The Dark Materials Trilogy, by Phillip Pullman

The Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman is a series of fantasy novels, ostensibly for children. They are well written, with a polish and a sense of narrative form lacking in the Harry Potter novels. In his New York Times review of the last Harry Potter novel, Christopher Hitchens recommended this trilogy, which I subsequently discovered on my son's bookshelf. The central character is a young girl named Lyra, ostensibly an orphan who lives under the supervision of the master of one of the colleges at Oxford University. Lyra begins the novel as a deceptively normal orphan—though adventurous and rebellious. She is constantly hiding in closets and running across the roofs of the college buildings with her daemon. Oh, yes, her daemon. The world Lyra inhabits is not exactly our world, but one parallel to it, similar in many respects to our own, but different in other ways. The inhabitants of this world all have a daemon, an animal of some sort that is linked to them through a special bond that the novels never quite explain. In childhood, the daemon can change shape at will—from cat to hawk to fish—but when its owner reaches puberty the daemon settles into one shape that is set for life. When the owner dies, so does the daemon. The daemon is akin to the soul. In some worlds, a person's daemon is invisible.

Lyra's simple life at Oxford soon begins to grow more complex. She secretly watches as the headmaster of the College tries to poison a visiting dignitary, Lord Asriel, a scientist of sorts. She overhears a conversation about a special child, who she realizes is herself. A beautiful woman, Mrs. Coulter, appears at the College and decides to adopt her. Lyra becomes aware that children in the town are disappearing, never to be seen again, and there are ominous rumors about their fate. She learns that Mrs. Coulter is involved in the disappearances. She also learns that she does have, after all, a mother and father. She runs away to live with the gypsies, becomes friends with a balloon pilot and a talking polar bear named Iorek Byrnison (with his own set of armor), travels to the frozen North, learns about the possible existence of other universes, and so on and so forth.

Pullman imaginatively populates these novels with all sorts of fantastic creatures and parallel worlds. The first novel, The Golden Compass, is full of surprises and is ingeniously put together. The latter two novels, The Subtle Knife and The Ambler Spyglass are quite readable and usually entertaining but also less satisfying, in part because Pullman forces them to serve a particular agenda and framework involving quantum mechanics, parallel worlds, anti-Catholicism and anti-institutionalized religion of any kind, and Paradise Lost. As the novel develops, and we learn of the roles that Lyra and her friend Will are fated to enact, events seem increasingly prescribed and limited.

Still, there are delights, such as the elephant-like mulefa that appear in the third novel. They have evolved to ride on wheels fashioned from the seedpods of a particular tree. The mulefa are highly intelligent, possessed of their own language, and have as enemies large swan-like birds that occasionally attack from the nearby sea. Less successful is the world of the dead, where Lyra and friends travel. It's too imprecise and unbelievable, with harpies and an emaciated boatman and millions on millions of ghosts. The afterlife in this novel, reminiscent of the afterlife in Homer's The Iliad, and also of a prison camp, is not a happy place.

As the books progress, the fantasy grows more forced, less plausible, less convincing. Lyra's character loses her distinctiveness, as she compliantly adheres to the role the novels create for her, and finally, in the third book, the climactic events are described with an imprecise, abstract, faintly eroticized language that is sentimental and ineffective.

A key component of the novels is Dust, an indefinable substance that is generated when a species becomes sentient, self-conscious. It's a kind of dark matter. It goes by various names, depending on which world you are in: in our world, Dust is Shadow Particles. Dust gives human life its joy and vigor. It animates the universe. Children don't have it, but as they grow older and mature they become covered with it. The novels revolve around the efforts of various characters in the novels to destroy Dust as well as to save it. Lyra's life is in danger as a result of the struggle.

The Dark Materials trilogy is well written and often highly imaginative. Much more literary and intellectualized than the Harry Potter novels, it is, in the end, less engaging. The Harry Potter novels are full of bad writing and rough edges, contrived plot turns, and other sorts of baggage, but Harry Potter and his friends, even at the height of the crisis in the final book, remain interesting and real as human beings, while Lyra and Will become more and more like pieces of an edifice that Pullman struggles too diligently to force into place. The smooth edges of his seamless trilogy are what bring it down.