Critical Perspectives on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials: Essays on the Novels, the Film and the Stage Productions ed. by Steven Barfield and Katharine Cox (review)

In the introduction to this edited collection, Katharine Cox teases out several Blakean "contraries" in Pullman's work: his well-publicized dislike of contemporary educational practices and his own Romantic didacticism; his appeal to a dual audience of children and adults; his belief that his fantasy is composed of stark realism; and his adherence to human spirituality contrasting his own atheism. Many of the essayists address these issues, helped along by plentiful quotations from Pullman himself, a frequently interviewed writer and outspoken public intellectual. Cox and her coeditor Steven Barfield have grouped fifteen essays centering on the novels and stage productions (but not, despite the collection's subtitle, the film) into four sections: "Adversaries and Influences," "Traditions and Legacies," "Religion, Sexuality and Gender," and "Dramatizing His Dark Materials." This organization is not unlike that of His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman's Trilogy, edited by Millicent Lenz and Carole Scott (2005), the first critical study of Pullman and a scholarly resource often acknowledged in the bibliographies of Barfield and Cox's essayists.

The uniquely valuable contribution made by Barfield and Cox's collection is the fourth section on "Dramatizing the Trilogy." His Dark Materials is a work of over 1,300 pages that takes approximately thirty-five hours to read aloud—so, not surprisingly, director of the National Theatre production Nicholas Hytner found that making theater of the trilogy "felt crazy, it felt unstageable" (219). Patrick Duggan's essay "Staging the Impossible: Severance and Separation in the National Theatre's Adaptation" deals with fascinating specifics of staging, puppetry, acting, and the intricacies of The National Theatre's drum-revolve in the Olivier stage (which might make it the only venue in the world that could have produced this spectacular production). However, Duggan also ties his essay into contemporary literary, artistic, and theatrical concerns about trauma. He demonstrates how tropes of forced partings, intercision, and painful separations move the audience into a closer relationship with the characters. Duggan's essay is followed by an equally interesting piece by Karian Schuitema, "Staging and Performing His Dark Materials: From the National Theatre to Subsequent Productions." Schuitema looks at small theater companies in Cornwall and Bath, and interviews Stewart McGill of Playbox Theatre on the challenges of presenting the play in venues more modest than the Olivier. These essays, offering material and photographs not to be found in Lenz and Scott's collection, add something entirely new to the appreciation of dramatizing Pullman's work.

To return to Barfield and Cox's collection as it is organized: the first section on "Adversaries and Influences" takes on intertextuality with Milton's Paradise Lost, an expected topic, but Rachel Falconer gives the reader new emphasis on the musicality of language in both poet and novelist as well as the nature of narrative and storytelling. Phil Cardew traces the evolution of the hero in Lewis, Tolkien, and Pullman, showing similarities in drawing upon the Bible as well as medieval and early modern models. His concluding remarks, however, argue that Lyra and Will never fully make their transition to heroic status due to their dependence on tools like the alethiometer and the subtle knife, types of "Excalibur for the game-boy generation" (36), as he puts it. Elizabeth Eldridge's essay draws on theorists Barthes and Foucault to present her idea of the constructed persona "Pullman" and his reading of the works of C. S. Lewis through his own construction of the author "Lewis." It is impossible to give the gist of this densely theoretical essay in this review, but it makes for provocative reading. Coeditor Steven Barfield contributes the fourth essay in the section, considering His Dark Materials as science fiction—more precisely, as a hybrid of science fiction, fantasy, and alternative history. This hybrid approach, Barfield argues, allows Pullman...