Believable fantasy world-building and symbolism in Northern Lights by Philip Pullman (1995)

A critical essay by Pauline Julien.

Photo by Zdeněk Macháček on Unsplash

My main writing focus has always been fantasy fiction, and some of the things I struggle with when writing in this genre are world-building and the use of symbolism to deal with societal issues, which is why Northern Lights (1995) resonates with my own practice so much. Indeed, Pullman not only manages to build a very convincing fantasy world, but also uses symbolism to deal with questions of identity, religion and sexuality throughout the novel, as we are going to see.

Northern Lights firmly belongs to the genre of fantasy defined as ‘literature dominated by alternative worlds’ (Feldt, 2016), although the author ‘is dismissive of fantasy as a genre’ (Stephen, 2014). Because the supernatural world is the native world of the main character (Lyra), at no point does the reader think she might be inventing or imagining it, as might happen for example in a magical realist novel (Hosseinpour, 2016). Moreover, the omniscient viewpoint takes away the risk of the narrator being unreliable, because we are not limited to one character’s point of view; the narrator is ‘god-like’ and knows about the lives and thoughts of every character in the story. Therefore, the world of the novel being established as ‘real’ within the context of the story through the genre and the POV used, Pullman doesn’t have to convince us of it. However, he employs an array of techniques to make the world as realistic as possible, for the readers’ enjoyment as well as to support the story effectively.

One of the techniques he uses to achieve this effect is the grounding in space and time of the world. ‘The college owned farms and estates all over Brytain. It was said that you could walk from Oxford to Bristol in one direction and to London in the other, and never leave Jordan land’ (p. 25). Real places such as Oxford, Bristol and London are woven together with fictional places such as ‘Jordan land’ or ‘Brytain’, which helps to create a map in the reader’s mind, and makes it sound like the fictional places really do exist. Moreover, the spelling of ‘Brytain’ makes it obvious that we are dealing with a familiar, yet alternative world.

Along with spatial grounding, there is also temporal grounding of the world, for instance when Dr Lanselius gives a history of the alethiometer, a magical tool used by Lyra to seek the truth: ‘The scholar who invented the first alethiometer was apparently trying to discover a way of measuring the influences of the planets [...] In that he failed, but the mechanism he invented was clearly responding to something’ (p. 128). The fact that we are given historical information about the alethiometer makes us feel like Lyra’s world goes back hundreds of years, just like ours, giving it a sense of authenticity. Moreover, the alethiometer was invented by mistake, which reminds us of real human inventions which followed the same pattern, like penicillin or microwave ovens.

Another method used by Pullman to bring the magical elements of the story to life are meticulous descriptions (Hosseinpour, 2016). The aforementioned alethiometer resembles a real object (a golden compass), in the same way that the giant armoured bears (the ‘panserbjørne’) look like real polar bears in the story. These resemblances establish a mental image in the reader’s mind, which is then complemented by Pullman’s incredibly detailed descriptions. Page 128, we see how Lyra uses the alethiometer: ‘Lyra turned the hands to the camel, which meant Asia, which meant Tartars; to the cornucopia, for Kamchatka, where there were gold mines; and to the ant, which meant activity, which meant purpose and intention. [...] The long needle trembled on the dolphin, the helmet, the baby and the anchor, dancing between them [...] in a complicated pattern that Lyra’s eyes followed without hesitation, but which was incomprehensible to the two men’. This description uses a minimalist style to fit Lyra’s young voice, with repetitions of ‘which meant’ to depict the complex mechanism, and goes into a lot of detail to allow readers to fully understand how the object works. Moreover, because we have no clue what ‘the dolphin, the helmet, the baby and the anchor’ represent, we find ourselves as baffled as ‘the two men’, exacerbating Lyra’s mysterious talent and making us believe in the power of the alethiometer.

Page 201, Pullman utilises precise medical terminology to describe the methods used in the ‘intercision’ process, a barbaric operation which consists of ‘cutting’ a child away from their dæmon: ‘The first big breakthrough was the use of anaesthesia combined with the Maystadt anbaric scalpel. We were able to reduce death from operative shock to below five per cent.’ The medical terms ‘anaesthesia’ and ‘scalpel’, as well as the statistic ‘below five per cent’ are reminiscent of real medical jargon, making this invented medical procedure sound plausible to us. Since we don’t understand all the terms used (for example, ‘anbaric scalpel’), we feel as though the doctor is more knowledgeable and therefore superior to us somehow, which makes him more ‘lifelike’, in the same way that Lyra appeared superior to us when she read the alethiometer earlier.

We have seen that Pullman used a minimalist style to describe the alethiometer. Page 258, however, he switches to a maximalist style to describe the combat between Iorek Byrnison and Iofur Raknison, two rival panserbjørne, using an incredibly evocative simile: ‘Like two great masses of rock balanced on adjoining peaks and shaken loose by an earthquake, that bound down the mountainsides gathering speed, leaping over crevasses and knocking trees into splinters, until they crash into each other so hard that both are smashed to powder and flying chips of stone: that was how the two bears came together.’ The very long sentence, the figure of speech and the evocative vocabulary with words such as ‘masses’, ‘earthquake’, ‘crevasses’ and ‘splinters’ are very fitting because this is an intense and surreal action scene in which two magical creatures are fighting to death, therefore we need to feel the violence of it, which is successfully achieved by the comparison Pullman makes between the fight and a powerful and inevitable natural phenomenon (rocks crashing together), giving the scene a sense of fatality and power.

Although Pullman manages to build a very believable world in Northern Lights, there is something that struck as taking away some of the realism: the way Lyra reads the alethiometer in the second part of the novel. We are told that she learns to read the alethiometer in a few weeks without the help of books; which isn’t a problem in itself, as the theme of incredibly gifted children is frequent in fantasy children’s fiction. The problem comes from the way it is described: “She took out the alethiometer and asked: ‘Where is Iorek now?’ ‘Four hours away, and hurrying ever faster.’ ‘How can I tell him what I’ve done?’ ‘You must trust him.’” (p. 251) This exchange between Lyra and the alethiometer, although it is interesting in the way it makes use of dialogue punctuation to personify the object and have it ‘speak’ to Lyra directly, feels like a narrative tool used to move the plot forward in a not-so-subtle way. At times, the alethiometer even gives Lyra incredibly specific answers, such as numbers, which seems impossible considering that it can only communicate through symbols. Although I see why Pullman might have wanted to do this (to avoid repetitions and quicken the pace of the story), the effect could have easily been made stronger, more realistic and more satisfying, by adding more details about the reading process or having the object provide more ambiguous answers.

The otherwise very believable world in Northern Lights forms the perfect canvas for exploring societal issues such as questions of identity, religion, and sexuality through symbolism.

The main form of symbolism I’ll be talking about is animal symbolism, which is omnipresent in Northern Lights. Pullman himself said that ‘animals have always been used to symbolize or embody various moral qualities’ (Parsons, Nicholson, Pullman, 1999). Indeed, in the scene where Lyra reads the alethiometer mentioned previously, the ant is linked to ‘activity, [...] purpose and intention’, which is similar to La Fontaine’s 17th century interpretation in ‘La Cigale et la Fourmi’ (1668), in which we see a hard-working ant and a lazy grasshopper.

Then there are dæmons, which Stephen described as ‘part invisible friend, and part fluffy pet’ (2014). They have the appearance of animals (mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, fish), everyone has one, and they can’t be away from their humans. Lyra’s dæmon, Pantalaimon, is described both as her soul: ‘For a second or so more, he was still her own dear soul’ (p. 205) and as her conscience: ‘“Hush. Pretend to be unconscious”’ (p. 172). When a human has been separated from their dæmon, they are described as ghost or zombie-like, sort of like people who have been lobotomised, and therefore stripped of their sense of self. Pullman said he wanted to tell ‘a story about what it means to grow up and become an adult’ (Stephen, 2014). The shapeshifting dæmon represents a child’s developing sense of identity, and when a dæmon’s form settles, the child’s personality is fully-formed and he or she has become an adult: for instance, the servants’ dæmons settle as dogs because they are symbols of loyalty, obedience and servitude (‘a dog, like almost all servants’ dæmons’, p. 4), and the sailors’ dæmons settle as seagulls or dolphins, because these are marine beings. Some humans aren’t satisfied with their dæmon’s final form, which is a metaphor for an identity crisis: ‘There’s plenty of folk as’d like to have a lion as a dæmon and they end up with a poodle. And till they learn to be satisfied with what they are, they’re going to be fretful about it.’ Therefore dæmons represent a character’s social status, job, and even personality, since Mrs Coulter’s dæmon is described as a sadistic monkey, a direct reference to Mrs Coulter herself; “Mrs Coulter’s dæmon, the golden monkey, [...] had filled Pantalaimon with a powerful loathing and [...] pried into [Lyra’s] secrets [...] ‘She likes watching the kids, when they take us away, she likes seeing what they do to us. This boy Simon, he reckons they kill us, and Mrs Coulter watches’” (p. 182). Traditionally, monkeys are symbols of intelligence and trickery (in La Fontaine’s fables (1668) monkeys pretend to be humans and use malignancy to get what they want), two qualities Mrs Coulter possesses since she manipulates people. Mrs Coulter is also cruel to her dæmon, and can be away from him, which is normally too painful to endure; a symbol of Mrs Coulter’s self-hatred, since when she inflicts her dæmon pain she inflicts it to herself too.

According to Pullman, children and animals share an innocence he calls ‘unselfconscious grace’ (Parsons, Nicholson, 1999) which makes them capable of doing things adults can’t, symbolised by the fact that bears supposedly can’t be tricked, and by Lyra’s instinctive ability to read the alethiometer: ‘it was so much a part of her now that the most complicated questions sorted themselves out into their constituent symbols as naturally as her muscles moved her limbs: she hardly had to think about them’ (p. 241).

Pullman uses symbolism not only to talk about identity, but also about religion. He has said explicitly that the novel is his own reinterpretation of ‘the Christian myth of the Fall’ (Feldt, 2016), written in opposition to ‘Lewis’s Christian fantasy’ (Hatlen, 2005), which Pullman finds toxic for children (Parsons, Nicholson, Pullman, 1999). The theme that drives the story is Dust, a mysterious celestial substance. Page 209, when Mrs Coulter tells Lyra that ‘dæmons bring all sort of troublesome thoughts and feelings, and that’s what lets Dust in’ at the age of puberty, she is talking about the Christian notion of ‘original sin’ (Parsons, Nicholson & Pullman, 1999), which is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as ‘the state of sin that according to Christian theology characterizes all human beings as a result of Adam's fall’. Mrs Coulter, who is associated with the Magisterium (the headquarters and ruling authority of the Holy Church, whose members have insect & reptilian dæmons to symbolise corruption), believes that through the process of intercision, children can be preserved from Dust, and therefore sin. She perseveres, even though she knows that what she does is horrible, because she is convinced that it is a lesser evil than Dust; a representation of the weight of Christian doctrines and beliefs. Lord Asriel, on the other hand, through his research, expeditions and experiments, represents science. He discovers that Dust isn’t inherently bad and that the Magisterium has been spreading false ideas about it, similarly to the way the Church in our world has disregarded science in the past, by fear of losing credibility, and therefore power. But Lord Asriel is evil too, and doesn’t hesitate to sacrifice a child for his own research: ‘he needed a child to finish his experiment’ (p. 279). This helps to bring some nuance to the fight between religion and science in the novel.

From an atheistic point of view, Dust can be said to represent the emergence of sexuality in adolescents. The theme of sexuality, although subtle, is present throughout the novel. We are told that dæmons are of the opposite gender, as if dæmons and humans formed a sort of platonic relationship, and in rare cases dæmons and humans are of the same gender, which seems to be a metaphor for homosexuality: ‘Bernie was a kindly, solitary man, one of those rare people whose dæmon was the same sex as himself’ (p. 93). Page 203, Lyra’s dæmon is being handled by a man, which is taboo in this world: ‘She felt faint, dizzy, sick, disgusted, limp with shock. [...] She felt those hands… It wasn’t allowed… Not supposed to touch… Wrong’. This evokes an act of sexual abuse through the repetition of ellipses, italics and short sentences which emphasise the character’s distress. Towards the end of the novel, Lyra’s perception changes from that of an innocent child to that of a ‘sexual adult’ when she refuses to take a bath with her childhood friend Roger: ‘They had swum naked together often enough, [...] but this was different’ (p. 269). The last step of her transition from childhood to adulthood is when she becomes aware of her parents’ sexuality at the end of the novel, both through their physical embrace and that of their dæmons: ‘their mouths were fastened together with a powerful greed. [...] the monkey raked his claws in the soft fur of [the snow leopard’s] neck, and she growled a deep rumble of pleasure’ (p. 291).

Throughout the novel, Pullman introduces multiple ways to enjoy Northern Lights, both as a child reader through the wonderfully convincing fantastical world he creates, and as an adult through the use of symbolism, which opens a discussion on issues such as identity, religion and sexuality, and encourages the reader to think about what ‘God’ means to them (Oliver, 2012).

Bibliography

Feldt, L. (2016). ‘Contemporary fantasy fiction and representations of religion: playing with reality, myth and magic’. His Dark Materials and Harry Potter, Religion, Volume 46, 2016 - Issue 4: Thematic Issue on Religion and Fiction. Guest editor: Markus Altena Davidsen.

Fontaine (De La), J. (1668). ‘La Cigale et la Fourmi’. Les Fables de la Fontaine. Barbin.

Hatlen, B. (2005). ‘Pullman’s His Dark Materials, a Challenge to the Fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, with an Epilogue on Pullman’s Neo-Romantic Reading of Paradise Lost’. In M. Lenz and C. Scott (Eds.), His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy, pp. 75–94. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Hosseinpour, S. (2016). Magical Realism in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. Prague Journal of English Studies 5, 1, 87-101. Department of English Language and Literature, Semnan University (Iran).

Oliver, C. (2012). ‘Mocking God and Celebrating Satan: Parodies and Profanities in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials’. Children's literature in education, 43(4), pp.293–302.

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Pullman, P. (1995) Northern Lights, ‘His Dark Materials: The Complete Trilogy’. Random House Children’s Publishers UK.

Stephen, M. (2014). The good liberal and the scoundrel author: fantasy, dissent, and neoliberal subjectivity in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Extrapolation, 55(2), pp.199–219.

“Original sin.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/original%20sin (accessed 24 March 2021).