Golden Compass

Philip Pullman's grand trilogy, His Dark Materials, began with Northern Lights (1995), which was published in the US as The Golden Compass, followed by The Subtle Knife (1997) and The Amber Spyglass (2000). The saga of Lyra Belacqua's coming of age is darkened by her realization that she is alienated from her mother and father, Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel. She is, in a sense, an orphan stuck between two worlds.

The series is a meditation on the Romantic idea of the child, who is closer to the creative core of life and naturally honest and brave. It is strongly influenced by John Milton's Paradise Lost, from which Pullman drew the title "His Dark Materials" (see Milton's poem, Book 2, lines 910ff). It is also strongly influenced by William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789-1794), which deals with the problem of the child's comprehension of an adult world it must enter. "Innocence" and "Experience" are concepts of consciousness that recast Milton's mythic states of "Paradise" and "Fall." See below for two presentations on Blake.

Pullman has said, “I reveled in and loved the Romantic poets—Keats, Shelley, Coleridge—and Romantic music, too. The music of Beethoven, Wagner. All of the cultural poets of that time are very close to me. So I suppose I could be a Romantic poet: post-Romantic or imitation-Romantic, if you like.” You can see the strength of these ideas as represented in Chapter 13 of The Golden Compass, when Iorek Byrnison and Lyra talk about the differences between bears, humans, adults, and children (see pp. 198-99 in the Laurel Leaf Paperback edition).

Pullman's trilogy has been turned into film, an ambitious stage-play, and starting in 2019 a television series that will deal with all three books. He is now at work on The Book of Dust, another trilogy dealing with Lyra's later career, the first volume of which had been completed and published in 2018. He says that his own daemon is a crow.

Pullman has strong opinions, and has criticized Tolkien:

“Tolkien’s work has very little of interest in it to a reader of literature, in my opinion. When I think of literature—Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad—the great novelists found their subject matter in human nature, emotion, in the ways we relate to each other. If that’s what Tolkien’s up to, he’s left out half of it. The books are wholly male-oriented. The entire question of sexual relationships is omitted. Tolkien was Catholic, which meant that for him, there were no questions about religion. The church had all the answers” (Interview in Slate 2015).

Pullman has explained that Lyra came to him—he didn’t really choose her. He was drawn to her personality because

“she was so strong, so individual. But she’s not—I like to stress this to people—an unusual child. She’s very ordinary. I was a teacher, I used to teach girls her age, and there were many Lyras.” (Slate Interview).

Pullman has written quite a lot on education and children in newspaper opinion pieces and talks:

“Any education that neglects [joy] will be a dry and tasteless diet with no nourishment in it. People – children especially – need this experience of delight. It isn’t something you give them as a reward, it’s something they will perish if they don’t have. Some part of them will perish. Just look at a flower dying for lack of water, and then water it; it’s like that. Look at children’s faces as you tell them a story, or as they sit in the theatre. Look at the rapt flushed expression on the face of a child involved, lost, in a well-loved book. That’s the look of someone entering the school of morals” (Lecture, 2005).