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.

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.

2022: My year of reading

A house move early this year has had a major impact on my reading: books boxed up, being unable to find books that I wanted to read, far less time to read due to having so many other pressing things to deal with: are those excuses or reasons? I’m not sure. But the books are now, much later, out of boxes and on shelves, although in different places, so tracking down and finding a book still isn’t easy, until my ageing brain has internalised my new system…

There has been a certain amount or re-reading; there has been the usual ‘compulsory’ reading for our book group, some of which were real eye-openers. In 2022 I bought or was given (and kept) all of 19 books, which represents a slight decrease on 2021; I read 50 books, which marks a serious decrease on last year’s total, for the reason above-mentioned.

I have a number of resolutions for 2023: to continue buying fewer books – and this is partly because a good number of the new books I come across I only want to read once, and I know I shan’t return to them – to return to my interrupted project to re-read all of Shakespeare’s plays in chronological sequence, to revisit a lot of the poetry I cherish, to revisit some old favourites including Josef Skvorecky, Garrison Keillor and Amin Maalouf, and to continue weeding my library and disposing of books I no longer want. And, driven by the final TV series which is currently being screened, I want to re-read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy: I’ve watched the TV adaptations and loved them, and I’ve listened several times to the excellent full audiobook recording of the trilogy while I’ve been on my travels, but it’s a good few years since I actually consumed the printed volumes…

I’ve read far fewer travel books this year, and I’m wondering if I’ve finally exhausted that bug. There does seem to be a limit to the number of new travelogues through Siberia, or the various deserts of the world, that a person needs.

This year’s awards:

Best novel: Sequioa Nagamatsu How High We Go In The Dark. A novelist I’d never head of and took a punt on; a challenging fantasy which I really enjoyed and hope to go back to shortly. It’s good to read new authors.

Best non-fiction: Alberto Angela Une Journée Dans La Rome Antique. I’ve liked everything I’ve read by him.I’ve been fascinated by ancient Rome since my school days, and this historian brings it to life with a wealth of detail, without ever being patronising or talking down to his readers.

Best travel: Edward Abbey Desert Solitaire. I love deserts, and travel in deserts, and this journal of time in one of the US natioanl parks by an early ecologist (as you’d have to call him nowadays) is a gem: he shows you the desert and makes you love it as much as he does.

Best re-read: Jan Potocki Manuscript Found in Saragossa: an astonishing novel, a tour de force from the early 19^th century; it was good finally to find time to re-read this one. And I have the film, waiting to be watched, too.

Best book group discovery: Ben MacIntyre Agent Sonya. I thought, “Do I really want to bother reading this? Why would I read this?” and I did, and it was another object lesson in not dismissing books too easily. A fascinating and thought-provoking account of pro-Soviet espionage in the twenties, thirties and forties, and out book group discussion was enhanced by a guest appearance from one of the heroine’s relatives.

I’m hoping to resume normal service in 2023, ie lots more reading and re-reading, further pruning of my library, and continuing to buy rather fewer books than previously.

His Dark Materials on TV

I first encountered Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy many years ago when I was ill and spent several days in bed. I devoured the novels, and remember sending someone out to buy a missing volume. This Christmas I have been languishing in bed, and for the first time in my life I have binged on television, once I had figured out how to get the BBC iPlayer app to behave, and watched all of the final TV series production of His Dark Materials. It was compulsive viewing, and utterly awesome. I could not understand some of the semi-lukewarm reviews I’d come across by some critics in the previous few days.

I’ve long maintained that the novels are masterpieces, and I have been astonished at how well and how faithfully they have been translated to television; the last series is no exception, and although it has been a long wait, it has been worth it.

The stories are eminently readable, and not aimed at a particular age group or audience, in my opinion. They certainly don’t talk down to, or preach at, a young adult audience; Pullman regards his readers as intelligent human beings, who don’t have to like his books or his message.

The TV series are a gift to SFX departments, who have risen to the occasion superbly, envisioning daemons, creating unreal creatures, imaginary technology and unearthly landscapes – unearthly in terms of our world, that is.

I think, however – and I suspect this may well be one of the reasons for some of the rather silly reviews I mentioned earlier – that the TV production is a complement to the novels rather than a replacement for them, and if someone hasn’t read the books, then they will find the story and the ideas rather harder to follow from the TV series alone. Obviously, I haven’t found this a problem. I had certain expectations, from my acquaintance with the novels, and largely these were met, within the limitations of any attempt to transfer 1500 pages of novel to 24 hours of television. Here I’m reminded of the achievement of the BBC in the early 1970s, when they turned War and Peace into a 26-part TV series.

Plot wasn’t re-written, though clearly slimmed down and perhaps perspectives and emphases changed; casting was very well done and highly convincing, particularly in the cases of Will, Lyra and Mrs Coulter. Settings were stunning, throughout. And the interaction between human and daemon was fascinating to watch, although the concept of interaction between the two did suffer a times, I think, and the idea of the externalisation of one’s soul was only foregrounded in the final series. But I felt actors and directors had a fine sense of the interaction between characters, and seeing them onscreen allowed me to observe and reflect more closely on those relationships, which enriched the story for me, as well as providing food for thought.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of the novels, and of Pullman’s ideas, to translate from page to screen was that of dust, and its link to the idea of what makes us fully human, as well as the contrast between innocence and experience. This merits a post of its own, which I hope to get around to writing some time soon.

I realise I’m probably sounding like more of a fan than a critic here. So be it. I was disappointed in the film The Golden Compass, which preceded the TV adaptations, and my copy of that film has mysteriously disappeared, not that I miss it. I had great hopes when I first heard of the TV project, and I haven’t been disappointed. Pullman’s novels have been one of the fantasy milestones of the century, and for my money leave Tolkein and J K Rowling in the shade…

ed Stevan Davies: The Gospel of Thomas

    Having realised long ago that Christianity, despite its spiritual origins and intentions, is also a construct of those fallible human beings who shaped and directed it particularly in its earliest years, I’ve been exploring some of the writings which, for all sorts of reasons, are nowadays regarded as apocryphal, unorthodox or deuterocanonical; the Gospel of Thomas is one of those.

There is, of course, ongoing debate about its status, authenticity, and whether it’s gnostic or not; it appears to be synchronous with other of the earliest accepted writings, though offering a different perspective. It’s a list of sayings of Jesus, with almost no narrative content at all; there is considerable overlap with what Jesus says in the synoptic gospels. So, is it actually another source for those?

I don’t particularly care, although the scholarly debate is mildly interesting; what interests me is the content. And the sayings of Jesus as reported in this text offer a rather different perspective: the kingdom of heaven is here and now, within us – reminds me of Philip Pullman’s Republic of Heaven at the end of the Dark Materials trilogy! – and there is no place for the sin and salvation narratives of the canonical gospels. Self-knowledge is the road to salvation. There are no miracles, and no prophecies about the future.

Davies’ commentary I found not particularly helpful, ranging from the obvious to the purely speculative, and I was thrown by a basic error in his Latin at one point, too. I’m not sure he offers very much enlightenment, but he does provide a clearly accessible text for the general reader, which I suppose I am, in the end. What I did notice were clear links between the simplicity of Jesus’ message in the Gospel of Thomas and the Quaker approach to the scriptures, and I was reminded of what I’ve read about the beliefs and practices of the Cathars, too.

Hiatus

As I haven’t posted for several weeks now, a brief explanation: we have moved house, all the books are still in boxes, mild chaos surrounds us. Normal service will begin to be resumed sometime next week when the arrival of carpets will allow my desk to be rebuilt, and some of those boxed to be emptied…

It has been weird to be deprived of my library. Of course, I made some preparation and left a small pile of books easily accessible, so I’d have something to read. The time and energy for reading disappeared. And then, when the opportunity finally re-emerged, those weren’t really the books I wanted to be reading at that moment. So I have been using the library, which is most unusual for me. And I’ve read a lot less. But there are a few books that I shall be reviewing over the coming week or two: the first volume of Norman Davies’ massive History of Poland, a Philip Pullman mystery, another thought-provoking book by Richard Holloway. And the hiatus has stopped me writing too much about the horrendous situation in Ukraine, and the unbelievable ignorance of so many commentators in the West about it. Read Timothy Snyder and try to understand, avoid simplistic analysis…

As they used to say, “Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.”

Susanna Clarke: Piranesi

     Spoiler alert!

Well, in all honesty I should go back and amend this post – or not write about a year until it’s properly over, because this novel deserves an accolade. Read it in a day, and it stunned me, so utterly weird it was. Initially it reminded me of some of the drug-crazed ramblings I read during my hippy days, then reminded me of the utter weirdness of Ben Marcus’ The Age of Wire and String, finally reminded me of some of the best detective stories I’ve ever read.

Weird beyond belief, the tale of someone trapped or marooned in what seems at first a strange parallel universe modelled on the bizarre drawings of the eponymous Italian artist: at first I found myself wondering whether there was some complex allegory developing. A world with only two people in it. And the behaviour of the other (or the Other) was quite quickly not exactly what it seemed to be. A story that defied attempts to parse it from the outset.

Do the two characters have anything in common, do they share a goal? Is one misleading the other? Do they understand each other, have they a rapport or were they just thrown together? And why is the Other so much better equipped than the narrator?

Another weirdness: although the narrator/writer of the journals is named as a male character, I cannot fathom why I never shook off the very strong impression that the story was being told by a female.

What triggered the comparison with Ben Marcus was the initial impression that there was just enough commonality between my world and my language and those of the narrator for me to be able to make some vague sense of what was going on. Gradually, as the plot develops and ideas suggest themselves, the story begins to mutate into detective fiction, although that term fails to do justice to the tour-de-force of motivations, clues and evidence that Susanna Clarke weaves to deceive and delude. It turns in on itself, there are wheels within wheels, and then there are doors between universes à la Philip Pullman in His Dark Materials.

Incomprehensible things have been happening, and rightly do we wonder, along with the narrator, where our and her (!) sanity lies; the mind plays tricks – has mountains, as Gerard Manley Hopkins once said – and the gradual and painful unpicking by the narrator of what actually happened to him, aided by his meticulous and obsessively-indexed journals, and his coming finally to entertain the possibility of being rescued from the bizarre world which he has grown to know and love unfold beautifully, sweeps you along.

It’s a truly mind-blowing tale as it plays with your head all the while you are reading. It’s really a stunner. Unputdownable.

2021: My year of reading

2021 has been a very conservative reading year. I’ve apparently only bought 20 books (I received another 3 for Christmas), but I have read over 90, so there’s been a lot of re-reading going on, and this has mainly been comfort reading to help me through the strange times we are living in. And the big clear-out also continues, as I get rid of books I know I’m not going to read or refer to again.

I spent quite a while revisiting Richard Brautigan’s novels, which have been in my library since my hippy days. They are light-hearted froth in a lot of ways, and yet some of them are very well-written, and I didn’t decide to get rid of all of them, but kept one or two just in case, as you do. The same is true of Hermann Hesse’s novels: I’ve now re-read all of these apart from The Glass Bead Game, which somehow I can’t face at the moment, even though some think it’s the best of all his works. I have a very vague recollection of it being a bit of a disappointment way back in the 1970s, too. But as I grow older I realise that Hesse’s fiction, and his ideas about the self and personality were pretty influential in my younger years in terms of how I saw myself and the world I lived in, and the connections between Hesse’s characters’ lives and the psychology of Carl Jung has been quite to the forefront when I’ve been re-reading the novels. Necessarily this led to a re-reading of some of Jung as well. In the end, I think the pandemic has caused me to undertake some fairly deep reflection on my entire life, and I know this has been the case for a good number of people.

There have been some new books this year, and a good number of them I read because they were choices of other members of my current book group. I’m a little surprised that I’ve stuck with the group – I like the people a lot – but at other times when I’ve been in a book group, I’ve dropped out fairly quickly because I didn’t like other people choosing my reading matter for me…

I’ve also realised that I read very little travel writing this year, which struck me as rather odd since my own opportunities for travel have been necessarily rather constrained for the past couple of years. I re-read a short and very lovely book Something of his Art, by Horatio Clare who travelled in the footsteps of my hero J S Bach, making the journey on foot from Arnstadt in Thuringia to Lübeck to hear the master organist Dietrich Buxtehude in the early eighteenth century. Clare records his impressions of the walk and reflects on the music and musician.

Discovery: I’ve wrestled with the Tao Te Ching a few times but not really got anywhere. My liking for Ursula Le Guin led me to get her version (ie version rather than translation, with plenty of her annotation and commentary) and I feel I’m now getting somewhere with it and something from it.

Blog report: more visits than ever this year, but this is largely due, as last year, to the number of what I imagine are students of the literature of the Great War reading up about various poems and poets as part of their studies. I’m grateful for their visits, and for everyone else who reads rather more widely in my meanderings through the world of literature, and I enjoy your comments and interactions.

Best SF: Laurent Binet’s Civilisations, although strictly speaking it’s an alternative history rather than science fiction. But a superb ‘what if?’

Best new novel: this has to be the (for me) long-awaited The Books of Jacob, by Olga Tokarczuk, which was a challenging but rewarding read and shows why she is a Nobel-class writer. Looking forward to more from her.

Best non-fiction: I found Adrift, by Amin Maalouf a fascinating account of the current state of the world, and how we got here. He’s a Lebanese writer, mainly a novelist but he has written about history and society before. He anchors so many of our current political problems in the Middle East and the effects that interfering outsiders have had over the past century as they struggled for control over the region and its resources. That’s oversimplifying a great deal, but is a very thought-provoking approach and one which matches the way I have thought about the world and seen it changing over my lifetime. The West’s appalling and cavalier treatment of Palestine is at the heart of so many problems and conflicts…

Best re-read(s): Amin Maalouf again, and Leo The African, his amazing re-creation of the true story of the Muslim boy from Spain at the time of the Reconquista, and his life, travels and adventures. Simply wonderful. Also Jean Giono’s Regain, about the resurrection of a remote village in France, the power of nature and those who live in harmony with it. Another book from my student days.

Next year’s plans: I want to continue with my reading of all of Shakespeare’s plays, and I’ve also made a resolution to read/re-read more history. I shall continue to sort and tidy up my library, and attempt to buy no new books at all… I am allowing myself one exception, which will be the final volume of Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy, if it’s published. And lest you think I’m being extremist here, I will point out that I have several feet of as yet unread books on my shelves…

Jung: Memories, Dreams, Reflections

     This was a fascinating and unusual approach to autobiography. Jung does not present his life in a linear fashion, but through the recalling of significant moments and epiphanies, especially of his childhood. He gives a very powerful and detailed picture of the centrality of religion to his early years, and I quickly recognised a polymath striving to find his way through so much curiosity and so many paths of knowledge. He shows how he arrived at his earliest glimpses of the workings and power of the unconscious, and the shadow, in his life. When he moves on to his development as an analyst, we can see clearly the evolution of his therapeutic methodology, and how it has influenced the ways many current practitioners work. There is an astonishing bravery and confidence during those days of psychoanalysis in its relative infancy, almost a ‘make it up as you go along’ approach. Jung’s split with Freud is explained quite clearly: Jung could not go along with his colleague’s attribution of sexual origins to all neuroses, and quite soon was ploughing his own furrow, Freud merely being an episode in the progress of Jung’s life and work.

I find the descriptions of various cases fascinating and often wonder if such arcane and weird-sounding issues present themselves nowadays, as presented themselves to the likes of Freud and Jung, or whether today’s mental health issues are very different.

Some chapters are very challenging, both to read and to understand; Jung’s confrontation with the unconscious felt almost like an episode of madness to me, and the revelations he enjoyed reminded me of the effects of hallucinogenic drugs. I was continually astonished by his phenomenally detailed memory for his dreams and visions.

Jung’s studies, reading, researches and thinking represent an enormous work of synthesis across many fields, psychology, history, mythology, alchemy, religion, literature, and reflect the complexity both of his past and development, and through him, our understanding of that of the human race as a whole. There seems to be a much broader scope in his approach to the human mind and consciousness than in Freud’s work, as far as I can recall it. And I was intrigued – and will reflect further on this – by a sense of his influence on Philip Pullman’s vision of the afterlife as pictured in the Northern Lights trilogy…

As his life progressed, there was increasing emphasis on the importance and significance of the spiritual element, in its broadest sense, to human life, and the consequences of our neglect or rejection of this aspect of ourselves. I was also struck by Jung’s humility, in spite of the scope of his life’s achievement, by his recognition of his own, and humans’ limitations generally, and by the way he reached acceptance and contentment in his terms, as his life drew to a close.

Not an easy read, but a very thought-provoking and satisfying one.

Reading differently

Just a few brief thoughts here as I realised the other day just how much the act of writing this blog for the last decade or so has changed the ways I read. Not in any dramatic fashion, because as a lifelong student of literature, once the bug had bitten me in my teens, through three different degrees at universities and a lifetime’s career, I feel that I have always sought to go below the surface. But for a long time, in the middle part of my life, I ‘just’ read books… one sometimes leading to another.

Now there is a greater deliberateness to my approach. Yes, I’ll allow myself to be sidetracked by a sudden discovery, but there’s more of a sense of planning to what I read and when, as I’m increasingly conscious of limited time. I’ve set some time aside this November for reading the new Olga Tokarczuk novel The Books of Jacob, which is finally scheduled to appear in English translation – and I’ve resisted buying the French version which is already out there because I like the work of her English translator Jennifer Croft – and there’s a part of me that remembers, every now and then, that I need to live long enough to read the final part of Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy…

So I read a little more carefully now, with a slip of paper and a pencil to jot down ideas and thoughts, links and comparisons and anything else that occurs to me as I read. And I rejoice in the modern technology which means that if my phone is with me, I can look up words and references instantly, without leaving the sofa, and I do look things up rather more than in the past.

I’m thinking more about what I’m reading, with the discipline of this blog in the back of my mind: my promise to myself was that every book I read would get a post, and I don’t think I’ve broken this rule. And, if I’m honest, I’m getting more out of the reading that I’m doing, which can’t be bad.