Book Review: The Amber Spyglass, part 4

[osprey_archer]

And now for a wrap-up of a few final Amber Spyglass thoughts that I couldn’t fit into my earlier posts.

First, beyond all the other reasons I hated the ending of The Amber Spyglass as a child, I also loathed it as yet another variation of the evergreen classic of the children losing the magic at the end of a children’s fantasy novel: Peter and Susan can’t return to Narnia because they’re too old, Fern loses interest in talking animals because a boy took her on the Ferris wheel, etc.

Upon reread, I discovered that this isn’t technically what’s happening at the end of The Amber Spyglass. Yes, the timing does happen to coincide with Will and Lyra falling in love, but technically Lyra loses the ability to read the alethiometer because that ability was given to her by grace (by the rebel angels, one presumes) and has been taken away now that her quest is over. And Will breaks the subtle knife (which gives him the ability to travel between worlds) because the subtle knife turns out to be releasing a soul-eating Spectre every time it opens a doorway between worlds.

So they’re not losing the magic because they personally have grown too old, which at least still leaves room for another child (for instance, the child reader) to have a magical adventure. They’re losing the magic because every magic doorway forever must be closed, because the magic portals are actually EVIL. The magic was BAD ALL ALONG.

***

And finally, swinging back around to Dust. In the first book, Dust is a big mystery: it settles on humans, especially adults, but not animals, not even the armored bears who talk and wear armor and have kings etc. The Magisterium thinks that Dust is sin, which, okay, the Magisterium and I clearly have a different understanding of sin (the bears clearly have the ability to knowingly do wrong, which is how I would define sin), but sure! Why not! The Magisterium is clearly supposed to be wrong anyway and the story is great, so I’m not getting bogged down in metaphysics.

Unfortunately, the story became less great and the metaphysics became more explicit. In The Amber Spyglass, we learn that “Dust came into being when living things became conscious of themselves.” Dust is like “the stars of every galaxy in the sky, and every one of them was a little fragment of conscious thought.” And the doorways between worlds are draining away the Dust, and without Dust, “Thought, imagination, feeling, would all wither and blow away, leaving nothing but a brutish automatism; and that brief period when life was conscious of itself would flicker out like a candle in every one of the billions of worlds where it had burned brightly.”

Well, first of all, this breaks Pullman’s own worldbuilding. We know that the armored bears are capable of conscious thought, feeling, and even imagination: we saw Iofur Raknisson with his doll daemon perched on his knee. They understand themselves to be bears, think about what it means to be bears, and understand death. Why don’t they get Dust?

I think the answer to the armored bears question specifically is that Pullman hadn’t fully thought through that aspect of his worldbuilding in book one. But unfortunately for Pullman, this issue is far wider than the armored bears. It touches on one of my pet topics of animal intelligence, and can I just say: Holy Descartes!

So animals are merely brutish automatons, incapable of thought, imagination, or feeling? I realize that research in animal intelligence has become more widely known since this book was published in 2001, but that was still decades after Jane Goodall did her pioneering chimp research. The general public may not have been up on the intelligence of cephalopods and crows, but we knew great apes and dolphins were smart. We may have even been vaguely aware of elephant intelligence.

And I simply feel that if you are writing a book series about the nature of consciousness, maybe you should, in fact, familiarize yourself with the latest research about the nature of consciousness.

It’s incredibly frustrating that Pullman is taking aim at the destructive impact of certain Christian teachings on Western society but straight-up recreates the belief that humans are different from animals not merely in degree but in kind. We are not simply the smartest animals, we are the only conscious animals at all, in fact not really animals but marked out by the cosmos as different by the way that we attract the glowing golden particles of conscious thought that are Dust.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Well said, especially that last paragraph. (And the one about the self-awareness of the bears. My heart...)

Also: "Dust came into being when living things became conscious of themselves"

So if ultimately dust arose from the spontaneous self-awareness of creatures, how is that without dust, everything sinks into brutish atomatism? The dust didn't bestow consciousness, consciousness created dust.

Honestly, so happy I can look at Pullman's cosmology and say "Nope, do not like. Goodbye." And check out. And turn my attention to a world singing with consciousness and awareness of all sorts. Ahhhh. That's better.

[osprey_archer]

I don't think that Pullman fully worked out his cosmology of Dust and unfortunately he's trying to tell the kind of story where it's actually important for the cosmology to make sense. Does Dust create consciousness or does consciousness create Dust? Okay, maybe he's suggesting some kind of positive feedback look where they both strengthen each other, but even so, wouldn't the continued self-awareness of creatures continue to create Dust even if it is drifting off into the abyss...

But also, as you say, it's probably not worth trying to figure out the details of how Pullman's cosmology, since ultimately I'm not just quibbling about the details but refuting the entire premise. Consciousness is not some rare thing limited to humans, but as common as dirt, and no less precious for it.

[oracne]

I simply feel that if you are writing a book series about the nature of consciousness, maybe you should, in fact, familiarize yourself with the latest research about the nature of consciousness.

YES.

The reason I didn't like the last book in particular is I felt lectured to, and also as if the story had been forgotten because of the lecturing, which may have been what Pullman was after, but it was disappointing after the Sense of Wonder from the first book. IMO.

[landofnowhere]

Wow, that hadn't occurred to me about the Armored Bears. And IIRC Pullman's Land of the Dead is all populated by humans also. At least IIRC C. S. Lewis made his intelligent animals the moral equivalent of humans!

[kore]

I had not realized that about the bears! (Mostly because I just ignored a lot of his pseudo-theology, lol.) BOOOO.

....OK, I looked at the freaking Wiki entry (LOL) and I still don't get what Dust actually is especially since it "condenses into Angels"?? I guessss it doesn't gather on children either? I guess that goes along with another point that Lyra and Will gaining knowledge of good and evil, not er carnal knowledge or whatever, since the church in the books thinks Dust is original sin. And I am right back at IDEFK, and my private conviction that when authors turn didactic the results are almost always bad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_(His_Dark_Materials)

[kore]

Yeah, Aslan makes the Talking Beasts from the regular animals in Magician's Nephew, doesn't he? And tells them not to look down on the regular animals because they are their descendants. And Talking Beasts can be deceiptive/possibly evil too, like Shift in Last Battle. Regular mice nibble through the ropes binding Aslan to the Stone Table, too, and they are rewarded by his giving them speech and complex thought. So at least Lewis doesn't think the pain of animals is meaningless because they aren't capable of reason! (Fuck you, Descartes)

[sholio]

I've really enjoyed reading your write-ups on these! It's been a very long time since I read them - 20+ years - so I don't have a lot of specific recollections anymore, and vanishingly little after book 1, which is mostly what I remember. I do remember loving book 1 and then increasingly hating the series after that, to the point where I've never been tempted to go back and reread, and I'm definitely seeing why. But your posts have been entertaining and insightful reading!

[lobelia321]

What remains in my memory from reading the trilogy years ago is how dust clings to the objects in the museum. This speaks to me (who am an art historian) in a very evocative way. It makes into a visible metaphor that feeling of awe I get when I look at objects like ancient tools or tiny little prehistoric figurines. Full-blown oil paintings and Greek statues are almost too overwhelming; it's the little figurines that move me. And Pullman's dust seems to capture something about them. "Here's a glass case in a museum. Here's a dinosaur bone. And here's a little carving of a prehistoric reindeer."

[kore]

I don't think that Pullman fully worked out his cosmology of Dust and unfortunately he's trying to tell the kind of story where it's actually important for the cosmology to make sense.

BINGO

It is really something for the angels (not Angels) to weep over.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, the first book had SUCH amazing sense of wonder, and then in each subsequent book the sense of wonder went down and the sense of being lectured to went up.

[osprey_archer]

I think we see a couple of mulefa in the land of the dead, but yes basically everyone else down there is human.

[osprey_archer]

I had not grasped that Dust condenses into angels. So I guess 30,000 years ago, when humans started creating Dust, in condensed in the first angel who dubbed himself the Authority and told all the subsequent angels that he had created them (and everything else)?

But yeah, the fact that it doesn't gather on children is established in the very first chapter, and is why the Magisterium thinks it might be original sin although actually isn't the point of original sin that everyone has it, even children? Or is that Calvinist infant depravity and the maybe kinda Catholic Magisterium doesn't believe that.

[osprey_archer]

I did like the Dust clinging to the objects in the museum. I think that Pullman is very good at creating lovely atmospheric descriptions and not so good at coming up with an underlying logic behind them; he might have been better off if he had been vaguer about what exactly Dust is and how it works and just let it glow goldenly around.

[osprey_archer]

I'm glad you've been enjoying the posts! I really love book. For this reread, I kind of thought the cracks would be visible from the beginning since I knew what was coming, but nope, book one is still full of glorious possibility. You can see where he's going to go wrong later but none of it is set in stone yet.

[kore]

I must admit I was too busy mentally drawing hearts and stars in the margins every time Lyra showed up to take his attempted secular theology seriously

[kore]

Yeah, he's great at characterization, gripping action, vivid description and set pieces. Which are all great! But dense closely reasoned analytic theology, nooot so much.

[kore]

That seems true of so many modern YA trilogies. I wonder if it has anything to do with publishing contracts and writing speed.

[osprey_archer]

I mean honestly this is probably the best way to approach the book. The secular theology makes no sense so just focus on Lyra.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, part of what makes Pullman so frustrating is that he IS so good at so many parts of writing that he could have written a beautiful modern classic in His Dark Materials if he had just left the attempts at theology out. It would have made it a very different trilogy in a lot of ways because unfortunately the poor attempts at theology are load-bearing, but I feel confident that if he'd stuck to his strengths he could have produced something better.

[osprey_archer]

Quite possibly! The Amber Spyglass definitely needed more attentive editing. They probably couldn't have fixed the underlying thematic problems (not least because Pullman surely didn't see these things as problems) but a lot of the structural problems that detract from the book could have been fixed pretty easily if only someone had pointed them out.

[kore]

I had problems with the BBC show but Dafne Keen as L Y R A was perfect casting.

[lobelia321]

Yes, and let us readers speculate about or muse on it! Kiddie sex was cringe at the end; I tried to gloss over it or alternatively to force it into something that made sense to me. Will's name is the reveal of his function as an emblematic character.

[landofnowhere]

This.

[kore]

This interview with her! https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/oct/28/dafne-keen-his-dark-materials-lyra-bbc-philip-pullman

[kore]

I thought there were glimpses of that in the TV series, where they simply couldn't go into theological detail because of time constraints, heh. T had never read the books and was basically companion-watching with me when I saw it, and he wound up getting invested in the story too. (One thing really apparent in dramatization is how horrific a lot of it is, and how much danger Lyra's actually in. At least moreso than what I remembered!)