The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman, 1995
(Spoilers)
I was eight when The Golden Compass film was released in 2007, with discourse around its comparison to The Chronicles of Narnia. Narnia was deemed appropriate for Christian audiences where The Golden Compass was not (let me add I also watched The Exorcist for the first time when I was like seven, so this may have been a futile ban). The controversy was over how Narnia positively displayed Christian ideology, whereas The Golden Compass ridiculed organized religion, with Christianity in the limelight. Fast forward now 19 years and an episode of The Book Club Podcast on The Golden Compass (titled Northern Lights in the UK) is released with a synopsis blurb for the discussion on its critique of organized religion and inspiration from Milton’s Paradise Lost. So y’all best believe I RAN to amazon prime and added the whole trilogy to cart.
Here is my take after finishing book 1: Lyra is an eleven year old orphan raised by the scholars in Jordan College, Oxford, where she was left by her Uncle Asriel as a ward. Lyra doesn’t know much of her Uncle other than that he is a fierce man who has business with high politics. They live in a fantastical world, with talking animals, “ghasts,” and witches, and, most distinctively, are each born with a daemon. Daemons are essentially a soul or conscience made physical, taking the shape of changing animal forms until the human hits puberty and their daemon chooses one animal form to exist in.
The novel begins with Lyra, quite the brazen child, sneaking into a private meeting held by Lord Asriel for the scholars at Jordan College. Asriel is requesting funds for an expedition in which he will explore a city found within the North Pole’s Northern Lights. Asriel discusses a new, inexplicable substance called “Dust,” which seems to be leaking from the city in the Aurora lights. Lyra has an eerie feeling, as she watches the Master of the college attempt to poison her Uncle, and not long afterward there are children who begin disappearing, said to be taken by a group referred to as the “Gobblers.”
Lyra and her daemon Pan are mystified by these events, and even more so when Lyra is sent to live with a beautiful and alluring woman, Mrs. Coulter. She is given a device called the Alethiometer by the College Master beforehand, with a warning not to let Mrs. Coulter see it. Lyra is told that the Alethiometer is a very rare truth meter, but Lyra will have to figure out how to read the Alethiometer’s symbols on her own.
*Major spoiler in next two paragraphs* On attending high society parties with Mrs. Coulter, Lyra and Pan figure out that Mrs. Coulter is in fact the head of the Gobblers (otherwise known as the General Oblation Board), and is intending to use Lyra to help lure children. On the night of Lyra’s escape, she is found by the Gyptians, a familiar tribe in town, and taught that she herself is key to the whole mess with Dust and Gobblers, and that Mrs. Courter and Uncle Asriel are actually her true mother and father. *mic drop*
The story goes that Lyra follows the Gyptians to the North Pole to help save the stolen children (one of which is her best friend Roger), and to help save her father/uncle Asriel who has been imprisoned by Coulter and guarded by the Svalbard bears. Along the journey, she finds family with the Gyptian tribe, an outcast bear Iorek, a witch Serafina Pekkala, and a bunch of stolen kids in a holding palace, one by one being plucked off and severed from their daemons. That, she learns, is why Coulter has been kidnapping kids, to study them for dust and to sever their daemons.
First off, on opening the book I was immediately blasted with nostalgia. This would make sense, as The Golden Compass is intended for middle grade readers. Children’s books can easily be watered down of their ideas and tension enough to lose an adult reader’s taste for it, but Pullman has absolutely preserved the novel’s literary art. The scene building is so beautiful and descriptive that it is difficult not to be completely immersed in it. The book is filled with whimsical ambiance—there are market stalls in the village, horse fairs, department stores with big large windows, theater-goers calling for cabs on the street. Pullman is a master of old-world charm.
And yet, when the book needs to become scary, it is masterful at that as well. For example, as the legends of the Gobblers start spreading through the town, the tone becomes dark whilst still preserving its fairytale charm. I felt as if I’d been thrown into the world of The Woman In Black, though one much less bleak and with much more wonder. And then later, as Lyra is journeying with the Gyptians to the North Pole, I felt as if I was in the wondrous land of The Polar Express. All of Pullman’s ambiances are sewn so intricately and intentionally that we feel as if we really have entered the world he has imagined for us.
*Spoilers onward* Balanced with Lyra’s adventure journey, the novel’s secular ideas are strong—hence the controversy—and complex enough to actually require some pause for even a 26 year old like myself. Dust, as decided by the Catholic Church, is original sin manifested physically. The novel goes far to relate this to Catholicism; Asriel has Lyra read from Genesis in the Bible, “for dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return” (page 373). Asriel’s initiative in searching for the city in the Aurora is to go to the source of Dust and defeat it, and so therefore to defeat Original Sin, and to defeat death. Mrs. Coulter, investigating this same phenomenon, uses a different method of investigation, severing children from their daemons as it has been found that Dust is with all adults and daemons. Mrs. Coulter has a really interesting explanation of this phenomenon, “You see, your daemon’s a wonderful friend and companion when you’re young, but at the age we call puberty, the age you’re coming to very soon, darling, daemons bring all sort of troublesome thoughts and feelings, and that’s what lets Dust in” (page 284). If this is a religious allegory, as it so clearly is, the novel’s theology is based on the idea that we have daemons attached to puberty, and if we can cut those daemons, we will not have any ties to Original Sin.
The daemons, however, are not demonistic characters. Coulter (who works closely with the church) and Asriel are the villains, which is why the book is largely seen as being very anti-Christian. In fact, the daemons—so, sin—are so indelibly tied to the identity of the humans that they are unable to live without them. It is a love stronger than any other. The daemons are, in part, the heroes. Would that be to say, Mr. Pullman, that our sinful nature is an indelible, and not a negative part of us? Even, for instance, a positive part?
There is yet another layer of the novel’s argument for secularism. Dust is an elementary particle, same as electrons and photons, which makes it so we can access other universes through the Northern Lights. The book becomes very Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (well, reversed, since EEAAO was released in 2022). Asriel explains that countless other worlds exist, all based on probability. Asriel says “one moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don’t exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which they did happen” (page 377). A belief in quantum physics is absolutely the antithetical point to Christianity, though the book enmeshes the two, allowing Original Sin to exist, but in a metaphysical way instead of a religious way.
Contradictorily, the existence of the alethiometer implies that there is one predestined truth, so therefore one objective reality. Free will versus fate is a major theme of the novel, as all adults seem to know that Lyra will save the world, but she must do so without any awareness that she is the savior.
And then, as is due for all great fantasy novels, Pullman ends with a plot twist. As it turns out, Coulter and Asriel are not enemies. At their reunion in the last chapter, they are achingly in love. Asriel uses the charged moment of Roger and his daemon’s intercision to open a bridge between their world and the world of the Aurora lights, and enters it, begging Coulter to join him. She doesn’t, and for the first time in the novel, we see her as a hurt, jilted woman instead of the monster who is capturing children and severing them from their daemons.
The Golden Compass has a really heartbreaking ending; really great incentive to read the second novel. Lyra and Pan discover that neither of her parents are good, and therefore they make the decision to enter the discovered world and search for Dust themselves, as they should be fighting on the opposite team as her parents. Also, she just lost her best friend Roger, murdered by her father, after believing she’d saved him! The girl is eleven, by the way! Talk about resilience, as she is ready to walk right into an entirely different world and follow her loveless father, who has betrayed her. We can assume she is on the Alethiometer’s predestined path.
Last note, the story’s lore is incredibly impressive and original, and the only fiction I can compare it to is that of an Anne Rice novel.
After listening to The Book Club Podcast Episode:
So apparently the The Chronicles of Narnia and Golden Compass rivalry goes deeper than I recall. Pullman has critiqued the Narnia series, describing it as “ugly, poisonous, vile, life-hating, nauseating,” because of its strong Christian allegory. Pullman also has gotten his own fair share of hate, especially by Catholicism, as he’s been called “the most dangerous author in Britain,” and has had his books banned in many childhood spaces for their anti-Christian views.
The Book Club Podcast speaks about Paradise Lost’s influence on the novel, which Pullman has admitted he intended to rewrite in three volumes. Asriel, the speakers say, is adjacent to Satan or Lucifer, and Lyra is a second Eve. This knowledge will add multiple layers of interest to my read of the second and third novels. The trilogy, titled the His Dark Materials trilogy, is a term used in Book II of Paradise Lost, and the Alethiometer is based on the compass that God creates the earth with in Milton’s Book VII.
Other points from the Podcast that I would like to add are that the daemons are typically the opposite gender of their humans, an interesting little allusion to Jung’s anima/animus, and that the intercision made when a human is cut from their daemon is intended to reflect a male’s castration, making the Dust a loss of sexual innocence. The Podcast makes the same point as my own about how Pullman’s secular argument is that experience (Dust) should be celebrated over innocence.
A bit more about Lyra’s parentage: the speakers of the Podcast emphasize how an orphan searching for parents is a very common arc in children’s books, but it is not common for the child to find the parent and be betrayed by them as Lyra is by Asriel in The Golden Compass. Not mentioned is that in the final pages of the book, Asriel uses Lyra’s love for adventure to tempt Coulter to follow him into the new world, which Coulter declines, essentially saying ‘then take Lyra, she is more your daughter than mine.’ Lyra is truly unwanted by her parents. The speakers of the Podcast say that there are moments throughout where we find Coulter to have real care for her daughter, but I actually did not find that. In my reading, the only moment of sympathy I had for Coulter was when Asriel was leaving her, and she was so hurt that she seemed to be swaying, almost fainting (page 396).
5/5. I am obsessed. I am so glad I am reading this at 26 years old, as I am sure its philosophical depth would have went right over my head as a child, which is, by the way, another point of the Podcast’s—its polemics and didactics should be excused as they are in Narnia, for a child will not understand the Anti-Christian propaganda in the same way they don’t understand the religiosity in The Chronicles of Narnia.
I look forward to watching the 2007 movie and especially the 2019 television series on HBO Max, which is said to be, appropriately, more dark.
