[HPFGU-OTChatter] The Amber Spyglass

[Simon]

Hello all

I am going to be talking about Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy
here and mainly about the third The Amber Spyglass. Be warned that it does
contain spoilers for the series and so I advise not reading this message if
you have not read the books.

Also it is quite long, but I feel that I have a lot to say. Apologies if it
seems quite disjointed, I have written it over a long period of time and am
still unhappy at the order but seem unable to get the subjects into an order
I am totally happy with.

I will reference the article by Alan Jacobs:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/magazine/mag_6_6_00/jacobs_bkart_6_6_00.asp in
my comments.


Simon wrote, on HPforGU: "How The Amber Spyglass won the children's award I
will never know."
Amy Z replied: "No, I'm not going to argue that AS was the best British
children's book of the year--how would I know?--nor that it's better than
GoF-I can't make comparisons like that and don't really want to stretch my
brain, or mangle my loyalties, trying to.  Nor am I going to defend any kind
of award;"

I am not arguing that GoF was necessarily the best. I also have read few
Children's (based on how they are categorized for such awards - comment
added for the benefit of Penny "they are not children's books" Linsenmayer)
books released last year. I am just going to point out why I found AS to be
very disappointing. Last year I read all four HP books, the trilogy by
Pullman and The Hobbit. Hence only two possibilities for best children's
book of last year are available to me. Which is not a large enough sample to
attempt to make a selection from.

My favourite book of last year, comparing the ones that I read last year
rather than ones that necessarily were released then, is a tie between PS,
PoA and Northern Lights (note that Northern Lights is the UK, and hence
correct title, for Golden Compass) - all supposedly children's books. What
does that say about me? Or is it just an indication of a wealth of
children's literature being released at the moment? I would hope that it is
the later.


Amy Z: "And why am I bringing this subject up here when I could do it on the
Dark Materials Yahoo Group and avoid the argument?  Must be itching for a
fight."

Possibly. I am not a member of that group and so you would be missing my
comments. This group has been set up for us, as fans of the Harry Potter
series, to come together and discuss nearly anything. So I am here,
responding to your comments and the question posed to me in a private e-mail
by someone else.


Amy Z: "1. It articulates large chunks of my theology with power and grace.
I would preach on it, but I can't figure out how to do it without giving
away the end.  Instead, I recommend it to everyone in my church whether they
ask or not.  Abuse of power comes as no surprise."
Amy Z: "7. The way it deals with death, and the respect it has for the view
that dissolving into the universe is a better fate than living forever in a
nonphysical state.  Unlike Mrs. Coulter, and like most of the ghosts, I'd
rather dissolve.  "Take me back, O hills I love" (traditional Appalachian
song).  That whole loving and celebratory attitude toward the physical
world...but this is all wrapped up in reason #1."

Ebony wrote (HPforGU message 8510): "There are Christians who read and enjoy
Pullman's books-some of us can make a clear distinction between the dictates
of the church visible and the church invisible.  (Lewis himself makes this
distinction in the novel "The Screwtape Letters.)"

This is basically the starting point. As a Christian I do not necessarily
agree with the 'theology' as presented by Pullman in his series, but I have
no problem with reading about someone else's views in a fiction book. At the
end of the day I can make a clear distinction between fiction and fact, so
had no problem reading the series written from this point of view.

In his series we have God as being the enemy of humanity, Heaven as a
horrible place and the Church as an undertaker of awful acts in God's name.
The third of these I can have little argument about. The Church has done
some awful things in God's name throughout history. The first two, however,
I have bigger problems with and do not agree with. Though as I said this
does not stop me from reading the series. As I said earlier, the difference
between fiction and fact is an important distinction to be made and must be
made every time we pick up a book.


Amy Z: "2. Daemons."

Daemons are cool. I enjoyed the idea of them and the implication that this
has on all of us with Lyra's comment about us all having daemons inside us
(sorry I cannot give an exact quote as I do not have the books with me) and
that we could tell a lot about ourselves if we can identify what form the
daemon would take for each of us. I especially like them because they caused
me to stop and think about my life and myself. What I have done, where I am
going and I feel that I gained a lot from the experience.


Amy Z: "3. Powerful, intelligent, fully-developed-as-characters, wise girls
and women, without any condescension or second thought.  I think PP is free
of the usual sexism that infects most of us, and it comes through in his
writing without any sense of self-conscious effort on his part.  E.g. Lyra,
Mary, all of the witches, even Mrs. Coulter (who manages to evade every
evil-woman cliche)...there are so many that it is beyond a list of
acceptable-to-feminists characters--it's pervasive."

This is good. Male heroes are far too common in literature and it is good to
see some of this being addressed by this book. Even in something like Lewis'
Narnia series, where there are both females and males, the males are more
likely to be the warrior types and the females kindly and caring.

I am not sure that Mrs Coulter avoids every evil woman hero, but she is
certainly not the typical evil woman from literature. Of course we had the
obligatory redemption, because someone she loved bit that was also to be
expected.

An amusing comment I have made before is that the two best selling
children's series of recent years have a female author writing with a male
hero and a male writing with a female hero. It is interesting to note that
this at first seems odd, but maybe it is understandable. In one of the round
robin I have contributed to I did both first person from male and female
points of view and for some reason found the female easier, even thought the
male in question was Dr. Branford.


Amy Z: "4. How many children's authors quote Blake, Milton, Rilke, and
Ashbery in their epigraphs?  (He gets extra points for hitting two of my
very favorite poets, Blake and Rilke.)"

And how many children would know who Milton, Blake and so on are? I am not a
fan of poetry and so any comment I make here will be biased because of that.
Also why does the ability to quote such authors make the books any good? Or
that the author is any better than one that cannot quote such stuff? It just
demonstrates that someone got a very good education in those particular
authors.


Amy Z: "5. It has two of the most frightening scenes I've ever read: the one
where they find Tony Makarios and the one at Bolvangar where they almost
separate Lyra and Pan (both from GC).  Why is this a reason to love it, you
ask?  Because when I opened the book I had never heard of a daemon, and by
page 200 I knew so well what it meant to have one that I shook and wept all
the way through "The Lost Boy" as if someone had done to me what they did to
Tony.  How the hell does PP do that?  I take everything I read to heart (at
least, everything good), but this experience took the cake."

"The Lost Boy" - I am assuming that is the chapter title. I agree that both
of these points are very moving, but will point out that this bit comes from
Northern Lights (US publishers changing book names again!). Why I point this
out will be explained later. Incidents like those mentioned, and the
Voldemort / Harry interaction in GoF, have restored my confidence in
literature and have encouraged me to read more. I am fairly typical British
teenage / just out of teenage male in that for years I have read very
little. Recently I have been reading a lot more, which started around a year
ago when I first read HP while I was supposed to be revising for finals. I
aim to read a book a week at the moment.


Amy Z: "6. Two extremely passionate, serious 12 year olds whose passions and
seriousness are believable."

The two lead characters are brilliant. They are believable and the way the
books are written catches the readers' imagination. It brings the reader
into the story and makes us totally caught up in their respective plights.


Amy Z: "8. The message that stories can save us, from death, from despair,
from meaninglessness.  And that one of our tasks in this life is to live in
such a way that we could tell true stories about the world-to pay that kind
of attention."

Yep.


Amy Z: "What's the problem, in your opinion?"

Now for the big bit. The bit where I say I liked the first two books but was
disappointed with the third.


We have the first book, which take us through the attempts of a young girl
to find her best friend and then her father. We see her trials along the
way. The way she makes friends and then ultimately finds her friend and
leads him to his death. Then onto her decision to go on instead of turning
back.
Then, in the second book, we meet up with the second of the two lead
characters and learn about his past and his search for a father and
ultimately a normal family life. In his quest he meets Lyra and they join
together.

I really enjoyed the first two books. I felt that, even though they covered
what is a very contentious subject matter, the story was the most important
thing and Pullman's anti-Christianity feelings were not getting in the way
of the plot. They were there in the background, obviously important to the
story, but in no ways the central factor in them and easy to ignore while
you immersed yourself in the story.

We have believable and very well developed characters. The two children have
moved from their natural environments into new and totally alien places and
even into different worlds. Everything has been amazing well built up and
developed. The detail is immense. We want the children to succeed and by
this time it is becoming clear that maybe they are meant to be with each
other.

They then carry on together towards the battle. We are prepared for what
promises to be an amazing battle between this twisted good and evil
(reversing the normally held concepts of God as Good and Satan as Evil). The
third book is billed as a battle in Heaven and on earth. Then what happens
it is almost missed. It goes from being the point of the story to seemingly
chucked away in a few sentences as the whole battle is almost ignored.


>From the Jacobs article: "Meanwhile Asriel engages in dubious battle with
the Almighty's army.

At this decisive point in the story, Pullman's narrative energy flags
markedly. There are times when it's not even clear what's happening, and the
key anti-theological moment-toward which the whole narrative has been
heading-is abruptly passed over in a few lines, after which the characters
turn to things that more greatly interest them.

I suspect that Pullman does this deliberately, in order to make the truly
anti-theological point that whether God lives or dies is not in the long run
a very significant matter: One character suggests that we could best prove
our love for a decrepit God by seeking him out and giving him "the gift of
death." But even if this is intentional, it's still a problem. A writer who
draws for a thousand pages on the narrative energy generated by the promise
of Armageddon, only to toss the theme aside at the last moment, has cheated
the reader.

By this point, however, Pullman the storyteller has also been cheated-by
Pullman the village atheist. <SNIP>

In his attempts to diminish God, Pullman ends up diminishing his own story.
When the Almighty's Regent, "a being whose profound intellect had had
thousands of years to deepen and strengthen itself, and whose knowledge
extended over a million universes," is ruined because he can't resist a
seductive babe, or when Asriel attacks the Deity with a hovercraft straight
out of Star Wars, it is not the absurdity of Christian doctrine that one
contemplates.

Again and again, Pullman's mocking of religious belief gets him into
trouble. There is an irony in Pullman's calling Lewis's narrative method
"dishonest," because dishonesty is the signal moral trait of Pullman's
trilogy. One sees a number of unequivocally evil people in these books, and
one sees a number of Christians, and these are always-always-the same
people. Everyone associated with the Church is cruel, remorseless, and only
rarely less than murderous. Conversely, everyone outside the Church is
blindingly righteous, Lord Asriel being the only partial exception. (And his
most indefensible deed proves to be the inadvertent cause of-in the
narrative's terms-an immeasurably great thing.) These decent, compassionate
folk regularly denounce religion and God, while the monsters who run the
Church utter scarcely a word in their own defense-just to make sure that no
reader comes to a conclusion Pullman doesn't want"


Though I do not agree with all that is contained in the article, it is at
this point that what is being said really ties in with my feelings. I was
expecting Armageddon and then felt cheated and disappointed when I did not
get it. The whole story has built up to this and we do not get it, and what
that spaceship thing is doing I will never know. It almost seemed like
walking into a battle where people only have simple spears and catapults
when you have a modern machine gun. It also seems to be in there to get
Pullman out of a plot hole. One of his main characters (Mrs Coulter) needs
to report in and this spaceship gives her the opportunity to do so. If such
a massive leap is needed then it is because the author has made a big
mistake and then decided to use an easy way out to solve the problem.

Pullman, having dispensed with the battle almost before it starts, is then
able to continue his over the top attack on Christianity. This gets in the
way of the story and then he rushes into an ending. Also this God being just
another angel seems to be shooting himself in the foot. He says that God is
bad and then gives up and changes to saying there is no God. I got the
impression that at this stage he almost bottled out of going totally out and
out against the concept of God and instead decided to remove God from the
equation altogether. It comes across that he has just no guts to take the
fight.

His attempts to attack Christianity have only ended up in affecting his
story. It is almost as if he knew by this stage that his book would be read
by millions of children and so gave him the perfect opportunity to dispense
with a proper story and move instead to making it clear why he does not
believe in Christianity, without giving any good reasons, that are true, to
believe his viewpoint. He brings out lots of half-truths and things that are
true in these altered worlds and then passes them almost tries to pass them
off as being true in our world.


Amy Z: "I agree that the 3rd is not as good, but the three books are really
one, almost like Lord of the Rings; The Subtle Knife leaves you hanging off
a very high cliff.  Besides, 3 has its own charms.  It just has a bit of a
feverish tying-up-ends feeling to it now and then, IMO, but it is all worth
it, also IMO."

This is it. My point that the ending is just not right. The third book is
meant to be the culmination of the series and is instead little more than a
thinly disguised attack on Christianity. Added to this we then have the
pointless bit of the two leads either having sex or at least becoming very
familiar with each other. They are 12, and even though they are fairly
mature I still saw no need for this. We know they are meant to be together.
The whole daemons interaction has shown us that, their actions together have
shown that. The reason for this seemed very unclear and unneeded and added
nothing to the plot or the ending.

The ending is neither what is expected or is satisfactory. It is almost
trying to create an 'everyone lived happily ever after' in a situation where
it is not possible. Both main characters have lost parents during the books,
now they are being separated from each other, but we will have a sentimental
attempt at something approaching a happy ending. But by this stage he has
fought off the bad guys, God is dead (if he ever existed properly in the
first place) and the church will either die or be forced to change. Now we
must have the fairy tale ending to the story, or as close as is possible in
the circumstances.

If we get a similar ending in Harry Potter then I will be shocked and
appalled. His Dark Materials had the potential to be a great series and then
everything is thrown away in the final book so that the author can get over
his worldview.



I have written enough now and probably repeated myself far too many times.


Simon (no sig line this time - not needed in the circumstances!)