Kiraly

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Vivien Alcock’s The Stonewalkers. Another banger from Alcock. This time, the premise is “Hey, wouldn’t it be fucked up if statues started coming to life?” A statue in the garden comes to life and follows Poppy inside the decaying country house where her mother works… which unfortunately happens to be full of stone busts the owner collected. The statue, alarmed by what appears to be evidence of mass statue decapitation, flees over the moors, and Poppy and her sort-of-friend Emma go in search of her… Very pacy. An excellent cave sequence. Not fully convinced by Poppy’s character growth but we’ll take it.

I felt pretty meh about the previous Penelope Lively novel I read (A Stitch in Time), but I quite liked The Ghost of Thomas Kempe! Although like A Stitch in Time, I’d seen it described as timeslip and it’s not timeslip. It’s a ghost story, rather on the creepier/more destructive end of ghosts, wonderful sense of atmosphere both in the haunted house but also in just the general autumnal flavor of it all.

And I read Grace Lin’s The Gate, the Girl, and the Dragon, which I struggled to get into, to be honest. It wasn’t till the last third or so that I felt really caught up in it. Gorgeous illustrations, though, especially the full-page illustration of the dragon’s lair, lit with row upon row of paper lanterns.

What I’m Reading Now

Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. Based on my experience with the movie, I expected this book to blow me away, and instead it’s just - fine? I actually delayed reading it for a while because I suspected I was going to start obsessing, and instead I’m not obsessing at all and that’s frankly a bit of a let-down. Louis, I just can’t ship you and Lestat if you keep going on about how Lestat is beneath you and you’re superior to him in every way.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have alas run out of easily accessible Vivien Alcocks. I may circle back to her through interlibrary loan at some point, though.

sovay just posted this delightful meme, so I had to snag it.

1. Lust, books I want to read for their cover.

I just put a book on hold for this very reason: Sophia Gonzalez’s Nobody in Particular. Isn’t that a gorgeous cover? A bit suspicious of modern YA on principle, but I figured I owed it to the cover designer to at least give the book a try.

2. Pride, challenging books I've finished.

Lydia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna, in the original Russian, which I read for a class in my senior year of college. I got caught up in the story and spent an afternoon curled up before the fire, plowing through the remaining chapters. This apparently unlocked the next level of my Russian ability, because the next time I had to read aloud in class, I read so well that my professor asked me to read the next paragraph too, I think just to make sure that it wasn’t a fluke.

3. Gluttony, books I've read more than once.

Many! I’m an inveterate re-reader. Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books (as a child I always called them the “Laura and Mary” books, and have never quite accepted that the general name for the series is Little House), Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Changeling and The Headless Cupid and The Egypt Game, and so forth and so on… why buy books if not to reread? If I just want to read a book one time, that’s what the library is for.

4. Sloth, books on my to-read list the longest.

Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me is probably the one that’s been there longest, but honorable mentions to Elizabeth Kostova’s The Swan Thieves and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. There are just too many books! I can’t get to them all!

5. Greed, books I own multiple editions of.

I don’t think I actually own multiple editions of any books right now. I DID have two editions of Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Changeling at one time, because I found a signed copy (!) at Goodwill, but then I lent my unsigned copy out to someone who never gave it back (and can you blame them?) so I’m down to one again.

6. Wrath, books I despised.

Well, I did just finish a four-post series ripping The Amber Spyglass to shreds…

7. Envy, books I want to live in.

At this particular moment in world history, an awful lot of books look like a better place to live than reality. Anne of Green Gables and The Secret Garden are perennial choices, of course. (A Little Princess is dearer to my heart than The Secret Garden, but I wouldn’t want to live at Miss Minchin’s!) Betsy-Tacy’s Deep Valley. As a child I would have loved to live in any one of a number of fantasy novels, but as an adult I prefer to visit at a literary remove on account of the high degree of Mortal Peril.

And now for a wrap-up of a few final Amber Spyglass thoughts that I couldn’t fit into my earlier posts.

First, beyond all the other reasons I hated the ending of The Amber Spyglass as a child, I also loathed it as yet another variation of the evergreen classic of the children losing the magic at the end of a children’s fantasy novel: Peter and Susan can’t return to Narnia because they’re too old, Fern loses interest in talking animals because a boy took her on the Ferris wheel, etc.

Upon reread, I discovered that this isn’t technically what’s happening at the end of The Amber Spyglass. Yes, the timing does happen to coincide with Will and Lyra falling in love, but technically Lyra loses the ability to read the alethiometer because that ability was given to her by grace (by the rebel angels, one presumes) and has been taken away now that her quest is over. And Will breaks the subtle knife (which gives him the ability to travel between worlds) because the subtle knife turns out to be releasing a soul-eating Spectre every time it opens a doorway between worlds.

So they’re not losing the magic because they personally have grown too old, which at least still leaves room for another child (for instance, the child reader) to have a magical adventure. They’re losing the magic because every magic doorway forever must be closed, because the magic portals are actually EVIL. The magic was BAD ALL ALONG.

***

And finally, swinging back around to Dust. In the first book, Dust is a big mystery: it settles on humans, especially adults, but not animals, not even the armored bears who talk and wear armor and have kings etc. The Magisterium thinks that Dust is sin, which, okay, the Magisterium and I clearly have a different understanding of sin (the bears clearly have the ability to knowingly do wrong, which is how I would define sin), but sure! Why not! The Magisterium is clearly supposed to be wrong anyway and the story is great, so I’m not getting bogged down in metaphysics.

Unfortunately, the story became less great and the metaphysics became more explicit. In The Amber Spyglass, we learn that “Dust came into being when living things became conscious of themselves.” Dust is like “the stars of every galaxy in the sky, and every one of them was a little fragment of conscious thought.” And the doorways between worlds are draining away the Dust, and without Dust, “Thought, imagination, feeling, would all wither and blow away, leaving nothing but a brutish automatism; and that brief period when life was conscious of itself would flicker out like a candle in every one of the billions of worlds where it had burned brightly.”

Well, first of all, this breaks Pullman’s own worldbuilding. We know that the armored bears are capable of conscious thought, feeling, and even imagination: we saw Iofur Raknisson with his doll daemon perched on his knee. They understand themselves to be bears, think about what it means to be bears, and understand death. Why don’t they get Dust?

I think the answer to the armored bears question specifically is that Pullman hadn’t fully thought through that aspect of his worldbuilding in book one. But unfortunately for Pullman, this issue is far wider than the armored bears. It touches on one of my pet topics of animal intelligence, and can I just say: Holy Descartes!

So animals are merely brutish automatons, incapable of thought, imagination, or feeling? I realize that research in animal intelligence has become more widely known since this book was published in 2001, but that was still decades after Jane Goodall did her pioneering chimp research. The general public may not have been up on the intelligence of cephalopods and crows, but we knew great apes and dolphins were smart. We may have even been vaguely aware of elephant intelligence.

And I simply feel that if you are writing a book series about the nature of consciousness, maybe you should, in fact, familiarize yourself with the latest research about the nature of consciousness.

It’s incredibly frustrating that Pullman is taking aim at the destructive impact of certain Christian teachings on Western society but straight-up recreates the belief that humans are different from animals not merely in degree but in kind. We are not simply the smartest animals, we are the only conscious animals at all, in fact not really animals but marked out by the cosmos as different by the way that we attract the glowing golden particles of conscious thought that are Dust.

In my previous post, Lyra and Will cut a doorway out of the land of the dead so the dead can rejoin the living world and joyfully dissolve. They also accidentally killed God. Has Lyra fulfilled the prophecy that the fate of the entire multiverse hinges upon her actions?

Nope! The actual fulfillment of the prophecy comes when… drumroll please… Lyra and Will fall in love!

I cannot express how much I hated this development as a child. Not only did I generally hate romance in books, but I had pegged Pullman in my mind as “one of the good ones,” an author of complex and interesting children’s books that did NOT involve romance. So I felt incredibly betrayed when Will and Lyra not only fell in love, but this romance with the central linchpin the story.

Since I knew it was coming this time, I couldn’t feel betrayed by it in the same way, but I still think it’s just silly that this is the fulfillment of the prophecy. Whatever you may think theologically about letting the dead out of the land of the dead or killing God, you have to admit that these are both momentous and prophecy-worthy actions. A couple of pubertal kids falling in love? This is happening in five thousand middle schools as I type. Why should it have gigantic multiversal consequences when Will and Lyra do it?

Pullman offers no explanation. I think we’re just supposed to accept that it’s so because Lyra is the most special girl in the world, and listen. I agree that Lyra is the most special girl in the world. It makes total sense to me that character after character becomes willing to die for her within about fifteen minutes of their first meeting. littlerhymes and I started to call this “getting Lyra-brained” because it happens so often, and I too am completely Lyra-brained.

But I am not so very Lyra-brained that it makes sense to me that Lyra falling in love would have cosmic consequences not just for her own world but for the entire multiverse, especially given that, let’s face it, Will is not the most special boy in the world. Pullman can tell me as many times as he wants that Will is such a fierce warrior that Serafina Pekkala can’t meet his daemon’s eyes, but at the end of the day, Will is just some guy. Sorry Will. It’s not his fault that he’s boring, but he is in fact just boring.

However, even though I hated Will and Lyra getting together, I also hated that they get torn apart more or less immediately thereafter. It turns out that gateways between worlds drain the Dust out of worlds (Dust, by the way, turns out to be stuff of conscious thought, and we’re going to return to this in a final post), and because the gateway out of the land of the dead has to remain open, it’s impossible to keep a doorway open for Will and Lyra to visit each other. And also they can’t decide to live together in just one world because if you live outside of your own world, you sicken and die in about ten years. Sorry! Those are the rules!

If Pullman had established these rules earlier, then okay MAYBE, but he basically pulls them out of his ass in this book to ensure this tragic end, especially the bit about “there can only be one doorway.” Really? Really? There isn’t enough Dust in the whole multiverse to keep two doors open? You couldn’t keep a second doorway open for the boy and the girl who LITERALLY SAVED THE MULTIVERSE?

Also, for a series that is about rebelling against Authority, the characters are awfully quick to buckle down and renounce happiness when an authority figure tells them to do so. Will and Lyra, have you considered saying “Fuck you” to Xaphania when she tells you a second door is out of the question?

In my previous post about The Amber Spyglass, I wrote about the Lord Asriel, Child Killer. The child Lord Asriel killed, Lyra’s friend Roger, is now in the land of the dead, and Lyra and Will are headed to the land of the dead post-haste because Lyra would like to apologize for accidentally causing his death by bringing him to Lord Asriel. (Times Lord Asriel has wanted to apologize to Roger or indeed ever remembered his existence: zero.)

Will would also kind of like to talk to his father, but as usual Lyra’s goals are the ones that actually drive the plot. She’s the protagonist, and although the narrative feints toward the idea of Will as co-protagonist, really he’s just a sidekick. Would I find him more compelling if he had goals of his own that weren’t entirely centered on Lyra? Maybe. (Maybe not.)

But returning to Lyra, who after all is the reason we’re all here. Having come to the land of the dead to apologize to Roger, Lyra realizes that the dead are miserable in this unchanging underground existence, and decides that the thing to do is to cut a doorway into another world to let them out. Roger is the first to go, and he evanesces into the air, “leaving behind such a vivid little burst of happiness that Will was reminded of the bubbles in a glass of champagne.”

As a child I had a deep horror of the idea of death and oblivion, so I simply couldn’t get on with the dead joyfully dissolving into nothingness. And Pullman, like many a didactic writer before him, wants to make absolutely sure that you know not only what is happening but what your emotional attitude toward it ought to be. Mary Malone also witnesses the dead coming out of the underworld and joyfully dissolving. The alethiometer tells the Magisterium alethiometer-reader that the dead are now escaping the land of the dead and dissolving, and this is “the most sweet and desirable end for them.”

Okay, Pullman, I get it! You believe that when we die we dissolve into nothing and this is a GOOD and JOYFUL end that we should WELCOME. You may be right that this is what happens after death, but you CANNOT force me to be joyful about it no matter how many times you repeat that I should.

Having saved the dead from the horrors of eternal life, Lyra and Will emerge into the Republic of Heaven, where the forces of the Authority (God) are attacking Lord Asriel’s rebel fortress. Lyra and Will stumble through the battle searching for their daemons from whom they were separated when they entered the land of the dead (and again, this separation scene is SO powerful, curse you Pullman for being such a good writer).

While they look for their daemons, they accidentally kill the Authority. He is a very old angel who was being carried away from the battle in a crystalline litter when cliff ghasts attacked. Lyra and Will drive off the cliff ghasts and try to help this ancient, creaky, dementia-stricken angel, but when they help him out of his litter, the breeze blows him away.

Meanwhile, in the same world, the Authority’s right hand man (who seems to be the guy actually in charge, given that the Authority’s general mental state) is going mano a mano with Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter. They drag him into the abyss.

I’m sure these scenes were both super fun for Pullman to write, and they’re both powerful and memorable set-pieces. But this is a pretty classic example of making the weakest possible strawman out of your opponent’s argument and then punching it to death.

Pullman famously wrote His Dark Materials as a reaction against Narnia, because he so disliked the Christian didacticism of Lewis’s work. Not that he’s against didacticism, mind, he just thinks that Lewis is being didactic in the wrong direction, and he’s going to fix this by being even more didactic in favor of atheism. If he just repeats “Death is dissolution and this is JOYFUL” often enough, everyone will have to agree, right?

(Actually I’m not sure even Pullman fully agrees, because when Lee Scoresby’s ghost dissolves Pullman talks about how his atoms are going to join the atoms of his daemon Hester, which is not how atoms work, but a pretty good approximation of meeting your loved ones in heaven if you don’t believe in heaven.)

Unfortunately for Pullman, this is not how to teach readers a lesson through fiction. The reason Narnia works (to the extent that it does work in the “teaching a lesson” way) is that the stories are so strong. In The Golden Compass, Pullman shows that he can write a children’s fantasy as compelling as Lewis at his best. In The Amber Spyglass he shows that he can be as clunky as Lewis at his worst, as in That Hideous Strength, another work with some great setpieces that is basically spoiled because the author shunts the story aside in favor of venting his animosity toward something he dislikes but doesn’t really understand.

But Lewis has the advantage that all his books are basically standalones, even if they are also part of a series. You can hate That Hideous Strength and still like Out of the Silent Planet, or loathe The Last Battle and blissfully ignore it as you reread The Voyage of the Dawn Treader five hundred times. Pullman’s His Dark Materials, however, doesn’t work like that. It’s one big book that happens to be split into three pieces, and although the first piece is still exquisite, you can only reread it with the knowledge that the subsequent parts won't live up to the beginning.