His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman's Trilogy (review)

Perhaps no other recent work of children's and young adult literature has elicited such excitement among children's literature scholars as Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Although the ubiquitous Harry Potter has dominated mass media to a far greater extent, when The Amber Spyglass won not only the Whitbread Award for best children's novel and the book of the year for adults in 2001, even the general public began to take notice. His Dark Materials both appropriates and extends fantasy literature, drawing upon children's sources such as C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and canonical texts such as Milton's Paradise Lost and Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience; it mines religious thought from the Gnostics, philosophical concepts from Plato, and parallel universes from string theory and other cutting-edge scientific thought. It is no wonder that thoughtful people of all ages are eager to read and talk about the provocative and profound ideas Pullman employs and destabilizes.

This essay collection is among the first generation of books to focus upon His Dark Materials and the first overview of possible approaches to Pullman's work published by an academic press.¹ Divided into three sections, the first on reading and interpretation, the second on Pullman's relation with his literary predecessors (sometimes, as with C. S. Lewis, a vexed one), and the third on Pullman's contributions to the "big questions" theologians, philosophers, and writers of science fiction love to ask. The contributors, a distinguished group whose expertise ranges from Renaissance hermeneutics and philosophy to reader-response theory to contemporary fantasy to feminist theology, offer diverse and searching explorations not only of Pullman's opus but also of the range of possible reactions to it. Although the articles are not uniform in length or depth of treatment and some raise more questions than they resolve, and although the collection would benefit from more interaction between the essays (as when one essay takes an opposing position to another), each offers something worth thinking about and exploring further. Having established a variety of general interpretations of Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials Illuminated should stimulate a second wave of critical responses to the work, raising the interpretive bar to explore and challenge Pullman's creation in new and interesting ways.

The first section of the book, on reading, is a particularly valuable addition to the scholarship. Lauren Shohet's important essay, "Reading Dark Materials," examines the pervasive figuring of reading and the process of interpretation in the trilogy. Recognizing that Pullman alludes to Renaissance literary theory of allegory (narrative, symbolic, moral, and anagogical) in the invention of the alethiometer, Shohet beautifully unpacks the intricate interrelations between characters' names and actions, objects in the text, and their implications for reading and interpretation. Her reading of The Amber Spyglass and the series' conclusion is particularly rich. Maude Hines's essay on ideological blind spots in The Golden Compass provides a bracing critique of the power relations implied by the depiction of daemons and their people. Although Pullman is progressive, even radical, in how he talks about God, the implicit re-installation of a natural chain of being actually reinstates the hierarchies he says he wishes to challenge. Hines prompts us to think about the ideological impact of high-fantasy norms such as children of destiny, the "noble," what it means to be a "natural leader," and so forth. Myth's seemingly inherent static mode resists efforts to import history and change into the model, a topic addressed by other writers in the collection as well. Lisa Hopkins's "Dyads or Triads? His Dark Materials and the Structure of the Human" alone is worth the price of the book. Combining sophisticated theoretical context with a detailed and convincing close reading of the structure of the text, Hopkins illuminates the elegant and compelling structure of the trilogy, together with its meaning. Finally in...