The Amber Spyglass

Children with Adult Responsibilities

If there's one thing that stands out in the His Dark Materials series, it is the nature of the choices the young pre-teen children have to make in it. For this reason alone, I consider these books to be 'adult'. This doesn't mean that children shouldn't read and enjoy them, but perhaps only adults will understand how heart-wrenching some of the decisions are.

Life, the Universe and Everything

The Subtle Knife ended with Lyra in the clutches of her real mother, the evil Mrs. Coulter, and Will in the company of two 'angels' in another world, looking for her father, Lord Azriel, who intends to overthrow God himself.

Now, in The Amber Spyglass we discover the true nature of angels. Dust, physicist Mary is beginning to discover, is actually dark matter, a substance theorized by physicists as providing the bulk of the matter of the universe, invisible yet perhaps making up more than 90% of all the matter in the universe. But early on in the evolution of the Dark Materials universe, 'dust' coalesced into the 'angels'. There is nothing supernatural about angels, they are simply 'dust beings' - the first sentient beings in the universe.

Moreover, there's nothing particularly special about 'God', either - he is simply the first angel to have formed and gained sentience. He took advantage of his position by informing all subsequent angels that he 'created' them, and for many millenia, they believed this. When the truth was discovered, a revolution in heaven occurred; God is now a doddering figurehead and another angel reigns.

World-building Gone Wild

Pullman shows his extraordinary imagination in The Amber Spyglass, with physicist Mary Malone's sojourn among the Mulefa. These are large animal-like beings who use seedpods from a native tree as wheels. The seeds are pollinated with 'dust', and it was only when the Mulefa 'discovered the wheel' that they became sentient - dust, it seems, confers a mind on the beings who are symbiotic with it. But now fewer and fewer of the pod trees are producing seedpods, which effects how many children the Mulefa can produce to use the pods as wheels. Mary must discover what is wrong with the trees, and to do so, she must create the Amber Spyglass of the title, a tube with lenses created from a local resin that allows one to directly view 'dust'.

With the Amber Spyglass, Mary is finally allowed to see that the flow of 'dust' in the world she is visiting has been effected by the holes cut in the fabric of the Multiverse by the Subtle Knife. Using the knife to travel from world to world is, in effect, destroying the entire universe.

Hard, Horrid Choices

Mary has to get this information to the children, who also have their own difficult tasks to do.

Will and Lyra have to traverse the Land of the Dead to get to the other side where Lord Azriel is fighting the Hosts of Heaven. But only physical bodies can enter the Land of the Dead; daemons, being the physical representation of one's soul, cannot. And I defy anyone with a heart to be able to read Lyra's parting with her darling daemon Pantalaimon at the gates of the Land of the Dead, not knowing if she will ever be able to find him again, without choking up.

Ultimately, Will and Lyra must make an even harder choice. They learn from Mary that the holes in the fabric of space must be closed to protect the flow of dust in the universe. Only one 'permanent rift' can be supported by the creation of dust, and they must leave such a rift at the exit to the Land of the Dead. This means that, after having come to love one another, they can never see one another again - if one moved to the other's world, they would die quite young. They make this choice, to provide liberation from the hellish Land of the Dead to all beings in the universe who die.

Amber Spyglass' ending is quite one of the most poignant of any I have ever read.