Seán Harnett
Philip Pullman has frequently made the point that as a writer of "children’s" fiction he can tell stories that writers of adult fiction simply wouldn’t get away with. It’s a good point, but not the whole point, and Mr. Pullman is being a little disingenuous when he says it: it would be more accurate to say that because he is a "children’s" writer his stories of the fantastic are indulged by the critics, whereas if he tried to write such stories specifically for adults he wouldn’t register on our cultural radar screens, much less bag a Whitbread Award for Fiction. Yet that’s exactly what happens in the literary world. Writers such as John Crowley, Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Carroll, Robert Holdstock and Gene Wolfe have been penning grown-up fairy stories for years, with a great deal more style, wit and learning than Pullman but with nary a whiff of critical legitimacy.
The truth is that The Amber Spyglass, the conclusion to Pullman’s "His Dark Materials" trilogy, is an entertaining romp, but no more entertaining – and certainly no more significant – than the average episode of a genre television show like, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It is engaging and charming while it lasts, but instantly forgettable.
It is also theologically simple-minded and mythologically dilute, a remarkable achievement given that Pullman claims to have been inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost and Blake’s prophetic epics. Yet these two ur-sources seem to serve no other purpose than as quarries for the quotes that preface each chapter: Pullman’s vision does not begin to hint at a sense of Milton’s theological grandeur or Blake’s imaginative fervour.
I am reminded of Tolkien’s outburst when he read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: "It really won’t do, you know!" The Amber Spyglass suffers from the same ad-hoc, kitchen sink, nut ‘n’ bolts approach to "secondary" creation that afflicted Lewis’s earlier Narnia books.
The central sequence of The Amber Spyglass, for instance, is an extended quest to the World of the Dead that feels as dull as the listless dead that it contains. It borrows liberally from both Greek and Christian myth without trying to transcend either. More disappointingly, the consolation that Pullman offers the dead in his fictional universe is reincarnation as a re-cycled soul, a shallow, new-ageish philosophy of pantheism-redux that would have horrified both Milton and Blake.
And yet I could forgive these shortcomings, if the story had not been so remarkably free of any sense of momentum or risk and if the characters that had so signally set apart the first two volumes in this trilogy had not been completely lobotomised. Lyra, the main female character, so full of spunk and disrespect in Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife is now reduced to following Will around in an unconvincing state of permanent love-daze which he returns, his own signal rage and anger and grim resolve barely registering. They both drift through the narrative like the ghosts they are sent to liberate, shorn of all initiative and purpose.
More disappointingly, the ending, which aims for tragedy and manages only bathos, is a didactic and long-winded conclusion to a series that did not talk down to its readers and avoided excessive exposition. Here that rule is relaxed and a point is made. Yet a morally sophisticated subtext does not necessarily a morally sophisticated book make: that kind of writing thrives on ambiguity and on an acknowledgement of the dreadful choices that even "good" people make. There’s none of that here. If Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife were books for adults disguised as children’s books, The Amber Spyglass is a book for children disguised as an adult’s book. Regrettably, Pullman’s failure to carry his conception through means that, despite protestations to the contrary, the "His Dark Materials" trilogy remains a series for children, in the sense that it will be remembered as unsophisticated, if it is remembered at all.
