me off. Pullman was the YA Fantasy representative of the secular humanist cabal making a lot of noise post-9/11 (Richard Dawkins being the loudest) and his books were blatantly trying to be the anti-Narnia for a new, enlightened, Godless generation. This was fine as a premise for the series, but by the third book he had managed to get more evangelical than C.S. Lewis ever was. The preachiness of the last book rather soured my taste for the whole series and I didn't read (or listen to) it again.
My curiosity was piqued by the new TV adaptation, which aired shortly after I left for my Antarctic adventure. I was pleased to find it was still available on the iPlayer when I got back to the UK, so I watched it between naps as I tried to sleep off this cold. It has been probably fifteen years since I was familiar with the books, so I cannot comment as to the faithfulness of the adaptation, but it held on to what little I remember both in storyline and atmosphere, and it was a thoroughly admirable production on all fronts even if the approach to polar architecture broke my suspension of disbelief. Despite the excellent performances and wonderfully executed production, though, I was still left with that empty feeling – it was a grand adventure, but nothing much stayed with me, and in marked contrast to The Terror, even in my susceptible state I didn't much care about any of the characters. Why was such an obstensibly philosophical story so devoid of lasting impact?
It seems to have percolated a bit in my sleep since finishing it, and I woke this morning feeling like I'd figured something out.
In order to understand what I'm getting at, you need to be at least passingly familiar with the premise and basic storyline of The Northern Lights, first book in the His Dark Materials trilogy:
This is a world where the human soul is embodied externally in an animal avatar, called a daemon. Otherwise, it is a world more or less like our own, with the exception of a thinly-veiled Roman Catholic Church as an international authoritarian power called The Magisterium. They, of course, love to hush up things they consider 'heretical' while investigating them on the sly themselves. Lyra Belacqua is an orphan left in the care of a fictional Oxford college, and has a device called an Alethiometer which she figures out how to use as a sort of divination tool. In her pursuit of the Chosen One archetype, she discovers that a rash of child abductions is in fact [spoiler!] the Magisterium experimenting with severing the human/daemon bond. This is being done in the high arctic, for some reason, and ties in to the concept of Dust, on the cutting edge of this world's science – invisible to the naked eye, it pours in from the cosmos and is attracted to adults but not children. The Magisterium think Dust is the literal manifestation of Sin, and their experiments have the aim of freeing humanity from sin forever, but all they've succeeded in doing so far is [spoiler!] making zombie children. [more spoilers!] Lyra blows up the daemon-slicing laboratory and has a good old Freudian showdown with her rediscovered parents before running off to a parallel world, as you do. End of Book 1.
The TV show explicitly explained something I don't remember being clear in the book: Children and their daemons are great friends, but come puberty, daemons can be the source of 'troubling thoughts' – presumably of a sexual nature, though the door is left open to anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses. It was this idea that helped me figure out what's missing from this story. What gives a story sticking power is not its entertainment value, but its relevance and usefulness in unpicking the knot of one's own life, or providing wisdom with which to move through the world. Harry Potter is a fun adventure in its own right, and an amusing lens through which to look at the world, but it's also got a generous helping of psychological insight, and the necessity of resisting evil (specifically fascism), despite overwhelming odds and sometimes terrible cost. That's something you can take home with you. That sticks.
Pullman's approach to the daemon idea could have been an opportunity to explore, allegorically, man's struggle with his baser nature and/or the lived experience of mental illness, and the necessary and difficult process of mastering oneself. In Lyra's world one might literally fight one's daemons. But we never see the sort of problematic human/daemon relationship that might expose this idea, only perfectly harmonious ones. If anyone has a problem, it's with the Magisterium. The philosophical agenda of the author reduces the take-home message to 'The Catholic Church is evil!' which is hardly original, and can only be applied so far to one's own life and struggles. 'I don't have to work on anything; all my problems are the fault of External Entity X' is not a mature or constructive way to find peace; even if all your problems were E.E.X's fault, you have to sort things out for yourself eventually.
Later in the series, Dust is revealed to be a fundamental particle of consciousness, and it is Dust which drives Lyra's Alethiometer as well as, e.g., the I Ching divination practice in our world. Ignoring the idea that religion, globally and historically, is one of humanity's principal tools for self-mastery, Pullman throws spiritual practice out the window and his suggestion for replacing it is to ... legitimise fortune-telling? Not what one would expect from a frontman of Rationalism. Again, an opportunity arises to weave this consciousness-particle into a pantheistic or panpsychic cosmology, where it would fit quite comfortably and give the reader a new way to look at the world, but he rejects this in favour of concretising God in the most limited human terms in order to bring the whole construct down. Instead of building a new way to understand the world, it's all destructive. No wonder it's hollow and unsatisfying.
So once again I find I have been spoiled by Terry Pratchett, who is much better both at storytelling and proselytising for secular humanism, in part because he knows how to show, not tell, and abstains from lecturing the reader. Pullman can't even make the defence that he's writing for children, because one of Pratchett's best deconstructions of organised religion is the Bromeliad trilogy, which is openly aimed at younger readers. The sneaky thing about Terry Pratchett is that, in the midst of tearing down codified belief systems, he nevertheless provides worldly wisdom and teaches the reader how to be a better person, something Philip Pullman leaves hanging. Will there ever be a high-value TV miniseries adaptation of a Pratchett book, that takes itself as seriously as His Dark Materials? There have been a few attempts, but the essence tends to get lost in translation. Someday, maybe. We can but hope.
When I came home with a bad cold last year, I discovered the tremendous practical use of television: It is sufficiently interesting to keep me in bed doing nothing, i.e. resting, without requiring as much cognitive effort as reading, which is often beyond my decongestant-fogged brain. Last year I imbibed The Terror; this year I indulged the opportunity to catch up on the BBC's new rendition of the first part of Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials.
I remember when the first book came out. It was at the crest of the wave of post-Harry Potter YA Fantasy. I listened to the audiobook back in those days when I had a tape deck at my desk but not a computer. It wasn't notably satisfying and left me a bit hollow, but was a fun dark adventure that kept me on task, and was better than a lot of the YA fantasy audiobooks I was listening to around that time. Eventually I consumed the other two in the series, but the last one put me off. Pullman was the YA Fantasy representative of the secular humanist cabal making a lot of noise post-9/11 (Richard Dawkins being the loudest) and his books were blatantly trying to be the anti-Narnia for a new, enlightened, Godless generation. This was fine as a premise for the series, but by the third book he had managed to get more evangelical than C.S. Lewis ever was. The preachiness of the last book rather soured my taste for the whole series and I didn't read (or listen to) it again.
My curiosity was piqued by the new TV adaptation, which aired shortly after I left for my Antarctic adventure. I was pleased to find it was still available on the iPlayer when I got back to the UK, so I watched it between naps as I tried to sleep off this cold. It has been probably fifteen years since I was familiar with the books, so I cannot comment as to the faithfulness of the adaptation, but it held on to what little I remember both in storyline and atmosphere, and it was a thoroughly admirable production on all fronts even if the approach to polar architecture broke my suspension of disbelief. Despite the excellent performances and wonderfully executed production, though, I was still left with that empty feeling – it was a grand adventure, but nothing much stayed with me, and in marked contrast to The Terror, even in my susceptible state I didn't much care about any of the characters. Why was such an obstensibly philosophical story so devoid of lasting impact?
It seems to have percolated a bit in my sleep since finishing it, and I woke this morning feeling like I'd figured something out.
In order to understand what I'm getting at, you need to be at least passingly familiar with the premise and basic storyline of The Northern Lights, first book in the His Dark Materials trilogy:
This is a world where the human soul is embodied externally in an animal avatar, called a daemon. Otherwise, it is a world more or less like our own, with the exception of a thinly-veiled Roman Catholic Church as an international authoritarian power called The Magisterium. They, of course, love to hush up things they consider 'heretical' while investigating them on the sly themselves. Lyra Belacqua is an orphan left in the care of a fictional Oxford college, and has a device called an Alethiometer which she figures out how to use as a sort of divination tool. In her pursuit of the Chosen One archetype, she discovers that a rash of child abductions is in fact [spoiler!] the Magisterium experimenting with severing the human/daemon bond. This is being done in the high arctic, for some reason, and ties in to the concept of Dust, on the cutting edge of this world's science – invisible to the naked eye, it pours in from the cosmos and is attracted to adults but not children. The Magisterium think Dust is the literal manifestation of Sin, and their experiments have the aim of freeing humanity from sin forever, but all they've succeeded in doing so far is [spoiler!] making zombie children. [more spoilers!] Lyra blows up the daemon-slicing laboratory and has a good old Freudian showdown with her rediscovered parents before running off to a parallel world, as you do. End of Book 1.
The TV show explicitly explained something I don't remember being clear in the book: Children and their daemons are great friends, but come puberty, daemons can be the source of 'troubling thoughts' – presumably of a sexual nature, though the door is left open to anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses. It was this idea that helped me figure out what's missing from this story. What gives a story sticking power is not its entertainment value, but its relevance and usefulness in unpicking the knot of one's own life, or providing wisdom with which to move through the world. Harry Potter is a fun adventure in its own right, and an amusing lens through which to look at the world, but it's also got a generous helping of psychological insight, and the necessity of resisting evil (specifically fascism), despite overwhelming odds and sometimes terrible cost. That's something you can take home with you. That sticks.
Pullman's approach to the daemon idea could have been an opportunity to explore, allegorically, man's struggle with his baser nature and/or the lived experience of mental illness, and the necessary and difficult process of mastering oneself. In Lyra's world one might literally fight one's daemons. But we never see the sort of problematic human/daemon relationship that might expose this idea, only perfectly harmonious ones. If anyone has a problem, it's with the Magisterium. The philosophical agenda of the author reduces the take-home message to 'The Catholic Church is evil!' which is hardly original, and can only be applied so far to one's own life and struggles. 'I don't have to work on anything; all my problems are the fault of External Entity X' is not a mature or constructive way to find peace; even if all your problems were E.E.X's fault, you have to sort things out for yourself eventually.
Later in the series, Dust is revealed to be a fundamental particle of consciousness, and it is Dust which drives Lyra's Alethiometer as well as, e.g., the I Ching divination practice in our world. Ignoring the idea that religion, globally and historically, is one of humanity's principal tools for self-mastery, Pullman throws spiritual practice out the window and his suggestion for replacing it is to ... legitimise fortune-telling? Not what one would expect from a frontman of Rationalism. Again, an opportunity arises to weave this consciousness-particle into a pantheistic or panpsychic cosmology, where it would fit quite comfortably and give the reader a new way to look at the world, but he rejects this in favour of concretising God in the most limited human terms in order to bring the whole construct down. Instead of building a new way to understand the world, it's all destructive. No wonder it's hollow and unsatisfying.
So once again I find I have been spoiled by Terry Pratchett, who is much better both at storytelling and proselytising for secular humanism, in part because he knows how to show, not tell, and abstains from lecturing the reader. Pullman can't even make the defence that he's writing for children, because one of Pratchett's best deconstructions of organised religion is the Bromeliad trilogy, which is openly aimed at younger readers. The sneaky thing about Terry Pratchett is that, in the midst of tearing down codified belief systems, he nevertheless provides worldly wisdom and teaches the reader how to be a better person, something Philip Pullman leaves hanging. Will there ever be a high-value TV miniseries adaptation of a Pratchett book, that takes itself as seriously as His Dark Materials? There have been a few attempts, but the essence tends to get lost in translation. Someday, maybe. We can but hope.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-30 12:19 pm (UTC)"The sneaky thing about Terry Pratchett is that, in the midst of tearing down codified belief systems, he nevertheless provides worldly wisdom and teaches the reader how to be a better person"
That is a wonderful way to describe it. Amongst the humour and the sly sarcasm, there's such a wonderfully warm and gentle nudge towards being kind, thinking of others as people, remembering that deep down people share a lot of common threads no matter how different they seem (whether they're humans, dwarves or trolls).
I've enjoyed the TV adaptations but yes,some of the flavour gets a little lost. Mind you, Good Omens was wonderfully successful and kept the original flavour (maybe the focus shifted a little, maybe Aziraphale and Crowley were a little softer onscreen than the written POVs, but it was undeniably the same story and the same fictional world). So maybe there will be another attempt at Discworld adaptations.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-30 12:45 pm (UTC)On further reflection this morning, the philosophy propounded in HDM, which you neatly summarised as 'don't trust authority figures', is SUCH post-war white man's worldview – My personhood is defined and actualised by my Id! You can't tell me what to do! The world would be perfect without the oppression of The Man! – and that explains an awful lot about how we've ended up where we are today ...
I did enjoy Good Omens, which I intend to watch again when it comes to the BBC. My only misgiving was that the screenplay was obviously written by a novelist and not a filmmaker, but all in all it hit the mark a lot better than the Discworld TV movies. The radio adaptations are pretty good; if they just filmed those (and remembered when film allowed them to show rather than tell) they could get somewhere...? Can't say I'm optimistic for the upcoming City Watch series ...
no subject
Date: 2019-12-30 03:01 pm (UTC)I'm coming from a different angle than you, being devoted to Northern Lights (meanwhile, the rest of the trilogy... eh, they're fine) but I certainly agree with what you describe as lacking from the series.
If I'm reading right, I think you're saying 'relevance and usefulness in unpicking the knot of one's own life' was missing from the book as well as the series of Northern Lights? I agree with the point re. the series, but for me it's a let-down of a book which is all about that.
The series fails to present its fantasy with any of the source materials interest in the thoughts that inform it, so it all becomes a kind of dark whimsy.
You may or may not be interested - I've been writing a series about the handling of daemons across Northern Lights and its adaptations. The first part is here: https://www.kathrynrosamiller.com/post/daemons-in-his-dark-materials, with links to the other two installments that I have published so far.
If you're still poorly you might be looking for something to point your eyes at for a spell! I also found Myles McNutt's episode reviews on the A. V. Club insightful, depending how interested you are in spelunking into criticism of HDM.
Since you mention Pratchett, and the failures of adaptation there, I also wrote critically about Good Omens on the same blog https://www.kathrynrosamiller.com/post/good-omens. I'm unusual in really not thinking very highly of GO as an adaptation, so I think adaptations have all really missed the mark so far.
I'm actually excited about The Watch because at least it sounds like if it fails it's going to fail interestingly - I'm so bored of adaptations that have a dull, plodding fidelity to detail and no imagination or apparent understanding of the spirit of the text.
Get well soon!
no subject
Date: 2019-12-30 11:47 pm (UTC)I didn't know enough about the context in which to place the odd God-bashing, so thank you for that.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-31 02:39 am (UTC)These situations are in The Secret Commonwealth. I'm not sure you want spoilers, but I'd be really curious to read your thoughts on that book. It's the second book in the second trilogy, the first, La Belle Sauvage, is just a good adventure tale (though has some disturbing human/daemon interactions).