There is a scene in The Amber Spyglass in which the dagger is re-forged by the king of the armored bears. The scene is my favorite in all the Dark Materials trilogy. It is so good that I found myself wishing Tolkien had written it. And this is instructive.

In the first place, it has a vivid, scientifical sort of observation to it that makes it come alive in the details. This kind of careful observation in the description of an imaginary event is like magic. If you can get that sort of thing in the right place, you’re well on your way to being a worthwhile storyteller.

In the second place, the scene is magical in that it is suffused by wonder. There is desire, anxiety and danger all mixed in, along with the delicate work as everything is prepared and then the procedure is followed. One of Pullman’s great strengths is that he really has a sense of wonder toward what we think of as science. I really doubt that science comes with all that much wonder; it may be because when we are taught in school, we’re shown a bunch of tricks; or maybe I’m just obtuse. In any event, there is something about the old dream of the cosmos as an elegant machine of wooden and brass parts that is half magical and I find very compelling in Pullman’s parallel universe.

In the third place it is instructive, or at least I found it instructive, that when he’d reached that point in the development of his burden, he had gotten so preachy I really wished what was happening had been done by another writer. The big, gaping flaw in Pullman is his obvious point. His petulant, gay angels; his good-at-heart harpies; the homophobic womanizer formerly known as Enoch and now the supreme power of the universe; God, the decrepit bastard; and what is really the worst of all: the happy, environmental tribe of rhomboid shaped sentient elephants with their dying, motorcycle-gang way of life in harmony with the trees and the great, natural highways of their universe. This string of cliches, irresponsible and implausible cynicism and other such failures of imagination really hamper a work . . . of imagination.

What Pullman had in the first book, a world you were keen about and actually wanted, he squanders with his tendentious preaching. In the end our heroes eat the fruit nobody forbade them. Whether they have sex or not is not entirely clear—apparently it has something to do with original sin in the minds of the Biblically illiterate—but it does not appear to be anymore essential than the eating of the fruit. How this event solves all the world’s ills is not clear either. What happens behind the scene is that a brave, weak, petulant gay angel prevents a priest from murdering the children by murdering him first, thereby defeating the Geneva based catholic Magestireum of the parallel universe. Great! Thanks to Lyra’s parents, the totalitarian angel formerly known as Enoch is cast to his death, along with them and all their flaws. Oops! Thanks to a female angel who might for all practical purposes be Satan him/herself, the particles of consciousness some meddling corporate scientists (I wonder how long he had to sit around thinking that one up; all Pandemonium dedicated to a cosmic project of ecological sustainability; Milton is indeed rolling in his grave—I mean, Shelley) were wasting can be conserved again. About time! Thanks to the fact that puberty has erased all of Lyra’s natural power to use the alethiometer, she can devote herself to the life of a scholar, and whatever it was her boyfriend Will, now banished back to his own universe, did with the rest of his life I cannot now recall; I’m pretty sure it was something boring like helping Al Gore or showing the world that crazy people really are simply victims of corporate greed.

And it really is too bad because the books have some great moments. When the bear, an inhuman, soulless, somehow sentient being devours the carcass of his best pal (another cliche—remember the Texan? Fell defending the Alamo, more or less), you have something hair raising and imaginative. It explains the bear exactly, makes him alien and eerily familiar at the same time. The chilling father Gomez with his pre-emptive penance is another—perhaps not so imaginative—interesting detail; how he tames the foul fowl of the motorcycle elephants’ world. The suspense is always good and the confusion of the battles would have made for a great movie franchise.

It reminds me that I read the work in translation and it suffered because of that. When cliff-ghasts become ‘fantasmas del alcantilado’ something has indeed been lost. The at times positively mechanical translation was a shame, especially since Pullman had some brilliant coined designations in the first volume. It would take real dedication and ability to do justice to Pullman in his best moments, and with a trilogy that kind of builds itself into the same sort of ephemeral scattering toward which Pullman believes all life to be heading . . . well, what’s the point?

Barfield’s point in Saving the Appearances is very similar to Lukacs’s point in this book. But while Barfield is mostly to establish and clarify the point of the evolution of consciousness and that all our knowledge is participatory, Lukacs is working on the implications of this realization. One can see this by considering the history recounted in each book. Barfield looks and ancient and pre-modern history. Lukacs deals with the modern age—the last 500 years, more or less. Barfield is trying to establish what used to be in order to show the difference. Lukacs is telling us how we have become aware of those differences in the course of human events.

We have passed through an age—the Modern Age—in which we believed we actually observed phenomena as they existed and independent of our perceptions. This simply is not true, says Barfield. And Lukacs says, It is no longer possible for informed persons to believe that; we know better. Heisenberg teaches us—still Lukacs speaking—Durhem teaches us, this is what constituted Einstein’s failure, here is how Pascal anticipated it, here we see the idea shining through in Paul Valery and over here in Wendell Berry.

In short: Lukacs offers a reasoned synthesis of modern learning that points clearly to Barfield’s conclusion. All this assumes you have read Barfield, of course, but if you’re interested in the problem of epistemology you have to anyway. Lukacs comes at it from another way, which is helpful. And while he’s sometimes awfully strange (perhaps because he’s an eastern European), he will always add to your understanding of whatever it is he’s writing about. This book is about our present location in the stream of history.

I got an American edition in which the title—for whatever reason—is The Golden Compass rather than The Northern Lights. Silly, of course, because there’s really no compass involved. The device featured on the cover of the first edition is properly called an alethometer and resembles a compass only in some of its exterior features. Perhaps those in charge of such decisions cynically decided that was enough where Americans were concerned, and no doubt they were right.

Back in 1976 Kingsley Amis wrote a curious novel called The Alteration. It was what people are nowadays pleased to call an alternative history. Philip K. Dick devoted one of his drug-induced, fascinating, bizarre and eventually not entirely pointless novels to the notion; and curiously enough, Dick’s novel makes an appearance in Amis’s—as a sort of tribute, I suppose, to American letters. The Alteration may or may not have influenced Pullman—he is certainly better read than your average American, and it is doubtful whether your average American has heard of The Alteration or even of its author. What is curious is how many of the tricks Pullman uses come up first in The Alteration.

Which is not to say Pullman is not ingenious, but to steer us toward something pretty bright and interesting in his alternate universe. An alternate history has to play on what we know and mingle in the strange, and I think Pullman does it deftly. While any historian is going to balk at the impossibility of alternate history, Pullman does it in a way that doesn’t unreasonably strain disbelief with an over-strong gravitational force of ignorance. Quite the contrary, and I think Pullman has a pretty good sense of judgment: his measure and proportion here are hard to criticize.

You can really see his judgment when it comes to telling a story: using suspense, putting all the elements in the right order and to the right proportion, giving the perfect touch (when he conjures up—at the end of the scene !—the whole image of the ice encrusted balloon drifting through the arctic skies, for example). The sense of exploration and his love or at least cunning exploitation of the Newtonian dream of the cosmos as an elegant machine is something very satisfying about this book. Along with that, the book is exciting, one of the most exciting books I’ve read in a long time, and I’d read it again just for that. What a joy to be led along and not really let down.

The sense of exploration is heightened and heightened as the expedition reaches places stranger and stranger. I found his places and situations done well: vivid and interesting—even the repulsive arctic laboratory was more or less what it ought to have been—not quaint, but one of the most modern things in that world. And that he doesn’t mingle the things badly when it comes to familiar and unfamiliar elements is perhaps because of his deft use of names (anabaric, coal-silk, philosophical instruments, atomcraft [brilliant!]; though I thought he overdid it once: cauchic). He is really good at all this.

There are cliches. The cowboy with the long, enormous gun and his American way of speaking—but then, he’s an American type so who cares? The silliness about women scholars being repressed (bah), the hocus pocus view of religion and hierarchy—rather veiled in mystery, which saves it; one can sense the cliches that make the minds of modern “intellectuals” look bulgy and muscular in the background. But he knows the story is the thing and these minor irritations remain minor.

I can live with a story that paints the established religion as anything from a harlot on up since I’ve read the Bible. That doesn’t bother me; Pullman has nothing on St. John of Patmos. The church in his world is a sort of superstitious guardian of the mysteries of science or some such thing. It’s mostly innuendo. It’s nothing as hideous as the nightmare of American evangelical religion in our universe. No, what really nags at one is the eventual unending suspense. You need a bit of a let down from it, but the book is unrelenting, which makes it a bit thin on reflection. He resorts in the end to having the villain explain things to the protagonist at the point where all seems lost. This sort of thing at that point in the book has to be brief so that the suspense isn’t squandered. Of course, it is a children’s book, but what kind of elitist doesn’t think that children can think too? Is the anti-Narnia to be that there are none of the wondrous depths the vile, racist and misogynist (bah) C.S. Lewis somehow conjured up out of the withered sticks of tradition, religion and mythology? So there’s a bit of a hollow core (I understand the second and third books are more to the point, and I will be reading them shortly).

The heroine is a great idea. She’s interesting because she’s a determined pathological liar who inadvertently manages to turn her best friend into the whole burnt offering that opens the door to new wonders and possibilities. Really stubborn, really lucky, and fully believable—along with a resilient stomach. In order to have a good story you need human error, or human errors and human impulses that will create the conflict and necessary tension to produce the suspense and excitement. This girl does mistakes and impulses very effectively; she lives the life of unintended consequences to the max. One gets the idea that among the virtues, a feckless audacity ranks pretty high with Pullman. The problem is, this makes the good and the bad perilously indistinguishable, and that is just not good story telling. I think it will come back to bite him in the next stories, but I don’t think it has thought of that yet in this first volume.

Names and concepts are brilliantly done in the alternation Pullman presents, as I have said, but what is most fascinating to me is how he can take standard situations and circumstances and by doing the thing right, make them new and fresh and even expand on them. It’s like Kingsley Amis, only just as good and still different. I like his witches, and I like the hints of the religion he drops. His gypstians are a bit of a cliche of the outcast and sentimental, but I like the river fog they allow, the undrained midlands, and especially their manner of speech. It’s hard to mingle the quaint science of Newton with a laboratory from the late 20th century, but he does it, and other such things.

The book does contain some curiously strong descriptions of events. I’m surprised he was able to get away with all the gore and violence he did, and on top of it that he got congratulated for it. Does it go to show that it’s the ideology that counts or that the storytelling is what really counts? I’m not sure, but my money would not be on the latter, for all that it’s a clear strength.

I know it may sound sarcastic to some; but I don’t think I can help it. I admire the book and wish I had his powers. I mean to learn from him, one way or another, and I am hoping that in the next two books Pullman does not disappoint. Whether he does or not, I’m grateful for the enjoyment of the first. When you discover a really good book you are usually faced with a dilemma, and I’m pleased I had it again in my life: does one save the reading of it for times of maximum enjoyment, or does one take it along to brighten all the grey bus rides, monotonous waiting rooms and snatched intervals of disoccupation? When the satisfaction at the end outshines the melancholy fact that the book has been read, was too short and those precious hours are past, you know it has been good reading no matter where.

No my friends, we aren’t in Narnia anymore, and I am not sure that we can even count ourselves so lucky as to still be in the USA surrounded by cardboard cut-out Americans selling nefarious religious paraphernalia. Troubled waters; but if this is the bait (and I understand it is), I’m hooked!