Anne Enright: The Wig My Father Wore

      I’m really not sure what to make of this one…

Enright uses language beautifully, playfully, in a way that to me is particularly Irish, in the sense that it reminds me of James Joyce, and even more of Flann O’Brien; there’s a linguistic levity that conceals a seriousness unless you slow down and look closely, beneath the surface.

There are other aspects that make it Irish, to me: an awareness of and – not quite rejection, but distancing from – a sense of provincialism, primitiveness, smallworldliness of the place, that is also connected with religion. The effect of cloying Catholic pietism pervaded Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and it was the combination of all these factors that led him to permanent exile from his homeland a century ago. Enright also, for me, resembles Joyce in the way she conveys a particular attitude to sex and sexuality, which is also shaped by religion. It was interesting to come across a portrayal of this by a woman writer.

And then there’s the surrealism, both of the plot – Grace, the narrator, has an angel living with her, and she wants to get him into bed, and she works on an Irish TV dating show that struggles with how explicit or not to be in matters sexual – and of the general presentation of people and events; further shades of O’Brien here…

It’s incredibly funny in places, absolutely deranged in others, and yet, sixty pages in (my usual trigger for why am I bothering?) I found myself thinking, what is the point of all this? I was sort of enjoying the plot and the offbeatness of Enright’s style, but what was I getting from the book other than light entertainment, which isn’t my usual motive for persisting.

And I can’t really answer that question. I finished the book and thought okay, Irish person writing about their perceptions of the weirdness of the Irish, and their take on love and sex…well-written, but derivative and basically all done before; enjoyable enough, but nothing new to see here. Have I missed something?

Laurie Frost: The Elements of His Dark Materials

      This will be the last Pullman-focused post for a while, I think. But if you are as hooked on His Dark Materials as I am, in the sense that you both enjoy the story, and admire the inventiveness of the alternative universes and the writer’s philosophical and theological explorations of the human condition, then I’d say this book is for you.

It’s encyclopaedic. All the necessary connections, references and links are here for you to check and explore or remind yourself about if you’re slightly lost or confused. There are reflections, perspectives and thinking points a-plenty, about characters, peoples and worlds, as well as more general mini-essays; it’s clearly a labour of love by someone who is even more taken with His Dark Materials than I am; it’s a serious companion to the novels, not a work of fandom.

At the same time, there are some things that are not explained, along with a few inevitable minor errors and inconsistencies. Why, for instance, is the college in Geneva St Jerome’s College? Geneva I understand, St Jerome I know about, but the connection in his mind that led Pullman to the name eludes me… And a real index at the end would be very useful, too. It’s not a book for constantly referring to as you’re reading – Pullman’s storytelling isn’t that impenetrable – but each time I’ve delved into this book and read large chunks of it has been after a reading of the novels, to help me get my thoughts and ideas clearer in my mind, and it has worked.

Steve Hagen: Buddhism Plain and Simple

     I have recently become interested in the intersections between Buddhist beliefs and practices, and those of Quakers, and had been on the lookout for something introductory to read; after a couple of false starts, this recommendation from a former working colleague finally hit the spot, in terms of its focus on the teachings without the centuries of intervening superpositions and arcana, let alone 2500 years of history. In that sense it resembled the wish of the original Quakers to return to the basics of original Christianity…

The language is accessible, with specifically Buddhist terms clearly explained and used sparingly.

The message is that we have to be fully awake and do whatever it is we do for ourselves; knowledge is what we see. Again, as a Quaker I’m familiar with this idea though it’s worded differently; my spiritual journey is my own, and I cannot be told by anyone else how to manage it.

On the other hand, to look at things from a Buddhist perspective does seem, to me at least, to require quite a radical shift in perspective, and a good deal of thinking (?) in terms of how to re-orient my way of looking at the world. One minute I feel miles away from understanding what he’s saying, the next, it’s a clear as daylight. In the sense of going beyond a ‘search for meaning’, which I feel I’ve been engaged in for years, I’m wondering if there is in fact no spiritual journey as such, that I’ve been wrestling with impossible contradictions for years and it’s time to move on…

I know I’m not supposed to be ‘thinking’ about it all, but there is much to engage with here, and I shall be pursuing this way of looking at things.

His Dark Materials: Parents and Children

During this re-read of HDM, I’ve found myself thinking about what Pullman has to say or suggest about parents and parenting. Lyra grows up not knowing who her parents are, thinking Asriel is her uncle, and eventually learning that Mrs Coulter is her mother; her father has obviously ensured she is provided for at Jordan College, while her mother has nothing to do with her until the story starts. As things develop, it’s evident neither is an average nor an ideal parent. Her mother has a lust for power and influence which leads her into embracing all kinds of evil; it becomes clear, however, that there is some kind of maternal bond as Mrs Coulter’s emotions and behaviour become much more complex and conflicted when she is with her daughter, and this foregrounds itself ever more strongly as the story progresses; are we intended, by the end of the story, to feel that the bond of love between parent and child is the strongest thing there can be?

Asriel has an obsession with his conflict with the Authority which blinds him completely to his daughter other than seeing her as a potential tool in the battle; this is crystallised in Lyra’s (unwitting but necessary) moment of betrayal at the end of Northern Lights, when her friend Roger is what Asriel needs to pursue his experiments… Asriel is capable of ‘mansplaining’ various aspects of his compulsion to Lyra, but there is no recognition of any bond between them.

We see similar conflicts when we learn about Will’s parents: his mother seems to suffer from a kind of mental disorder which manifests itself in obsessive-compulsive behaviours at times, and Will is clearly her carer rather than she his. As the storyline develops, it becomes clearer that there is a partial explanation for this, related to the disappearance of Will’s father, the secret work he was engaged in, and the interest of the authorities in his discoveries. We accept Will’s father’s disappearance as accidental, perhaps; we know of his concerns for his son via the letters and through what we learn of him via his alter ego, the shaman Stanislaus Grumman, in the parallel universe in which he is trapped, and their brief reunion before Grumman in killed by the witch is a touching and powerful moment, as is their encounter in the world of the dead later on.

Neither hero nor heroine has what most of us might class as an ordinary childhood. Is this significant? Well yes, in the sense that Pullman didn’t have to tell the story thus; it was a deliberate creative choice. But that’s a statement of the obvious, though some might overlook it. What we do have are two characters who grow up differently from, and much more independently than most children: Lyra has a carefree existence in her Oxford, while various people keep a weather eye on her in terms of safety; one or two people are aware of some significance to her future. Will is forced to be grownup before his time, keeping his mother safe, both by physically protecting her and by participating in her strange behaviours so as not to alarm her or others too much; lurking in the background is surely the possibility of both of them being institutionalised in different ways…

Both Will and Lyra are pretty self-sufficient and self-confident in their thinking and behaviour and this means the reader is more likely to take them seriously (pinch of salt here, ok, but you get my drift) when Pullman throws them into their respective adventures, and there is the potential for a good team, too. Then, in terms of the ultimate temptation which the entire plot must lead to, there is the credible bonding, firstly via their common experience of and survival of perils, and secondly because they perhaps experience for the first time (key word there, experience) real closeness on an equal level with another person. This closeness Will knows only via caring for a loved mother and an imagined bond with an absent father, Lyra only through her deep friendship with Roger and her horror at the ultimate betrayal of it; she only knows coldness from Asriel and she is appalled by he mother’s evil. And the reader cannot but approve of the temptation and the Fall, if indeed we use those warped religious concepts here.

Milton, Blake and Dust in Pullman’s His Dark Materials

Pullman acknowledges his debt to Milton’s Paradise Lost, a masterpiece of literature that nowadays eludes many people, for a number of reasons: it’s in verse, it’s very long (12 books), it’s about religion, it’s written in 17^th century English, which is a little different from today’s, though far from impenetrable. Milton’s aim was to write the ultimate epic, the story of creation, and the redemption of humanity by Jesus’ death. He tells of the temptation of Eve and the Fall of the first humans, tempted by Satan.

Unfortunately for Milton, Satan takes over the story, becoming rather more of an interesting hero-figure than God or his son. And the question of the Fall also becomes double-edged: before it, Adam and Eve mimsy around the Garden of Eden blandly doing the gardening and having rather wet and innocent conversations, and a bit of very dull sex. Our feeling tends to be, well if this is paradise, I’m not sure I’m all that interested. The temptation is to take the forbidden fruit, of the knowledge of good and evil, after which they become humans as we know them: sex and arguments and blaming each other. And the real question is, why was the fruit forbidden? Because, is Milton’s and God’s answer, and that’s that… and we humans have become what we are because we have that knowledge. There are consequences: death. Adam and Eve have no idea what it is and cannot imagine it; we are the only species on the planet that knows of death and can contemplate it… And while I’m on with the Miltonic parallels, clearly there is an intended resemblance between Asriel’s armed camp preparing for battle with the Authority, and the building of Pandaemonium in the second book of Paradise Lost.

Pullman is fully aware of the importance of this difference between innocence and experience, and how it shapes us through our lives. There are things which happen to us which change us irreversibly, and which we cannot easily explain to others who have not experienced them. How do you describe to someone innocent the experience of an LSD trip, or sex for the first time, or indeed what love actually is? And, of course, you can’t rewind from any of these points, or turn back the clock: you are now changed, experienced. I have often felt that it’s perhaps easier for adult (experienced) readers to overlook this liberating aspect of Pullman’s stories, whereas they may perhaps be more eye-opening or life-affirming for younger readers. I don’t know for certain, of course; I’m on the wrong side of the fence here.

So in His Dark Materials, there are forces – organised religion – who would have humans remain permanently in a pre-pubescent state of innocent obedience, easily controlled. And the rebellion Pullman visualises is one against this tyranny, which might install the republic, rather than the kingdom of heaven. The more I think about it, the more utopian I find this notion, as well as extremely attractive. The idea of humans taking control over their own lives and their futures, rather than kowtowing to external forces, is one which has been revolutionary through the ages, and sadly, we are no nearer to achieving it…

Here is where Milton and Pullman overlap, for me: the crux is free will, which Christianity says we were given as a test: would we freely choose to obey and serve God, or would we wilfully choose what we shouldn’t and take the consequences? Milton feels the first humans made the wrong choice and it had to be rectified; Pullman lauds that choice, and has his Adam and Eve figures willingly give in to temptation and not regret it.

Dust. There is a serious amount of philosophical, even theological argument woven in to the novels; we don’t have to worry too much about it or strive too hard to comprehend it all. There is a serious information dump about Dust and its link with the Christian notion of original sin in the final chapters of Northern Lights, in conversation between Lyra and Asriel, and I’m still not sure how convincing I find this, given Lyra’s supposed age at this point. The concept is further developed in The Subtle Knife, where the arrival of Dust is linked back 33,000 years, presumably to the time of the first emergence of human consciousness in our species, which is where Pullman seems to situate the mythical Adam and Eve event and the original ‘Fall’. I’ve still not completely fathomed the significance, several times iterated, that things began to go seriously awry three centuries ago with the making of the knife: I can’t fit this timing in to a historical event, though I suppose we are at the start of the Enlightenment and the scientific era…perhaps a more astute reader can enlighten me here. Clearly these two dates are significant to Pullman’s ideas, and the second Fall, in the world of the mulefa, has the effect of reversing something.

Phillip Pullman: Parallel Universes

Pullman uses a common SF trope in His Dark Materials, the idea of a parallel universe, one which resembles our own, but with certain differences. The concept is often used to show an alternative history, such as in Philip K Dick’s well-known novel The Man in the High Castle, set in a United States where the Axis powers won the Second World War. Pullman’s parallel universe is rather different, in that it doesn’t represent an alternate direction after a fork in time, as it were, but is one of a myriad of possible universes, one that happens to be quite similar to our own.

The conception is carefully done, even down to the level of the language used, with different but logical terms used for ideas like electrical power; different technology, with airships being the modern mode of transport; countries having slightly different names reflecting the way in which recent history has also obviously been different. A great deal of careful thought has evidently gone into constructing this world, and in a sense Pullman has far less ‘conceptual freedom’ in the framing of such a world than an SF writer constructing a forked path. One might compare a twentieth century USA in which the Confederacy won the Civil War, as portrayed in Ward Moore’s interesting Bring the Jubilee, or a world several hundred years in our future, where the Nazis had been victorious in the twentieth century, as in Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night, which is all the more chilling a tale for its having been written before the Second World War…

Because Pullman posits an infinity of possible worlds, the other two he develops in depth can be radically different: the empty world of Cittàgazze bears some resemblance to our own, though we cannot really map very much of our world onto it, and the world of the Mulefa visited by Mary Malone and in which she plays out her role as temptress, is alien in terms of creatures, but flora and fauna are still recognisable.

Where Pullman is at his most radical, and deliberately so, is in his vision of daemons in Lyra’s world. Every human has a daemon – a creature of the opposite gender, and this bears some thinking about – from which they are inseparable; their form is mutable until maturity or puberty is reached, at which point they become fixed permanently. We need to think about what Pullman seems to be saying here. There is obviously something about the plasticity or mutability of human personality in the younger years, and the eventual development of a more recognisable and permanent personality as we grow older.

Is the daemon a soul? It’s an inseparable part of a human, visible rather than invisible as the soul posited by various religions in our world. And we see the interaction between human and daemon, through looks, closeness or distance, and conversation. There is also conversation between daemons…. And there is also the taboo on touching someone else’s daemon, as well as the horrific process being developed by the Magisterium and Mrs Coulter, to sever the connection between a human and their daemon; here Pullman wants his readers to think about, or imagine, what exactly it is that makes us human, and what the effect of such a severing would be. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, our attention is also focused on this question, and ultimately we are pushed to the realisation that the inhabitants of that society may look and behave like us at times, but they aren’t actually humans as we know them…

So what is the intercourse that goes on between human and daemon? It’s clearly far more than just a visible friend: there is advice, discussion, reflection back of ideas and decisions: daemon as therapist/counsellor? Somehow it’s possible to see humans in Lyra’s world as more fortunate than we are here in our world, in that such interaction is more obvious, more foregrounded? And yet Pullman also plays, at some length, with the notion that in our world, if we get to know and understand ourselves well enough, we can see our daemon and converse with it, too.

More to come…

Re-reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials

      This read took me just over a week; my first, in 2001 only two days. Pullman gets the story off to a cracking start, making Lyra’s Oxford intriguingly strange from the outset, through the different language used for all sorts of things in that parallel universe, as well as introducing complex human/daemon interaction straightaway: the reader’s attention is grabbed and shaped immediately.

There’s an effortless quality to Pullman’s prose, a style which I can see is attractive and instantly accessible to a young adult audience – which some think is his target audience, though I beg to differ – comprehensible yet accessible without being simplistic. Equally, it flows just as well for adult readers; quite an achievement. Pullman is a masterly storyteller.

There are complex, many-layered plots, and myriad characters, and yet Pullman leads his readers easily on; the story is easy to follow, and various complex ideas are carefully woven into the thread of the narrative. Readers are both entertained and challenged, I feel. And Pullman is strong in his portrayal of his characters’ feelings, too: Lyra’s sense of betrayal of her friend Roger at the end of the first book, Mrs Coulter’s growing closeness to Lyra, and the developing closeness between Lyra and Will through their adventures all feel natural and convincing.

For this reading, and prompted also by the last series on television, I focused particularly on the complex and developing relationship between Lyra and Mrs Coulter, that is, between mother and daughter. I felt the TV adaptation lacked a measure of clarity in this respect. I was also interested in just how much was changed for the small screen; obviously a great deal had to be left out, as The Amber Spyglass runs to almost 500 pages in print. It was also interesting to note that for the screen, Will and Lyra appeared rather older and more mature (only a bit, but to me noticeably) than in the novels, where we are explicitly told that they are both 12 years old at one point. Then I felt a bit churlish and thought about how much time might be needed for all the travelling and all the adventures in the three books together to actually take place and I could accept the idea of their being several years older by the end of The Amber Spyglass. The second ‘Fall’ has to feel natural and convincing and in my judgement, Pullman carries this off pretty well.

In the end, His Dark Materials is only a story. It’s very well-narrated, respecting the intelligence of the reader; it’s an easy (in the sense of flowing) read; it has been extremely well translated to television in the recent three-part adaptation, although, after re-reading the novels, it’s evident how much has inevitably had to be cut or glossed over in that adaptation; equally, it’s surprising how few details have actually been changed…

Only a story… but, as with all the best stories, it is more than just a tale, it is a story to made its readers think, if they wish to. What are good parents, and how are they good (or not)? What is freedom, and free will? How much of it do we/ can we have? How much of it do we want? What about institutions that exert power and control over us? Even if they are doing it – as they say – for our own good? And how might we re-take some/ all of that control back for ourselves? What makes us human? Do we have souls? What goes on inside us, in the deepest recesses of our minds? What is good, and what is evil? And so much more. We don’t have to engage with any or all of those questions, but if we are human, if we are curious, then the chances are that we will. And we are brought back to that initial curiosity which – for Milton in a bad way, for Pullman in a good way, led the original Adam and Eve of the creation myth – to Fall, or to become fully human. Either way, we are experienced, we cannot turn back the clock.

The final message that Pullman leaves his readers with is clear at the end of The Amber Spyglass: we only have this one life, that we know about and are part of, and it’s our duty to ourselves to live life to the full, to make the best possible use of it in terms of using our intelligence, developing ourselves, understanding ourselves and our world, and making our best efforts to do good while we are here. Amen to that.

Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions

     This re-reading of Borges’ short stories was less satisfying than my previous visits, as I recall; it was a case of separating the wheat from the chaff. I have always liked him for the bizarreness, as well as for his ability to do something really interesting with the short story form, which I have so often found thin, empty and disappointing. I also respect him as part of the inspiration for Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, one of my favourite novels of all time, in which the mad monastery librarian is named Jorge, in tribute to Borges.

Borges here is in translation, of course, and for me, the translator has successfully captured a style and use of language, particularly through the use of long, languorous sentences, descriptive and atmospheric. There is often an almost Brechtian sense of alienation from our particular reality in Borges’ playing with time and space in so many of the stories, and in requiring the reader to suspend disbelief in more ways than fiction usually asks of us.

There is also his aptitude for creating a sense of verisimilitude, through the use of small plausible details which we cannot or have no real desire to verify, in totally invented situations, in order to confuse or deceive the reader; I found myself being reminded of the very earliest novelists such as Defoe and Swift, who realised way back in the early 18^th century how to do this to great effect. The overall weirdness of Borges’ universes also recalled to me the fiction of Ben Marcus, and I wondered if that writer was familiar with Borges.

So, the tales or fictions are often bizarre or disturbing. The summit, I think, is reached in The Library of Babel, which posits a library as big as the universe which contains all possible writings; it combines Borges’ fascination with books with his fascination with labyrinths, and there is a computer programmer who has paid tribute to these by constructing a website that lets you interact with the library of Babel.

While I enjoyed my favourite stories again, I found myself wondering what exactly Borges had been trying to achieve; weirdness, a sense of eeriness? Alienation? Ensnaring his reader? Throughout, there is a sense of a man, a human like the rest of us, haunted by the meaninglessness of existence when confronted with time, immortality and the inevitability of death; hence the labyrinths in which characters wander, trapped… I found the earliest and the last stories better than those from the middle of his writing career, where there are too many about macho confrontations and knife fights in South America for my liking. There are some real gems, but you have to search for them.

Philip Pullman: The Collectors

     There’s a whole series of mini-books by Philip Pullman that are in some way connected with the events or characters of His Dark Materials. Sometimes they read like add-ons, other times like rough sketches or drafts from the days before the trilogy; this is one of the latter. They’re always pretty short, but beautifully produced, and, I suppose, aimed at readers like me who are fascinated by the creations of Pullman’s imaginations and will happily devour anything… So they’re not bargains, or big reveals, but are nonetheless fascinating.

This one is a vignette about the young Mrs Coulter, via a painting of her and bronze statue of a monkey, and their strange and malign influence on people even at this early stage in the sequence of events. The idea of multiple universes, and connections between them is also introduced, along with the idea of humans with daemons in another one of these universes…you can see what’s happening here.

It really does feel like a precursor, and the character of Mrs Coulter is given another edge. Recently watching the final TV series I found myself much more aware of the complexity of her character; along with pure evil, and a fatal attraction to power, there is a fully developed antithesis to this in Coulter’s complex relationship with and feelings for her daughter Lyra, and perhaps it is the visual medium and the talents of the actor which allow these aspects to emerge more fully.

It’s a brief but gripping read, and nicely illustrated.