His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass And Its Reader

The first book of Pullman's His Dark Materials immediately throws us into a parallel world to our own. A few things happened differently in both the evolution of humanity as well as the timeline of history. John Calvin served as Pope, technology is much more steampunk than in our reality (though that doesn't mean that it is inferior to ours), and every human walks side by side with their soul, known as daemons, which take on animal forms. And in this world, the Catholic Church, known as the Magisterium, has a much larger influence on people's lives than it does in ours.

We are introduced to Lyra Belacqua, a feisty young girl living under the watch the Scholars of Oxford's Jordan College. Her parents died when she was a baby, and her closest surviving relative is her uncle, Lord Asriel, who is a noted explorer and iconoclast. Lyra, and her daemon Pantalaimon, have a penchant for getting in trouble and telling lies. She and her best friend Roger, the son of one of the kitchen workers at Jordan, spend their time acting like children. They have "wars" with other children, sneak off and explore the grounds of the college, and, most importantly, buck authority just for fun.

Sadly, a series of events forces Lyra and Roger to be separated, and forces Lyra to grow up much faster than she should have. A group of people have been kidnapping children and Rogoer is one of them. Meanwhile, a mysterious woman named Mrs. Coulter appears at Oxford one night and woos Lyra with promises of expeditions to the North, where her uncle is currently researching a phenomenon known as "Dust". Before Asriel left, Lyra overheard him describing the strange behavior of particles that is most prevalent in the northern region of the planet, situated right under Aurora Borealis (hence the title Northern Lights in England). Before Lyra departs with Mrs. Coulter, the Master of Jordan (the dean, or chancellor, or whatever you wish to call the highest officer of a college) bequeathes her with a golden compass-like instrument known as an alethiometer. The function of the alethiometer is to do the opposite of what Lyra does best, it tells the truth.

Lyra spends a few months with Mrs. Coulter and her creepy daemon, a laconic golden monkey (daemons can speak, and though they mainly talk to their owners, Coulter's monkey almost never says anything even to her). But when Lyra discovers that Mrs. Coulter is behind the abductions, she runs away and joins up with a tribe of people known as Gyptians (in our world, they are known as gypsies). One of the children that Lyra played with was a Gyptian boy named Billy, and together, Lyra and the Gyptians make their way north to find Roger, Billy, and the other kidnapped children.

The trip serves as a way for Pullman to deliver an immense amount of exposition. Lord Faa, the leader of the tribe, and his second-in-command, Farder Coram, explain to Lyra the mysteries of the alethiometer and tell her some disturbing information about her family. Along the way, Lyra begins to learn how to read the alethiometer through intuition, a feat thought impossible. Most alethiometer readers study for decades and even the most learned Scholars still require books to decipher the meanings of the object's symbols. All Lyra has to do is to relax her mind and let an alternative level of consciousness flow over her, and she is able to "see" the numerous meanings of each symbol.

Now, on the subject of the alethiometer, I bring up my first point of interest. The alethiometer tells the truth, but in a book series about the negative effects of dogmatic thought, I must ask, whose truth does the alethiometer tell? Does it tell the truth relative to the person reading it, or is there an absolute truth? It would seem hypocritical for Pullman to state that there is, since the villainous Magisterium is attacked for pushing their own absolute truth on the protagonists. And the truth can be a relative thing. In The Subtle Knife, Lyra asks the alethiometer whether Will Parry, her future travel companion, is a friend or foe. Since Will becomes a friend to Lyra, if a representative of the Magisterium were to ask the same question, how would the alethiometer respond? And perhaps more intriguing is the answer Lyra got. Mere hours before Lyra and Will met, Will was running away from a group of men who were trying to steal documents from his home. In an effort to evade them, Will accidentally killed one of them. When Lyra asked the alethiometer about him, instead of responding, "Friend", it told her that Will was a murderer. Lyra used this answer to reason that Will was a strong person and a worthwhile travel companion, so the alethiometer told Lyra the truth she needed to hear to bring Will along with her.

The other major point about Lyra's relationship with the alethiometer is how mismatched a pair they are. While the alethiometer must tell the truth, Lyra is much more comfortable telling lies. She makes bizarre tales almost as a sport, and has a method, and once she gets going, she gives the story everything she's got. In what was possible her most intricate and dangerous lie, she tricked the king of the (sentient) polar bears into thinking that she herself was a daemon.

About halfway through the first novel, we are introduced to Iorek Byrnison, an exiled polar bear who joins Lyra in her quest after she helps him break free from a town that has trapped him and uses him for cheap labor. Along the way, she befriends him and develops a close relationship with the bear. When she is captured by Iorek's former companions, she remembers that the king, Iofur Raknison, longs for a daemon of his own (only humans have daemons). She formulates a story about how Magisterium scientists found a way to create daemons for animals, and she is the prototype. She tells Iofur that she was given to Iorek, but she would much rather belong to a king. If Iofur can defeat Iorek in combat, she can be transferred to the king. The point of this story is so that Iofur will allow the exiled Iorek to approach the palace without the guard bears using projectile weapons to kill him, and allow for a one-on-one fight. Her ability to spin such a story causes Iorek to give her the moniker Lyra Silvertongue, which Lyra takes on as her new surname.

If all one knew about Lyra was the fact that she is a compulsive liar, it may be hard to understand how she could be (1) the protagonist of a (supposedly) children's book series (it's a children's series in the same way Harry Potter is), and (2) that she could be destined bring harmony back to the universe. I must admit that Lyra comes off as not the best role model for children, but the series is about how she matures. By the end, she is no longer able to read the alethiometer through instinct, but she has also learned how to tell the truth on her own.

Up next: the subtleness of Will Parry...