When we first encounter Lyra Silvertongue, neé Belacqua, she is hidden in a wardrobe and listening intently to her uncle, Lord Asriel, give a presentation to Oxford scholars on his findings about Dust. Though she is only eleven years old, equipped with the patchy and unconventional education she has received from aging male scholars, Lyra is instantly captivated by the idea of Dust.
Not the kind of dust that accumulates in the corners of rooms, but tiny golden particles that flow from the heavens towards earth. Dust that is drawn to adult humans and lights up a mysterious city from another world lying just beyond the Northern Lights. Asriel’s descriptions of Dust and photograms of this city in the sky make such a powerful impact on Lyra that she sets out on a quest to discover the nature of Dust, taking her first to the far north of her own world, then across multiple parallel universes.
In the 30 years since Lyra’s adventures began in The Northern Lights,(The Golden Compass, to American readers) the first installment of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, countless characters have provided their own explanations for Dust. According to the Magisterium, the ecclesiastical body which rules Lyra’s world, it is original sin and the source of all human folly. A physicist from our world, Mary Malone, understands it as dark matter. Angels are made from Dust. The Mulefa, elephant-like beings from another world, need Dust, or ‘Sraf’ as they call it, to survive. We know how Dust behaves, that it is related to conscious thought, that it is attracted to adults, rather than children, that if feeds and depends on creativity, imagination and love, that it is an animating force in the universe. But, after five novels and five smaller companion texts, neither the reader, nor Lyra has learned what Dust actually is.
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With Pullman’s final installment of the Book of Dust trilogy, The Rose Field, coming out next week, on October 23, the author has promised that both Lyra and the reader will finally discover what Dust is. Though Lyra first sought answers through the Aurora Borealis, she is destined to discover the true nature of Dust in the deserts of Central Asia.
Pullman understands that true evil is never about the distorted cravings of a single person. Evil is aided and abetted by the banality of institutions and their functionaries.
I first encountered Lyra at 17, on the cusp of finishing secondary school, when the lingering innocence of childhood would soon give way, rather abruptly, to the world of adult experience. I was immediately captivated by Lyra’s world and the rich imaginative universe of Dust and Dæmons, witches and armored bears that Pullman brought to life on the page. I have spent over 20 years with Lyra, dipping in and out of her universe, either through the books or the excellent BBC adaption, at regular intervals. I’ve just turned 40, but I find the magic, emotionality and ethical preoccupations of Lyra’s universe just as compelling. His Dark Materials has not only stood the test of the last 30 years, but feels more necessary than ever.
Lyra’s quest to understand Dust brings her into confrontation with human and other worldly forces who champion moral absolutism over imagination, ignorance over knowledge, authoritarianism over free will and cold, disinterested rationality over empathy. Lyra does not always comprehend the world-shifting stakes of her actions, as she’s too focused on the concrete life-and-death urgency of each quest (e.g. saving her best friend Roger from the childcutters at Bolvangar, then freeing his soul from the Land of the Dead). She does, however, ally herself with many characters along this journey who are determined to push back against the oppressive systems which dominate their worlds.
Throughout these adventures, Pullman assembles a motley crew of characters who not only challenge power, but the rigid social and gendered expectations imposed on them by those powers. Back in our world, where trans, nonbinary and gender nonconforming people have become the focus of a sustained, and increasingly violent, moral panic, His Dark Materials is a welcome antidote to the absolutisms of those who deny both science and experience by insisting on rigid sex-gender binaries.
Lyra’s existence pushes back against the moral absolutes and gendered expectations that define her world and seek to limit her agency. And, as a fictional protagonist, she challenges what readers might expect from a young heroine. She is the smart but lazy, arrogant, half-noble, half-street ruffian, tom-boy, protagonist. At every turn she challenges authority, the limits of propriety, rejects the pretty dresses she is squeezed into and the destiny of her gender.
Her companion Will, who she first encounters in The Subtle Knife, similarly challenges what readers might expect from a male protagonist. He is a quiet, introverted and sensitive boy who cares for his mother above all else. He can cook and clean and he is far more practical, level headed and cautious than Lyra. But Will also knows how to fight and is not afraid to use his strength when necessary. With Will by her side, Lyra learns to reciprocate acts of care and open herself to experiencing love, desire and pleasure. Will and Lyra face a devastating separation, literally caught on either side of their two worlds, at the end of The Amber Spyglass.
But with the second trilogy, The Book of Dust, we are introduced to Malcolm Polstead who challenges toxic masculinity in many of the same ways as Will. While the first book, 2017’s La Belle Sauvage, did not quite have the fantastical scope of the original trilogy, I can think of few other novels where the young male protagonist dedicates his time—happily, dotingly and responsibly—to looking after a baby, including feeds and diaper changes. Jumping forward twenty years to the second installment, The Secret Commonwealth, Malcolm has grown into a strong and capable secret agent who is not afraid to show care or affection.
Lyra’s existence pushes back against the moral absolutes and gendered expectations that define her world and seek to limit her agency.
The inversion of traditional gender roles reaches its extreme with Mrs. Coulter who could be considered among literature’s most compelling villains. Mrs. Coulter has an unabashed thirst for power and uses her sexuality as a tool to position herself in a world where sexuality is feared and power is almost completely closed off to women. She possesses a preternatural ability to shut off any human feeling and uses this in the most despicable of ways: the murder of countless children. As a mother to Lyra, she abandons her as a baby and displays no interest in her until Lyra herself becomes a figure of interest to those in power. Mrs. Coulter is the embodiment of the devastating impacts of science when divorced from ethics and religious fundamentalisms, where the innocent can become sacrificial lambs to preserve the moral order.
The awakening of any maternal feelings towards Lyra are delayed and never free of conflict. She loves but wishes to possess, control her daughter, “save her from herself” rather than allow her any agency. Though Mrs. Coulter’s love and self-sacrifice for Lyra is her ultimate redemption, it comes almost too late for Lyra to notice.
The existence of Dæmons in Lyra’s world is, in itself, a challenge to the gender binary. Dæmons seem to be an outward manifestation of the complex nature of humans that encompasses, male, female and animalistic characteristics that hint towards the breaking of gender binaries and the possibilities of interspecies relations. In The Secret Commonwealth, Lyra’s relationship with her Dæmon, Pantalaimon, is put to the ultimate test when she begins to doubt his “objective” existence. She seems to forget that she fought so hard and lost so much as a child to ensure no more children would be cut away from their Dæmons. In desperation to recover the bond they seem to have lost, Pantalaimon disappears in search of Lyra’s imagination.
The Secret Commonwealth is the condemnation of a world where imagination—not making things up, but a way of seeing, understanding, feeling the world—is suppressed by the dual forces of cold rationality and religious fundamentalisms that breed authoritarianism. It centers, once more, the power of imagination and storytelling as the forces that shape our reality, for good or for bad.
Pullman understands that true evil is never about the distorted cravings of a single person. Evil is aided and abetted by the banality of institutions and their functionaries who, as Lord Asriel says, have “tried to suppress and control every natural impulse. And when it can’t control them, it cuts them out.” Evil is aided and abetted by those who stand back and do nothing, who swallow the lies and turn away from images of death and destruction that are wholly preventable.
Likewise, evil will not be defeated by the emergence of an individual Chosen One, a lone hero possessed of a wand powerful enough to subdue his enemy. In Pullman’s world, evil is overcome by people choosing truth over lies, action over apathy and empathy over hate, every single day. As the angel Xaphania says at the end of The Ambar Spyglass: “Conscious beings make Dust—they renew it all the time by thinking and feeling and reflecting, by gaining wisdom and passing it on (…) keep[ing] their minds open and free.”
Pullman, at 78, has declared The Rose Field his last novel, making it the definitive end to the series. I am, however, comforted by the fact that there is a corpus of eleven novels and novelettes to return to when I feel that our world is too grim. But His Dark Materials offers much more than mere escapism.
As a literary project it remains, alongside authors like Octavia E. Butler or Ursula K. Le Guin, one of my antidotes to despair. This feels more important than ever in a world that tries to normalize genocide and climate catastrophe as the inevitable outcome of ongoing and increasingly authoritarian imperialist projects. A world which seeks to assert control by destroying our ability or willingness to open ourselves to imagination or the ability to see, feel and understand the magic in our world from multiple, diverse perspectives.