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book reviews
Books about dark matterreviewed by T. Nelson |
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book reviews
Books about dark matterreviewed by T. Nelson |
Reviewed by T. Nelson
At first glance, this magnificent fantasy sci-fi trilogy seems like a cross between Dune and Paradise Lost, from which the title His Dark Materials is derived. In fact it's a vehicle for the author to teach us about the nature of the soul.
As shown in the movie (and presumably the HBO series, which most people seem to have missed), the golden compass is an antikythera-like device called an alethiometer. The main character Lyra, whose name suits her as she, as a chronic liar who gives dishonest imaginative answers to most questions, uses it to get truthful answers and advice about what to do.
In this parallel world, the souls of children are wild animals that follow them around, like pets, and give them guidance. As the person grows up, their soul becomes fixed in a specific form. If a person is separated from their soul, they die with a spectacular release of energy in the form of sparks.
In Volume 1, Lyra's father discovers that strange particles called Dust are entering their world. He goes on an expedition to “study” them and Lyra goes on a trek to find her friend Roger, who's among the many kids who have disappeared, and discovers a terrible truth about what is happening to them. The movie follows this story up to the point just before it takes an even more brutally dark turn, but leaves the question of Dust unanswered.
In Lyra's world, the Church or ‘Magisterium’ is stuck in its Inquisition era and ruthlessly suppresses all knowledge of Dust. It also discourages experimentation with Dust, believing there to be a connection between Dust and Original Sin. Their Bible is also slightly different from the one in our dimension.
The story contains messages about how powerful organizations like the Magisterium go astray and end up harming people, and—more importantly as I'm concerned—about subatomic particles. It turns out that Dust is what physicists call ‘dark matter,’ and consists of elementary particles from space that possess consciousness. The alethiometer allows Lyra to communicate with this Dust, which gloms onto people via their soul when they reach adulthood. Dust, according to the story, comes into being when living things become aware of themselves; and matter ‘loves’ Dust. When a person dies, their soul or “daemon” reverts to Dust and disappears in a flash of sparks.
As Charlton Heston might say, “Dark matter is peeeeeople!”
In Volume 2, Lyra and her friend Will, who's from our dimension, find a special knife that creates open doors or ‘windows’ between worlds, allowing them to travel from one dimension to another as they search for their lost friends. The story gets rather violent and the author almost runs out of characters.
In Volume 3, an Earth scientist invents an amber spyglass that enables her to visualize the dark matter or ‘shadow matter.’ She too discovers that it's conscious:
[S]he herself was partly shadow matter. Part of her was subject to this tide that was moving through the cosmos. . . and so were the human beings in every world, wherever they were . . . and unless she found out what was happening, they might all find themselves drifting away to oblivion, everyone. [p.329]
Lyra's mother, who is even more dishonest than Lyra herself, realizes that she has sacrificed the one thing she cared about—her child—for her career. She destroys her career and risks her life to repair the connection. Lyra's father, who's now living in a sort of fortress of doom in a different dimension, claims to be searching for a way to destroy the Dust and also the Authority, which is the Church's name for the Supreme Being. So the Church wants to kill both of them. But he is lying too.
A terrific battle ensues. At one point half a dozen species are fighting a battle, including ghosts, witches, humans, and angels. Even the Authority himself, now incredibly ancient, makes a brief appearance. Lyra is overwhelmed with guilt for what happened to Roger in Volume 1 and is determined to see him one last time. After she and Will get stuck in a dark world of the dead from which there is no escape, Lyra discovers the value of truthfulness and makes a deal with that world's unearthly denizens to enable their escape.
It would be a mistake to view this story as a critique of religion. At one point the angels say that the Authority isn't the real Creator but merely the first and most powerful angel, who became a dictator. But just as in Milton, there's no telling whose side these angels might be on: everyone lies, and none of the angels, witches, or humans knows the real truth.
As they recover from their ordeal, the two characters suddenly find that they're growing up. Puberty hits them like a piano falling on them. As often happens, their brains turn to mush; Lyra is no longer able to read the alethiometer, and their daemons are starting to take their final form. They fall madly in love with each other. Her friend Will discovers that traveling too far from one's own world weakens and eventually kills the soul. So each must return to their respective world and the doors between them must be sealed. After literally going through Hell, they now experience heartbreak.
Although the author doesn't cheat us by saying the whole thing was just a fantasy, it sneaks up on you at the end: the story isn't just about religion or dark matter or the ghosts or even the giant killer ducks and the talking polar bears who are good at TIG welding. Perhaps it's about childhood, and how we can remember what it was like to be a child and have a child's powerful imagination. And about how suddenly it ends: one day a door just closes and it's gone forever.
nov 27, 2024
Reviewed by T. Nelson
In Dark Materials, Lyra and Will were left in misery after they returned from their journey through hell. So now, 18 years later, the author finally got around to writing a sequel titled The Book of Dust.
Volume 1: In England, it starts to rain. The Thames floods. A kid named Malcolm Polstead takes baby Lyra to safety in his canoe and gives her cookies to keep her pacified. Lyra's diaper needs changing several times but she mostly enjoys the trip.
Volume 2: Lyra is now twenty. It turns out that the reason she can no longer read the alethiometer isn't that she hit puberty at the end of Dark Materials as we thought. Something happened to her since that time she crossed the Styx to say goodbye to her friend Roger. She is hardly able to lie anymore and has lost her imagination.
Her daemon (i.e., her soul), who has settled into the form of a marten, tells her in effect she's no fun anymore and runs off. He witnesses the murder of a courier and, based on the clues on the victim, concludes that he will find Lyra's imagination in Lop Nor, which is a desertified former Chinese military nuclear weapon testing site in our world but in the story is the source of a special strain of roses that has some connection with Dust.
Lyra thinks he is going to a place called the Blue Hotel near Aleppo, Syria, where daemons (souls) that have been separated from their human are said to live, so she follows after him.
Along the way we discover that the Magisterium is a corrupt totalitarian church created by John Calvin, who was the last pope in this world. It uses its network of secret police called the CCD to enforce a rigid religious conformity. The gypsies, called Gyptians in the story, tell Lyra more about it:
[They] got an energy that our side en't got. Comes from their certainty about being right. If you got that certainty, you'll be willing to do anything to bring about the end you want. It's the oldest human problem, Lyra, an' it's the difference between good and evil. . . . To do the things [good] needs to do to win, it'd have to become evil to do 'em.
They contrast this with the “secret commonwealth,” which as someone else tells her is “the world of hidden things and hidden relationships. It is the reason that nothing is only itself.” In other words, one should try to find meaning in the world.
Lyra concludes that she lost touch with this secret commonwealth of unseen beings when she embraced reason. She rejects the idea that one should accept harsh, barren reality even if it is unpleasant, but doesn't consider that the police state she lives in is also based on a belief in unseen beings.
CCD terrorists systematically destroy all the ordinary roses in the world. The Oxford academics and bureaucrats are all deceitful, conniving scum. Lyra's uncle, the brother of Lyra's evil mum named Mrs. Coulter, contrives to become the head of the Magisterium by reinstituting the papacy and then assassinating the new Pope. Basically, everyone Lyra meets is evil. Luckily someone gives her a truncheon before she leaves. Apparently the other characters think she is really attractive, and she gets a lot of practice using it to fight them off.
Lyra finally arrives by camel at the Blue Hotel, where the story ends and we must wait for the author to write Volume 3.
Pullman is a superb storyteller. It couldn't be easy to make a story about changing a baby's diaper during a canoe ride sound exciting. And Pullman is very imaginative. But if those special roses had happened to be in France instead of a remote desert in western China, we'd know what this Dust is by now.
dec 06 2024
Google Maps show Lop Nor, the former Chinese H-bomb testing site, as a big beige rectangle with no hotels, restaurants, parking, pharmacies, or ATMs. In Volume 3, Lyra and her dæmon Pan finally make the last leg of their trek there from Aleppo, a distance of 2893 miles, for an average of 4.97 miles per page. All that's there is a single red building. So why go there?
Two reasons: Pan thinks Lyra's imagination is there; and to solve the mystery about those magical roses. Their world has changed: many of the original characters got killed off in The Subtle Knife; the chief villain, Marcel Delamare (Lyra's uncle), is now President of the High Council of the Magisterium; and the author has forgotten some of the rules he invented for this world way back in 2000. Also, the CCD, the Church's inquisitional arm, has changed its name from Consistorial Court of Discipline to something else, possibly because it might be seen as a slur against the CCD in our world (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine), an important tenet in Catholicism. Aside from that, little has changed since Volume 2: everyone is still trying to kill everyone else, England is still a police state, and we still don't know what Dust is.
The Magisterium wants to destroy the magic roses because they make it possible to see Dust. It turns out that not all the “windows” to other worlds got closed as we thought in Amber Spyglass. The Magisterium has found some new ones and is trying to blow them up. Lyra and her dæmon survive bad weather, cannibalistic man-eating tweety birds, and her guide running off with a particle physicist, only to find that the secret in the Red Building is even more terrible than she imagined (which is actually not saying much, since according to the story she lost her imagination 18 years ago).
This time the Magisterium isn't wrong. Something bad is coming into their world through the portal. After 582 pages of traveling, Lyra finally reaches the Red Building and finds dead and dying souls lying around everywhere. It's not a biological plague as the Magisterium thinks but a cultural one, specifically commercialization, which causes loss of respect for tradition and separates people from their souls.
As for Dust, Lyra concludes that Dust is created when a person's imagination touches the Rusakov field (later renamed to the Rose field). So maybe instead of Rose-Dust duality, imagination interacts with the field and generates Dust. However it works, Lyra somehow gets her imagination back. After 653 pages of telling the truth, Lyra can finally lie again (or so she says).
A weakness of this story is that the problems the characters face aren't solved; they just become dead ends. Dust is needed for the soul, but the soul creates Dust, so Dust turns out to be irrelevant. Roses make Dust visible but do little else, so roses are also irrelevant. The connection with dark matter goes nowhere. The plague wasn't really a threat to their world because people in Lyra's world can't get ten feet from their soul without extreme distress. If their soul dies, it bursts into sparks and the person dies too, so the plague would be self-limiting to them.
If the goal was to say something about tradition being necessary for the soul, it might have been more effective to place the Red Building scene earlier to create a mystery for Lyra to figure out. As it is, it's more of a soul quest (in this case literally, but without the illegal drugs) than a story with a philosophical message. But as adventure stories go, it's a good one.
nov 01 2025. updated nov 02 2025