If you haven't read 'His Dark Materials', don't read this.
You know, sometimes you happen upon a book about which you have heard a lot, and it has an effect on you which you could not have imagined.
There's a small lending library of non-academic, non-Gaelic books at the college here, and I saw that Northern Lights by Philip Pullman was one of them. It's the first part of the His Dark Materials trilogy, about which I had heard peripherally-- that Pullman was a very controversial atheistic writer, among other things-- but I really did not know much about the plot. I started reading, and immediately got hooked.
I will confess, I wasn't sure what to think of it at first, whether it was historical fiction or fantasy. Even with the daemons (the talking animals who are boon companions to many of the human characters), I was still trying to place it in a specific time. Naive and thoughtless, I know. You can relax, though-- by the time the witches showed up, I discovered that it was more of a fantasy than anything else. It was a fantasy, however, rooted in ideas and a time period which I have in fact been studying as history. Perhaps it was too much on my mind, which made me confuse the book and its sequels with historical fiction. It also seemed to be dealing with many issues which Neil Stephenson addressed in Quicksilver, which I had just recently finished.
As soon as I stopped attempting to place the book in a specific historical time, I was able to focus on the ideas present in the book. The idea of a church attempting to suppress human consciousness struck a chord with me, not so much because I am anti-religious, but because it is counter-intuitive: it is because of this consciousness that religion exists. Unlike animals, humans historically have just needed something more. What made this aspect of the theme so interesting to me was outlined in a recent New Yorker profile of Pullman: in the series, the Reformation did not break up the church, but unified it in a Calvinistic form. The 'papacy' was moved to Geneva. A detail from the last book, The Amber Spyglass, is that the head of the church is Scottish. A Presbyterian. In light of much of my work last year, including, tangentially, my dissertation, perhaps it is no wonder why the books captivated me so much. A flatmate of mine last year said that I was essentially working on church history. And despite what some classmates told me just today, religion is a historical defining factor of the Gàidhealtachd: look at how many Highland congregations left the Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland, respectively, in the Disruptions of 1843 and 1893, compared to the number of Lowland congregations.
And I will say once again, if you haven't read the series, stop here. Read it. Then come back.
Friends of mine said that the last two books did not live up to the promise of the first. I have to say I enjoyed the second one the most, as it illustrated the relationships between the different worlds which existed. More became clearer to me during it. One drawback of the series is that Pullman seemed to have too many threads, which contributed to the weakness of the third. It seemed too rushed, and that he had attempted to do too much. There were too many loose ends which needed to be tied up. He deserves credit, though-- he writes much better than J.K. Rowling, addresses complex issues in a far more profound way, and did not sell the film rights before the books were actually all written.
The hinting at the love story also got a little annoying. We knew what was going to happen, but when it did, it did happen really sweetly, and the Biblical metaphor... Actually, I'm thinking about it now, and it went beyond Lyra feeding the fruit to Will. They were in an Eden of sorts, and an angel, together with their daemons, led them to the realisation that they would have to leave. There was no God to punish them.
The end, though, was heartbreaking. Perhaps that's the bit which has occupied me, together with the fact that I finished the third book the day before I was to leave Glasgow to come back to Skye. The two characters were so strong to give up what they desired for what they had to do. Maybe I'm just being melodramatic, but when the film of the third book is released, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to watch the scene. Just reading about it was difficult enough.
There's a small lending library of non-academic, non-Gaelic books at the college here, and I saw that Northern Lights by Philip Pullman was one of them. It's the first part of the His Dark Materials trilogy, about which I had heard peripherally-- that Pullman was a very controversial atheistic writer, among other things-- but I really did not know much about the plot. I started reading, and immediately got hooked.
I will confess, I wasn't sure what to think of it at first, whether it was historical fiction or fantasy. Even with the daemons (the talking animals who are boon companions to many of the human characters), I was still trying to place it in a specific time. Naive and thoughtless, I know. You can relax, though-- by the time the witches showed up, I discovered that it was more of a fantasy than anything else. It was a fantasy, however, rooted in ideas and a time period which I have in fact been studying as history. Perhaps it was too much on my mind, which made me confuse the book and its sequels with historical fiction. It also seemed to be dealing with many issues which Neil Stephenson addressed in Quicksilver, which I had just recently finished.
As soon as I stopped attempting to place the book in a specific historical time, I was able to focus on the ideas present in the book. The idea of a church attempting to suppress human consciousness struck a chord with me, not so much because I am anti-religious, but because it is counter-intuitive: it is because of this consciousness that religion exists. Unlike animals, humans historically have just needed something more. What made this aspect of the theme so interesting to me was outlined in a recent New Yorker profile of Pullman: in the series, the Reformation did not break up the church, but unified it in a Calvinistic form. The 'papacy' was moved to Geneva. A detail from the last book, The Amber Spyglass, is that the head of the church is Scottish. A Presbyterian. In light of much of my work last year, including, tangentially, my dissertation, perhaps it is no wonder why the books captivated me so much. A flatmate of mine last year said that I was essentially working on church history. And despite what some classmates told me just today, religion is a historical defining factor of the Gàidhealtachd: look at how many Highland congregations left the Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland, respectively, in the Disruptions of 1843 and 1893, compared to the number of Lowland congregations.
And I will say once again, if you haven't read the series, stop here. Read it. Then come back.
Friends of mine said that the last two books did not live up to the promise of the first. I have to say I enjoyed the second one the most, as it illustrated the relationships between the different worlds which existed. More became clearer to me during it. One drawback of the series is that Pullman seemed to have too many threads, which contributed to the weakness of the third. It seemed too rushed, and that he had attempted to do too much. There were too many loose ends which needed to be tied up. He deserves credit, though-- he writes much better than J.K. Rowling, addresses complex issues in a far more profound way, and did not sell the film rights before the books were actually all written.
The hinting at the love story also got a little annoying. We knew what was going to happen, but when it did, it did happen really sweetly, and the Biblical metaphor... Actually, I'm thinking about it now, and it went beyond Lyra feeding the fruit to Will. They were in an Eden of sorts, and an angel, together with their daemons, led them to the realisation that they would have to leave. There was no God to punish them.
The end, though, was heartbreaking. Perhaps that's the bit which has occupied me, together with the fact that I finished the third book the day before I was to leave Glasgow to come back to Skye. The two characters were so strong to give up what they desired for what they had to do. Maybe I'm just being melodramatic, but when the film of the third book is released, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to watch the scene. Just reading about it was difficult enough.