A Certain Slant of Light

I’ve been enjoying Picture Book Advent so tremendously that I considered extending it with Twelve Days of Christmas Picture Books, but then I decided, no, better to quit while I’m ahead. Already looking forward to Picture Book Advent next year, though!

The Night Before Christmas, by Clement C. Moore, illustrated by Tasha Tudor. Pace the documentary Take Peace, Tudor illustrated this poem as a picture book THREE times (besides including it in her Christmas collection Take Joy!). I have the 1999 version with the most recent illustrations. (Am I planning to track down the others? Maybe.) Like Corgiville Christmas, this has a looser, sketchier style than her earlier books, but I thought it worked better here, possibly because the subject matter didn’t invite direct comparison to The Corgiville Fair.

Becky’s Christmas, written and illustrated by Tasha Tudor. A book with pictures rather than a picture book; an account not merely of Christmas itself but the weeks of preparation leading up to it. Baking cookies, twisting cornucopias for the tree, making presents, singing carols with the neighbors, harnessing the horse to go chop down the perfect Christmas tree…

Gingerbread Christmas, written and illustrated by Jan Brett. This is so cute! Matti bakes a gingerbread band to play music with the gingerbread baby, and the whole village is enjoying the concert in the bandstand when one perceptive little girl realizes that the instruments are delicious gingerbread cookies. The gingerbread baby leads the villagers on a merry chase as the instruments sneak away.

The Doll’s Christmas, written and illustrated by Tasha Tudor. One of the many Tudor family holiday traditions was to have a Christmas party for the dolls, featuring a tiny doll-size dinner (including cookies cut out with a thimble and a miniature cranberry jelly!), doll presents, and a marionette show, all of which were designed to keep the children busy as Tasha put together the full-size human Christmas.

Christmas in the Barn, by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Barbara Cooney. A spare, poetic retelling of the Nativity story, with illustrations by Barbara Cooney that really draw out both the pathos and the strangeness of the story by setting it in storybook New England. There’s just something about taking it out of Biblical times and setting it in a land of plaid flannel shirts, one-horse open sleighs, and red brick inns that really draws attention to the fact that, let’s face it, a baby who is spending his first night on earth asleep in a feed trough is facing a rough start in life. Not to mention his poor mother who just had to give birth in a barn.

The Christmas Cat, by Efner Tudor Holmes, illustrated by Tasha Tudor. An abandoned cat is ALONE and COLD on Christmas until a kindly man (probably the father of the two boys in the book but also metaphorically Santa Claus) takes him home as a pet for his two sons. The boys find the cat curled up on a chair by the fire on Christmas morning. HAPPY END.

The Church Mice at Christmas, written and illustrated by Graham Oakley. My mother’s contribution to Picture Book Advent, based on a recommendation from our children’s librarian who is from England, where these books are apparently quite famous. Love a book where the text tells one story and the illustrations change the meaning, like the bit in this where one of the church mice is yelling his Christmas wishes at Santa… who is in fact a burglar in a Santa suit.

My archive book list was running low, so I decided to spend some time poking around the archive catalogs again to see what else I might find. And to my shock, I discovered a book I somehow completely missed on my first go round: a hitherto unsuspected book by Edward Eager!

“Edward Eager wrote more books?” I gasped, for I’d always thought the famous seven were the only seven.

Yes, quoth Wikipedia, Edward Eager wrote three books beyond the famous seven. The other two I’ll get to in good time, but the one in the archive was Mouse Manor, which just so happens to be set at Christmas (although not a Christmas Book), so of course I had to read it right away.

Mouse Manor is a slim children’s novel about Miss Myrtilla Mouse, the sole inhabitant of Mouse Manor, who on Christmas Day decides impetuously to go up to London. (Mrs. Felina Thompson mentioned that she was on her way to London to look at the queen, you see, and Miss Myrtilla found herself saying she was on her way to London too.)

And so away she went! She hid in a hamper on the train, hitched a ride in Charles Dickens’ coat pocket, and met a dashing mouse in a checked suit who took her into the palace kitchens to try to nab a bit of sauce for the plum pudding that Miss Myrtilla had fortuitously brought… only the cooks caught sight of the two mice, and the dashing mouse distracted the cooks so Miss Myrtilla could flee, only to find herself in the throne room where the cats were taking their yearly Look at the Queen!

Just charming. I loved the illustrations by Beryl Bailey-Jones, too, especially Miss Myrtilla’s delicious candy-cane striped Christmas skirt, which swirls about her as she bustles about planning her trip to London. A cute quick read for any Edward Eager fan.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Ngaio Marsh’s Tied Up in Tinsel, which is actually a reread, which I realized fairly early on when the foppish country house owner explains that he’s staffed the place with murderers who have served their time. Just oncers, no more dangerous than the average man on the street, and anyway how else is he supposed to staff a country house given the servant problem in 1970s Britain? But I kept going, because Ngaio Marsh is always a good time, and also this book prominently features Troy who just happens to be at the country house to paint said foppish owner when the murder occurs… A Troy book is always especially a good time.

Maud Hart Lovelace’s The Trees Kneel at Christmas is set in Park Slope, where one of my friends lives, so every few pages I was shrieking “I know that place! I’ve crossed that street!” So naturally I loved the book, haha. Our heroine Afifi hears a story from her grandmother about how the trees kneel at Christmas back home in Lebanon, and becomes determined to walk to Prospect Park at midnight on Christmas Eve to see if the trees kneel in America, too.

I checked out Ruth Crawford Seeger’s 1953 American Folksongs for Christmas purely because it was illustrated by Barbara Cooney, but found it unexpectedly fascinating. Seeger (stepmother of Pete Seeger) was, among other things, a collector of folk music, and this book is full of songs I’ve never even heard of, from the tradition of all-night Christmas Eve church singalongs, often in the South, where people would gather and sing till dawn.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started Tasha Tudor’s Take Joy, which is a compilation of Christmas stories/poems/carols etc illustrated by Tudor. The second story is Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the world’s saddest pine tree. In the woods, the pine is too entirely focused on growing bigger (big enough to be a Christmas tree!) to ever feel happy. Then it’s cut down to be a Christmas tree, and it’s taken to a house and covered with ornaments and candles, and it’s all very strange and confusing, but the pine tree thinks that it will be able to enjoy these celebrations once it gets used to them… except of course its life as a Christmas tree lasts for just one night, and then it’s tossed in the attic and dried out for firewood.

What I Plan to Read Next

As I feared, I’m already running low on Christmas chapter books. However, Christie has a Poirot Christmas book and a Miss Marple that’s set at Christmas (although not perhaps a Christmas Book), and I have been meaning to to a Miss Marple, so…

If you have any other classic mystery Christmas recs, let me know!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Forever Christmas, an account of Christmas at Tasha Tudor’s Corgiville Cottage, with absolutely luscious pictures of Tudor making the yearly Advent wreath (hung from the ceiling with crimson satin ribbons from her parents’ wedding!), decorating gingerbread cookies for the tree (cut fresh from the forest and lit with candles), dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh…

Just gorgeous. Two of my life dreams are to ride in a sleigh and see a Christmas tree actually lit with candles.

And I popped back to the archives for Katherine Milhous’s The First Christmas Crib, which is not (as I expected) an account of Jesus’s birth, but rather a recounting of the first Christmas creche, created by Saint Francis of Assisi. Older Christmas picture books tend to be more religious than the newer ones, which probably shouldn’t surprise me but does slightly, just because overall the older Newbery books were not particularly religious. Christmas books were the last outpost for a rearguard action, perhaps.

What I’m Reading Now

Ruth Sawyer’s holiday story collection The Long Christmas, illustrated by our friend Valenti Angelo of Newbery fame. The book was first published in 1941, and although Sawyer doesn’t directly reference the war in the introduction, she is very conscious of the need for a light in the darkness, a repetition of the message “peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then the first story is about Satan rising in the fields of Bethlehem on the night of Jesus’s birth, intent on storming the stable and killing the baby messiah, but his evil plan is thwarted when the archangel Michael descends from heaven and vanquishes him in pitched battle.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve got my eyes on Ally Carter’s The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year.

On one of troisoiseaux’s recent posts about a nun memoir, someone linked an article about a different nun memoir: Monica Baldwin’s I Leap Over the Wall: A Return to the World after Twenty-Eight Years in the Convent.

As Baldwin went into the convent in 1914 and emerged in 1941, I knew instantly that I had to read it. What an absolutely huge period of social and technological change to miss! Baldwin is astonished by modern underwear, the wireless, wartime shortages, and masses and masses of people who have become famous since she went into the convent: Greta Garbo, Picasso, D. H. Lawrence… Right up to the end of the war she keeps clanging up against her ignorance of so many things that everyone else takes totally for granted.

However, as interesting as I found all the details about social change, the parts I found most fascinating were Baldwin’s descriptions of life in the convent. I’ve read about early twentieth-century social changes before, although not quite from this angle, but the convent was totally new, in a “I wouldn’t make it five minutes as a novice” kind of way. Bells, bells, bells, ringing at intervals all day and all night, telling you to move from one occupation to another, stopping mid-stitch if that’s when the bell rings, lengthy sung prayers every day, every scrap of behavior governed by the Rule. There’s a correct way to sit, stand, eat, speak, and presumably breathe.

It’s particularly interesting because, although Baldwin left the convent, she still has faith in Catholicism and the concept of monasticism. She’s outside the convent but still “inside,” if you will, the belief system, so she’s particularly good at explaining the ideas behind an enclosed convent: humans were created to adore God and that therefore a life spent in adoring God is profoundly unselfish and also useful, because usefulness doesn’t mean first and foremost serving other people but serving God.

Unfortunately for Baldwin, most of her interlocutors aren’t willing to listen. It’s not just that they disagree (I certainly was going a bit bug-eyed over this order of priorities), but that they’re not even interested in trying to understand. And she’s never the one who brings up the whole nun business! People just tell Baldwin, the ex-nun, their opinion that nuns are selfishly hiding away in convents when they should be getting married or having families or building careers or CONTRIBUTING to the world.

Even if you think that, why would you tell this to an ex-nun unprompted? Were these people born in barns? But maybe they think that Baldwin, having left the convent, will agree.

But Baldwin does not, and she tries to explain the theory of the cloistered nun. Her interlocutors “listen” (read: sit in silence without taking any of it in) and then reiterate their original opinion.

So if Baldwin still believes, why did she leave the convent? Well, she believes in God, and Catholicism, and the concept of vocation, but has realized that she personally does not have a vocation. As she explains it, when she first decided she wanted to be a nun, she didn’t stop to ask herself if she actually had a calling. “I wanted to be a nun; it followed, therefore, as the night the day, that God must have chosen me.” (Some of my students who want to be doctors have the same attitude, insofar as you can have a thoroughly secular version of this belief.)

All through the year of her noviceship, and the five or six years of probation that followed, she continued in this willful confusion between “wanting to be a nun” and “being called to be a nun.” Only after ten years in the convent does she realize she’s made a horrible mistake.

And then she stuck it out for eighteen more years! The same pigheadedness that led her to decide wanting to be a nun meant she must have a vocation also kept her from throwing in the towel for nearly two decades after realizing she didn’t.

The tone of the book is generally pretty sprightly, a sort of quizzical madcap adventure, an Edwardian Rip Van Winkle awakens in World War II. But there is an undercurrent of tragedy, too, which sometimes breaks the surface in a brief lament. If Baldwin had left the nunnery at 31, when she realized she had no vocation, she might still have built a life for herself. But in staying so long, she missed everything: marriage and children, yes, but also the chance to build a career, or even just acquire the job skills that would suit her for any kind of war work.

As it is, she can only bumble from war job to war job. After the war she retires to a cottage in Cornwall, which is certainly a happy ending of a kind. But what a shame she didn’t change direction at once when she realized she was on the wrong path.

All of Gene Stratton Porter’s books are An Experience, and The Harvester is no exception. At the beginning of the book, the Harvester has just posed to his dog (his sole companion) his yearly question: shall I get married this year?

He is appalled when the dog signifies a resounding YES! So he sits on his stoop, staring over the lake and sulking about how he’ll have to go COURTING and put on clean CLOTHES and she probably won’t like his CABIN, when out of the moonlight on the water a vision appears: a beautiful girl, glowing in gold, who floats across the lake to him, plants a kiss on his lips, and disappears.

Charged with this vision of the Girl, the Harvester begins to build a proper house for her. “Going to get married?” the builders ask. “Yep!” says the Harvester, who has not yet met the Dream Girl in the flesh.

(A sidenote: the Harvester and the Girl do eventually get names, but the narrative mostly refers to them as the Harvester and the Girl and so will I.)

The Harvester, by the way, is named for his profession of gathering medicinal herbs from the woods. Over the past decade, he has slowly transplanted to his woods medicinal herbs from the surrounding area, so the whole forest is one great medicinal garden where these plants can grow to their full medicinal potential in natural conditions.

But to return to our story. A few months later, the Harvester at last catches sight of the Girl at the local railway station! After a protracted search, he finds her staying at the home of her uncle, the Harvester’s most perfidious neighbor. To rescue her from this uncle (and after suggesting various other solutions to the problem of getting her away from this uncle, like sending the girl who is very ill to the hospital), the Harvester asks the Girl to marry him.

“YES we are going in for some FORCED PROXIMITY” I shrieked, and OH BOY ARE WE. The Girl moves into the Harvester’s house! The Harvester promises that she shall be free until she comes to love him! The book is about as forthright as a book in 1911 can be that this means the marriage will remain unconsummated until the Girl feels a reciprocal, passionate sexual love for the Harvester.

But the Girl’s ill health catches up with her. She is sick with Fever, that convenient early-20th century literary disease so conducive to hurt/comfort. In her delirium only the Harvester’s touch can soothe her. (GSP knows what the people want and she is GIVING it to us.) He strokes her hands and tells her of the beautiful life of the woods, tethering her to this world with the sound of his voice! When medicine gives her up for dead, he cures her with a natural elixir made from the medicinal plants grown on his land!!!!

The Girl is now passionately attached to him, and during her convalescence there’s lots of cuddling and hand-kissing. But she’s still not sexually attracted to him. At this point her mother’s relations conveniently appear, and she’s whisked off to a round of Society in Philadelphia, at which point the Harvester wearily confides to his friends that she loves him but she doesn’t LOVE love him, at which point they roundly scold him: doesn’t he know that a good girl won’t LOVE love him till after the wedding night? It’s up to him to teach her what passion is!

This is a common nineteenth-century idea, and GSP both kind of embraces and repudiates it. On the one hand, there’s all this cuddling and hand-kissing and face-kissing and that times the Harvester gives her a single passionate kiss on the lips just to show her the difference between that and the kiss of sisterly affection she gave him, and what can you call that but coaxing along the growing tendrils of the Girl’s sexuality?

But in the end, the Harvester’s decision to let her go and see if absence will make the heart grow fonder is vindicated. The Girl does come back to him from Philadelphia: she did realize, on her own, that she now passionately loves him, and it does give her that flush of warm sensation that he tried to describe. She comes to him through the moonlight, sitting by the lake, and at last plants her kiss on his lips.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Already posted about Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, and there’s been nothing else of note.

What I’m Reading Now

Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. This is a LOT of undersea description, and sometimes I’m enjoying it and sometimes I’m like “That list of fish is LONG ENOUGH, Verne.” But the main thing pulling me along is the question “Captain Nemo, what is your DAMAGE?”, and also the source of his fabulous wealth.

Although I just learned the answer to this latter question in the most recent chapter! Retrieving the treasure from long-ago shipwrecks, of course. And he’s funneling the funds to revolutionary movements around the world, double of course, peak 19th century activity right there.

Also, I’ve discovered that the twenty thousand leagues of the title refer to the length of the voyage, not the depth, as twenty thousand leagues is apparently many times deeper than the actual depth of the ocean.

What I Plan to Read Next

My hold on Sachiko Kashiwaba’s The Village Beyond the Mist is finally on its way! I put this book on hold back in May or June, and it’s been dawdling because apparently it was too new to leave its home branch even though no one checked it out for ages and AGES… but finally it’s coming to me! The book apparently inspired Spirited Away (it looks super different though, so I’m not expecting any super direct relationship) so I’m looking forward to reading it.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Vivien Alcock’s The Stonewalkers. Another banger from Alcock. This time, the premise is “Hey, wouldn’t it be fucked up if statues started coming to life?” A statue in the garden comes to life and follows Poppy inside the decaying country house where her mother works… which unfortunately happens to be full of stone busts the owner collected. The statue, alarmed by what appears to be evidence of mass statue decapitation, flees over the moors, and Poppy and her sort-of-friend Emma go in search of her… Very pacy. An excellent cave sequence. Not fully convinced by Poppy’s character growth but we’ll take it.

I felt pretty meh about the previous Penelope Lively novel I read (A Stitch in Time), but I quite liked The Ghost of Thomas Kempe! Although like A Stitch in Time, I’d seen it described as timeslip and it’s not timeslip. It’s a ghost story, rather on the creepier/more destructive end of ghosts, wonderful sense of atmosphere both in the haunted house but also in just the general autumnal flavor of it all.

And I read Grace Lin’s The Gate, the Girl, and the Dragon, which I struggled to get into, to be honest. It wasn’t till the last third or so that I felt really caught up in it. Gorgeous illustrations, though, especially the full-page illustration of the dragon’s lair, lit with row upon row of paper lanterns.

What I’m Reading Now

Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. Based on my experience with the movie, I expected this book to blow me away, and instead it’s just - fine? I actually delayed reading it for a while because I suspected I was going to start obsessing, and instead I’m not obsessing at all and that’s frankly a bit of a let-down. Louis, I just can’t ship you and Lestat if you keep going on about how Lestat is beneath you and you’re superior to him in every way.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have alas run out of easily accessible Vivien Alcocks. I may circle back to her through interlibrary loan at some point, though.

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.

In my previous post about The Amber Spyglass, I wrote about the Lord Asriel, Child Killer. The child Lord Asriel killed, Lyra’s friend Roger, is now in the land of the dead, and Lyra and Will are headed to the land of the dead post-haste because Lyra would like to apologize for accidentally causing his death by bringing him to Lord Asriel. (Times Lord Asriel has wanted to apologize to Roger or indeed ever remembered his existence: zero.)

Will would also kind of like to talk to his father, but as usual Lyra’s goals are the ones that actually drive the plot. She’s the protagonist, and although the narrative feints toward the idea of Will as co-protagonist, really he’s just a sidekick. Would I find him more compelling if he had goals of his own that weren’t entirely centered on Lyra? Maybe. (Maybe not.)

But returning to Lyra, who after all is the reason we’re all here. Having come to the land of the dead to apologize to Roger, Lyra realizes that the dead are miserable in this unchanging underground existence, and decides that the thing to do is to cut a doorway into another world to let them out. Roger is the first to go, and he evanesces into the air, “leaving behind such a vivid little burst of happiness that Will was reminded of the bubbles in a glass of champagne.”

As a child I had a deep horror of the idea of death and oblivion, so I simply couldn’t get on with the dead joyfully dissolving into nothingness. And Pullman, like many a didactic writer before him, wants to make absolutely sure that you know not only what is happening but what your emotional attitude toward it ought to be. Mary Malone also witnesses the dead coming out of the underworld and joyfully dissolving. The alethiometer tells the Magisterium alethiometer-reader that the dead are now escaping the land of the dead and dissolving, and this is “the most sweet and desirable end for them.”

Okay, Pullman, I get it! You believe that when we die we dissolve into nothing and this is a GOOD and JOYFUL end that we should WELCOME. You may be right that this is what happens after death, but you CANNOT force me to be joyful about it no matter how many times you repeat that I should.

Having saved the dead from the horrors of eternal life, Lyra and Will emerge into the Republic of Heaven, where the forces of the Authority (God) are attacking Lord Asriel’s rebel fortress. Lyra and Will stumble through the battle searching for their daemons from whom they were separated when they entered the land of the dead (and again, this separation scene is SO powerful, curse you Pullman for being such a good writer).

While they look for their daemons, they accidentally kill the Authority. He is a very old angel who was being carried away from the battle in a crystalline litter when cliff ghasts attacked. Lyra and Will drive off the cliff ghasts and try to help this ancient, creaky, dementia-stricken angel, but when they help him out of his litter, the breeze blows him away.

Meanwhile, in the same world, the Authority’s right hand man (who seems to be the guy actually in charge, given that the Authority’s general mental state) is going mano a mano with Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter. They drag him into the abyss.

I’m sure these scenes were both super fun for Pullman to write, and they’re both powerful and memorable set-pieces. But this is a pretty classic example of making the weakest possible strawman out of your opponent’s argument and then punching it to death.

Pullman famously wrote His Dark Materials as a reaction against Narnia, because he so disliked the Christian didacticism of Lewis’s work. Not that he’s against didacticism, mind, he just thinks that Lewis is being didactic in the wrong direction, and he’s going to fix this by being even more didactic in favor of atheism. If he just repeats “Death is dissolution and this is JOYFUL” often enough, everyone will have to agree, right?

(Actually I’m not sure even Pullman fully agrees, because when Lee Scoresby’s ghost dissolves Pullman talks about how his atoms are going to join the atoms of his daemon Hester, which is not how atoms work, but a pretty good approximation of meeting your loved ones in heaven if you don’t believe in heaven.)

Unfortunately for Pullman, this is not how to teach readers a lesson through fiction. The reason Narnia works (to the extent that it does work in the “teaching a lesson” way) is that the stories are so strong. In The Golden Compass, Pullman shows that he can write a children’s fantasy as compelling as Lewis at his best. In The Amber Spyglass he shows that he can be as clunky as Lewis at his worst, as in That Hideous Strength, another work with some great setpieces that is basically spoiled because the author shunts the story aside in favor of venting his animosity toward something he dislikes but doesn’t really understand.

But Lewis has the advantage that all his books are basically standalones, even if they are also part of a series. You can hate That Hideous Strength and still like Out of the Silent Planet, or loathe The Last Battle and blissfully ignore it as you reread The Voyage of the Dawn Treader five hundred times. Pullman’s His Dark Materials, however, doesn’t work like that. It’s one big book that happens to be split into three pieces, and although the first piece is still exquisite, you can only reread it with the knowledge that the subsequent parts won't live up to the beginning.