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Lyra and Pantalaimon from the “His Dark Materials” series 🧭

His Dark Materials is one of those very imperfect but formative books that, if it strikes you right, permeates your sense of the world and never quite fades. I have a lot of thoughts about it and they’re all strung between enchantment and criticism, it’s complicated—

(spoilers for the entire trilogy)

The universe is so rich and strange: daemons and a sinister blood-steeped church and zeppelins and anbaromagnetism and experimental theology and dark matter and the soundless blazing of the aurora. Every character’s stitched out of stories—like Asriel, who’s Lucifer waging war in Heaven, Milton’s vain and prideful Satan, Antichrist, rebel archangel Ariel, the rabbinical angel of death (“Azrael”), Blakean revolutionary, Byronic anti-hero, a man half-monstrous with ambition that tears great rifts in the universe.

The wild imagination of it is startling on every page. The proud secretive matriarchal clans of witches, and the witch-queen who stands unashamed and unafraid before angels. The arctic kingdom of the bears and their sky-armour and the brutal death-fight for the throne which ends with Iorek tearing off the jaw of the pretender-king and eating his heart. Cittàgazze, the desolate glittering city of children by the sea. The love between the rebellious angels Balthamos and Baruch—Baruch who was once a man, whose name is the Hebrew for “blessed”, who dies for Asriel’s merciless cause—and Balthamos’ sulking sarcasm and disdain and terrible furious grief. The crucial role of a woman particle physicist. Marisa Coulter, machiavel and mother and godkiller, cruel and clever and ruthless beyond measure, caged by her gender in a patriarchal theocracy but rising swiftly and inexorably through the ranks of the Magisterium by sheer guile, exploiting men’s guilty desires, her inquisitor’s mind as sharp as the blade which cuts child from daemon, a revolutionary who’s perilous and merciless and vicious in love. The humane depiction of mental illness as a spectre you can’t see gnawing upon the person you love, and Will’s gentleness and protectiveness and love for his mother. The strange but reverent materialism: humans are matter that’s become conscious of itself; sensual experience isn’t sinful but desireable and meaningful and a grasping of wholeness; this world is all we have, and when you die your atoms drift apart and pour out into the wide universe. Lyra and Will, soft-eyed and golden with Dust, feeding each other fruits. (U.S. readers might know that The Amber Spyglass was censored there, removing a passage about Lyra’s sexual awakening—as if to prove the book’s argument about fetishisation of innocence & fear of female sexuality.) The wrenching, bittersweet separation at the end.

It’s ambitious: it transforms a foundational Western myth into something like the ancient Gnostic heresy—the Fall of Man in Genesis 3, the origin of sin and shame, is rewritten as an ascension and seizing of morality and sexuality and wakefulness. And at the heart of it there’s Lyra, not virtuous but wild and disobedient and brave and fierce in her love and loyalty and hate, whose gift is lying—storytelling as deceit—and whose great prophesied rebellion takes the form of small and unconscious but cosmic-reaching acts of love and grace which repair the sundered universe.

And that’s the cornerstone of the trilogy’s critique of authoritarianism, which is good and important and valid until it lapses clumsily into dogmatism—when it comes to God, HDM suddenly ceases to be democratic. In the beginning it’s a broad argument against oppression and domination and ignorance and hubris and hypocrisy, and institutions too vast and powerful to be questioned. The Magisterium is partly the pre-Reformation Catholic Church, contorted until it’s equal parts theocracy & secular fascism—but more evil are the scientists performing secret experiments and Mrs Coulter and the hieratical councils, all using religion to mask their grasping for other kinds of power. Yet in the end, when the Magisterium becomes consumed with suppressing and torturing and killing in a war against “sin”—one priest wishes aloud that there’d been an assassin present in the Garden of Eden—the book’s sense of its enemy narrows: it’s “organised religion” against reason or secularism or humanism—and this enemy includes any belief in God, however individual and reasoned.

(And yet the God who dies in HDM is like the God who dies in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra: Zarathustra pronounces the death of a God who paralyses human will and buries us in fear of sin—a monarchical god, blind and narcissistic and fragile. The Authority in HDM has disseminated a great lie about creating the universe and when Lyra and Will find him shut in the silver cage that deception has worn him frail and thin as paper. Instead, the books offer up another kind of divinity: Dust—i.e. spiritual-matter which exists in mutuality with the universe and requires relationships of love for its very survival. HDM isn’t atheist, it’s panentheist—the universe itself is God in the process of becoming. Yet the book itself seems not to realise how much its vision overlaps with existing theologies.)

While collecting Northern Lights book jacket artwork I cam across this Italian illustrator’s beautiful fanart, follow the link for more images

Overall the book was enjoyable; Pullman's story-telling talent is evident as always, and I enjoyed the philosophical ideas presented although I'd have to digest them more to have any kind of firm opinion on them.

Where The Secret Commonwealth ended, it appeared that Lyra and Pantalaimon were about to reunite after hundreds of pages of harrowing separation (they're finally back in the same geographic location); I fully expected to stumble into this if I accidentally looked ahead in the first pages of The Rose Garden and had no idea I (and Lyra and Pan) was in for waiting another 630 or so pages for this reunion to happen.

There's definitely a trope of tortured, troubled, badly parented / of grim family background, and fragile-to-physical/emotional-adversity young man epitomized by Kylo Ren, and Olivier Bonneville was molded for that trope pretty perfectly. I'm glad that he got a much better ending (if somewhat abrupt) than Kylo was given.

Throughout most of The Rose Garden, it didn't feel like it was the conclusion of a trilogy. This is especially stark when contrasted to The Amber Spyglass, the third book in the original Dark Material trilogy. Throughout Spyglass, there's a sensation of climax and imminent finality both in terms of the stakes involved (we are literally destroying God, a titanic feat rarely acknowledged as having been a past event in the chronologically later novels Commonwealth and Rose Garden) and in terms of pacing and timing: after the (multiple-)world-shattering climax is resolved, there is a perfectly breathable "falling action" period where Lyra and Will's deep relationship is developed. The Rose Garden's pacing does not at all feel this way. I was getting to 150 pages left, then 50 pages left, then 30 pages left, and saying to myself that there was no way everything was going to be resolved in a manner that left us room to breathe. At one point, I think when I was within 100 pages of the end of the book, I seriously questioned whether this was the conclusion of a trilogy, or had Pullman decided he couldn't finish the grand story arc in a reasonable amount of time and planned to write a fourth installment? I actually Googled to make sure that the trilogy had indeed remained a trilogy.

The ending wound up feeling rushed and could definitely have used more resolution involving more characters (e.g. I'd have liked to see Lyra return to her own world, and I would have liked to see Farder Coram one more time). This is a criticism I apply much more strongly to the ending of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as well. I suspect that The Amber Spyglass may have been criticized by a substantial number of people for having such a slow-paced "falling action" phase and resolution that Pullman may have wound up over-correcting in the other direction. (I had a friend who actually wrote a careful review of Spyglass deriding the last "half" or "third" of the book -- which is a major exaggeration, by the way -- as turning into a YA treatment where Lyra is transformed into a "whiny/emo teenager". I completely disagree with his scathing representation of what the later parts of Spyglass actually were, but I'm sure he can't have been the only one with this opinion.)

His Dark Materials Based on the first book of the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman

"Iorek Byrnison" Watercolor on paper, 11x14", 2026.