The Golden Compass: Some Reactions.

Dec 15, 2007 - 22:01 PM PST

Word of warning about this entry: I just finished reading The Golden Compass and had a lot on my mind as I was writing. I tried to be as coherent as possible, but it's entirely possible that I failed. I apologize if I ramble a little, or a lot. Also, I write about details of the story, if you are planning on reading the book or seeing the movie and don't want anything spoiled, I recommend you stop reading. Also, it's rather long. If you're not interested, I won't, at all, be offended if you stop reading part way through or read it in installments. I think I just spent over an hour working on it. I understand completely. Otherwise, enjoy!

xx b.
The Golden Compass: Some Reactions

Ok, Die-Hard Fans, please don't crucify me, but I found The Golden Compass to be pretty mundane until we got into the discussion about destiny, and the whole thing about the soul, and then the very end where things get fucked up. That's really when this piece got interesting.

It took a long time to really get into it. It felt like we were jumping into the middle of something without getting enough detail to feel comfortable. He did that in The Ruby in the Smoke, too, but there the reader got enough information to coast on until he could expound upon the rest. And it worked because Sally didn't know anymore than the reader did. We got to learn what everything was about along with the character. But in The Golden Compass Lyra already knows what things are and how they work and it was us who needed to catch up before we could get into the real action of the story, which, I'm sad to say, does not equal the quality he produced for the Sally Lockhart series. At least, not so great in my opinion.

Now, in all fairness, I might be tainted by age. The philosophical discussion was really what captured my attention while reading this book. Had I read this book ten years ago when everyone else my age was reading it, maybe I would have been entranced by the action part (the plot) of the story - but I didn't read this book then, I was reading about Sally Lockhart then.

A word about the Church groups who are all up in arms about this story: he's not directly attacking the Catholic church or the Anglican Church directly - I don't even think this could be considered an attack - he's definitely accusing Organized Religion as being corrupt (and that, my friends, is amazingly accurate). It's not that Church as a whole, but the people in charge. As we all know, it's the human element that screwed things up in religion. R.E.M. says it in that "Hope" song, "You want to trust religion/ And you know its allegory/ But the people who are followers/ Have written their own story". The ever-lovin' Bible even says that it's the human element that messed things up! God created the universe and heaven and earth and the stars and the planets and the moon and the seraphim and the cherubim, the ophanim, the thrones, the dominons, the principalities, the powers, the archangels, and the angels and they all hung out in heaven and formed a choir and engaged in praise and worship and everything was hunky-dory (yes, I just wrote 'hunky-dory'), utopian (in spite of Lucifer being a sulky teenager and taking off the way he did taking, what, a third of the angels with him; he actually lucked out, God made a deal with him instead of destroying him immediately).

God wasn't satisfied. He wanted something else, He wanted his Children. So he created Humans. He scooped up some dust and molded Adam and blew life into him. Then he saw how lonely Adam was so he scooped up some more dust and created Eve and the two of them got on great! God gave them food, a nice place to hang out in, only one rule and Free Volition. So, of course they broke the only rule they had, they're human! And Pope is one brilliant Brit: "To err is human..." He hit the nail on the head with that one!

So what does this have to do with The Golden Compass, you ask? I'll tell you. Pullman writes very early in the book, in the second chapter, in fact, that "Ever since Pope John Calvin had moved the seat of the Papacy to Geneva and set up the Consistorial Court of Discipline, the Church's power over every aspect of life had been absolute. The Papacy itself had been abolished after Calvin's death, and a tangle of courts, colleges, and councils, collectively known as the Magisterium, had grown up in its place. These agencies were not always united; sometimes a bitter rivalry grew up between them. For a large part of the previous century, the most powerful had been the College of Bishops, but in recent years the Consistorial Court of Discipline had taken its place as the most active and the most feared of all the Church's bodies." People. Not God, not some other deity, not faith or belief, but people. People are the corrupting factor in this scenario.

These Church-groups who are against this book have every right to be offended. He's saying that Church groups are a corrupt bureaucracy. Now, I am certain that not all church groups are corrupt and only trying to further the ambitious agenda of one person. Some, however, might very well be just that! The Catholic Church in the Middle Ages had plenty of corruption, the Mormons - seriously, just what was the deal with Joseph Smith anyway? John Calvin was definitely pushing an agenda, granted it was a direct reaction to the way the Vatican was running things. Henry VII gave Anglicanism a helping hand mainly because he wanted to divorce his wife! The Pilgrims innocently started the wave of groups seeking the freedom to practice their own brand of Christianity sans censure coming to the new world and settling the eastern US coast - the Puritans most definitely had an agenda. When the Mormons moved out to Utah they were looking to build their numbers so they went to Northern England and enticed people to come to Utah by offering to pay their passage from England to the US. Corruption is, unfortunately, a large part of most religions. That doesn’t make the religion corrupt. There is still Truth to be found in Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism. He never once in this first book does Pullman say that the doctrine of the Church is wrong or corrupt, or that belief in a higher power is wrong. He says that the people in charge are corrupt. Can’t really argue with him there when history is rich with corrupt religious leaders!

I said earlier that I enjoyed the philosophical discussion the story raises, and some of the characters engage in. Pullman set out writing these books as a means of discussing some of the questions he had/has about these different topics and that can be seen in the discussion between Serafina Pekkala and Lee Scoresby. Serafina Pekkala is, at first, sure of her convictions concerning destiny, but then Scoresby offers her another argument and she wavers slightly. This could be Pullman’s own muddled feelings on the subject or simply his acknowledgement that one can’t know for sure. Is there destiny, or isn’t there? We can’t know, we can only decide how we are going to live our lives.

The other discussion this book raises is the question of choice (Free Volition?). Does man makes his own decisions or are we subject to fate? Or, do we have many interconnected destinies we have no knowledge of that we navigate our way through eventually falling into one distinct destiny? Pullman seems to pull a page out of Jorges Luis Borges’ book when he starts talking about multiple destinies. Borges writes in his short story The Garden of Forking Paths, “Unlike Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform and absolute time; he believed in an infinite series of times, a growing dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times. That fabric of times that approach one another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for centuries, contains all possibilities.” Borges is suggesting that just because we choose one option over another that the other option doesn’t just disappear, but continues on a parallel dimension that we are no longer following, but another manifestation of ourselves is following. When we ask ourselves, “What if I had turned left instead of right?” there is another us who chose to turn left living out the consequences of that seemingly innocuous decision. Pullman parrots this theory in The Golden Compass. He has Serafina Pekkala’s daemon tell Lyra, John Faa and Farder Coram, “‘Here, on this deck, millions of other universes exist, unaware of one another . . . .’

He raised his wings and spread them wide before folding them again.

‘There,’ he said, ‘I have just brushed ten million other worlds, and they knew nothing of it. We are as close as a heartbeat, but we can never touch or see or hear these other worlds except in the Northern Lights’” He goes on to explain why that is, but the point the witch’s grey goose is making is exactly the point Borges makes.

This concept is shadowed later in Svalbard when Iorek and Iofur are fighting. Pullman describes the ritual of the two opponents then he writes this, “But Iorek and Iofur were more than just two bears. There were two kinds of beardom opposed here, two futures, two destinies. Iofur had begun to take them in one direction, and Iorek would take them in another, and in the same moment, one future would close forever as the other began to unfold.” Borges and the witch’s grey goose, both, would most likely argue that the loosing way of life won’t truly be closed, but carry on in another dimension or another universe. What would happen if the other bear won the fight? We don’t know because we are following this one specific path, but if we were to follow the other path we would see many different things happen. And it all would hang on the decisions made by Lyra, the Magisterium, Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel.

The final topic that really caught my attention was the discussion raised about the soul. In this world human’s and witches’ souls manifest themselves in the image of an animal and live separately from the body. In our world, those of us who believe humans have souls, believe the soul lives within the body. In Pullman’s alternate universe there are the humans, the witches and the bears; the bears’ souls are found within their armor. Their armor was made specially for each individual bear. But Iorek has his armor taken away from him. Instead of becoming like the children when their daemons are separated from them, he perseveres and makes himself new armor.

He makes himself new armor.

This is pretty significant. While Pullman does not discuss this fact very much, or its significance, in this novel, there it is lying there stark and naked on the page: we come with a soul, a soul, according to Pullman, we can be separated from, but it’s up to us how we react to that. Now, bear in mind I’ve only read The Golden Compass, or Northern Lights, and none of the rest of His Dark Materials, but I’ve got a theory worked out that the children did not know what was happening to them when they were being separated from their daemons and that is why they went mad. They felt the loss and pain that the separation caused and it drove them insane. The adults, the nurses specifically, who had the procedure done to them, presumably, knew what was happening and the result was not that it drove them mad, but they became dull and stupid as if they were on Vicodin. They chose (presumably) to be separated from their souls and this is the result. Iorek did not choose to be separated from his soul. Now, my theory is that he had a couple of options, become dull and stupid like the nurses at the station or take care of himself and put what he had left of himself into the new armor he made. He chose to remain an armored bear, even though his society made him an outcast; Iorek did not forget once who he was. He decided to stay the noble bear he had been.

The reader is given these three examples, but, in this first book anyway, is not given any conclusions. (By all means, draw your own!) Pullman presents the standard theories on destiny and he makes his views of Organized Religion very clear. The only other thing I’m going to comment on is the soul-thing. Everything he writes about the soul assumes the soul is an accessory of the individual. Which reminds me of that saying famously attributed to C.S. Lewis, “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” Thus reinforcing the Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu notion that if this mortal body dies, the spirit, the soul passes on to something else. Either another earthly vessel or to heaven or to hell – all depending on the branch of religion.