Navigating life

This article contains plot spoilers

A child who is separated from his or her parents in some way, perhaps because they are dead, is caught up in a great adventure, faces great dangers and must shoulder immense responsibilities. It’s familiar fare in children’s fiction – Harry Potter, the Baudelaire children, the children who go to Narnia, even the Famous Five – and some of these heroes and heroines are among the most memorable characters ever written. The best of them are stories about growing up. Think of how much Harry has learnt and how he has matured by the end of J.K. Rowling’s seventh book, for example. (By contrast, it is one of the reasons why the Famous Five are not great heroes and heroines – they never change.) In the minds of many people, Philip Pullman’s Lyra Belacqua has a place with the best of them.

She is a fabulous character: energetic, sparky and independently minded, she embraces life with earnest passion. When we first meet Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards) in The Golden Compass (or Northern Lights, for British readers), she is engaged in warfare with the children of Gyptian families or roaming the rooftops of Jordan College from where she spits plum stones onto the heads of passing scholars. Or she’s sneaking into the scholars’ retiring room to see what she can discover. Lyra has a taste for adventure, but little experience of the world. She may have a lot of freedom, but has no idea how fragile that freedom is becoming.

As the story progresses, Lyra is whisked away from the college into a life that promises more freedom as well as glamour and excitement, travelling with the exotic Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman) to London and eventually to the far north. But instead she finds herself in a more constricting world in which her behaviour and speech must conform to what Mrs. Coulter finds acceptable. And those standards come from the Magisterium, the totalitarian regime that wants to increase its authoritarian grip on all of life. Instead of freedom Lyra finds control; instead of glamour she finds something sinister; and the excitement fades to boredom – until her discovery leads to danger.

Lyra is discovering that the world can seem to offer so much, but demands a high payment in return, and that it is full of threats which are a far cry from the mild hazards of taking on the Gyptians. As she flees from Mrs Coulter’s world, Lyra is swept up into yet another kind of life when she is rescued by the Gyptians with whose children she has enjoyed such rivalry. Now, in a stark contrast from the absence of her father, and the remote, clueless benevolence of the Oxford scholars, Lyra encounters two men who become surrogate fathers to her, giving her the support and guidance she needs as she hurtles through her accelerated growing up. Lord John Faa (Jim Carter), chief of the Gyptians, has been keeping watch over Lyra throughout her life, though she did not realise it. He becomes a rock for her – constant, powerful and protecting. Farder Coram (Tom Courtenay) is a very different kind of character. He has a wide knowledge of the world and its ways, and not only a source of wisdom for Lyra, but a guide in the process of her discovering wisdom for herself.

Before long, Lyra encounters two other characters who have a significant influence on her. Lee Scoresby (Sam Elliott), the aeronaut adventurer, and Iorek Byrnison (Ian McKellen), the armoured bear who pledges to serve Lyra until victory is achieved. If Lyra was not already unshakeably loyal to her friend Roger (Ben Walker), who has been snatched by the Magisterium for its experiments, she would have learnt this from these new friends and mentors. Nevertheless, they powerfully reinforce this value in her, as well as spurring her to even greater courage. They learn from her, too. Iorek learns, or rediscovers, the importance of being true to who you really are, of living with integrity. And though we don’t see it in the film, she helps Lee realise the importance of fighting for something you believe to be right, even when there’s no material reward to be gained from doing so.

Lyra has become someone who has a powerful affect on those who encounter her, if they are open to viewing the world as she does for a time. Maybe it’s her open acceptance of others, especially of outsiders (as all of her new friends are), which prompts a similar response in return. There’s a lovely naivety about her. It’s an important aspect of childhood which we rightly value, yet we are apt to be dismissive of it in adults. We so easily become cynical in a world of adult manipulation and manoeuvring, power plays and self-interest. She retains something of her naivety, and her sense of wonder, throughout Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, yet grows in experience, wisdom and maturity.

Part of the reason, maybe the major part, she is able to do this is that she becomes free of the influence of dominating authority and comes under the benign, supportive and gentle authority of Lord Faa and Farder Coram. Philip Pullman does have a major beef with authority being misused and abused, and rightly so. What we see in the Magisterium and Mrs Coulter is everything he despises about authoritarianism. The Jordan scholars, on the other hand, are insufficiently interested in Lyra. But in these other characters – and, importantly, in Serrafina Pekkala as a surrogate mother – we see how Pullman thinks authority should work. They respect and value her as a person, rather than looking down on her as a mere child. They guide and encourage her, enabling her to fulfil her potential, rather than attempting to control and suppress her.

Pullman identifies authoritarianism with religion, even to the extent of claiming that atheist regimes, like Stalin’s, for example, were religious in character in their repression of people. He says,

I've always made it clear that theocracy - the political exercise of religious authority, which is what the Magisterium in the story embodies - is a special example of the regrettable tendency of humankind to believe in ‘one size fits all’ answers: to cling to the extreme of dogmatic fundamentalism whether religious or not. In fact (and I've pointed this out too many times to go through it all again) the purest example of theocracy in the twentieth century was Soviet Russia.

Pullman often points to two features to justify calling it a ‘theocracy’ – a ‘holy book’ (Marx’s Das Kapital) and a ‘priesthood’ (the Communist Party politburo). This is a convenient but extraordinarily narrow understanding of what constitutes religion. It ignores so many dimensions of religion which would not fit with such a model. Pullman is absolutely right, of course, to criticise totalitarianism, wherever and however it is expressed. He’s also right to criticise dogmatism. But it is a misreading of history to unequivocally identify religion with such unpleasant aspects of human existence. These things are a result, not of religion, but of power hungry individuals being in positions of great influence, positions which have enabled them to seize and wield control. In earlier centuries, such positions were largely tied up with religion because the world hadn’t yet become disenchanted with it. In the last century or so, such positions have been much more likely to be associated with a secular state.

The irony is that the benevolent paternalism which Pullman portrays through John Faa, Farder Coram and even Iorek the bear, is an extremely good model for the way God deals with his children. It’s the way the Christian church should always have acted towards its members – and, in fact, the way it has acted in the majority of cases. The church that Pullman describes is, sadly, not unknown in our world, but it bears little relation to the church that many Christians would say they have experienced. And the fraudulent Authority who claims to be God in Pullman’s trilogy bears no resemblance whatsoever to the God worshipped and loved by Christians. The Jesus who insisted that his disciples should exhibit childlike openness and faith (Mark 10:15) also claimed that ‘anyone who has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9). He invited the weary and burdened to come to him to find rest and to learn from him (Matthew 11:28-30). He taught and guided, encouraged and supported his followers. He dealt gently with those in distress yet challenged those who were misusing their authority and position. Ultimately, he was prepared to die for the sake of, in the place of, those who love and trust him in order, the Bible claims, to enable us to find peace with God. We can be adopted by him into a family bound by acceptance and love of each other and of outsiders, since we know we’re all equally undeserving of God’s love, and by faith in God to protect, guide and save us.

Pullman is right that we need to be free of authoritarianism in order to truly grow up. But as with Lyra, maturity is not found in wilful independence but in a relationship of trust and love with a benevolent father figure, God himself.

Back