Authors: Michael Chabon
I have resisted trying to summarize, and thereby spoil, the vast, complicated plot of
His Dark Materials,
which runs to more than twelve hundred pages. But there is no way to form or convey a judgment of the sequence without giving away the name, alas, of the ultimate, underlying villain of the story, a character whose original scheme to enslave, control, and dominate all sentient life in the universe is threatened first by the implications of Dust as
felix culpa
and then by the ambition of the new Lucifer, Lord Asriel, with whose Second Rebellion the plot of
The Amber Spyglass
is largely concerned. The gentleman’s name is Jehovah.
†
The original British title of
The Golden Compass
is
Northern Lights.
4.
The Amber Spyglass
was awarded the
Guardian’s
fiction prize for 2000, the first time that a novel ostensibly written for children had been so honored. Shortly afterward, the new laureate stirred up controversy by publicly attacking his fellow Oxonian C. S.
Lewis, and in particular the
Narnia
books (which also begin, of course, in a wardrobe), calling them racist, misogynist, and allied with a repressive, patriarchal, idealist program designed to quash and devalue human beings and the world—the only world—in which we have no choice but to live and die.
Or something like that. I confess to taking as little interest in the question of organized Christianity’s demerits as in that of its undoubted good points, in particular when such a debate gets into the works of a perfectly decent story and starts gumming things up. My heart sank as it began to dawn on me, around the time that the first angels begin to show up in
The Subtle Knife,
that there was some devil in Pullman, pitchfork-prodding him into adjusting his story to suit both the shape of his anti-Church argument (with which I largely sympathize) and the mounting sense of self-importance evident in the swollen (yet withal sketchy) bulk of the third volume and in the decreasing roundedness of its characters. By the end of the third volume, Lyra has lost nearly all the tragic, savage grace that makes her so engaging in
The Golden Compass;
she has succumbed to the fate of Paul Atreides, the bildungsroman hero turned messiah of
Dune,
existing only, finally, to fulfill the prophecy about her. She has harrowed Hell (a gloomy prison yard, according to Pullman, less Milton than Virgil, home of whispering ghosts cringing under the taunts and talons of the screws, a flock of unconvincing harpies), losing and then regaining her daemon-soul; she has become, like all prophesied ones and messiahs, at once more and less than human.
This is a problem for Pullman, since
His Dark Materials
is explicitly—and materially, and often smashingly—about humanity. That’s the trouble with Plot, and its gloomy consigliere, Theme. They are, in many ways, the enemies of
Character, of “roundedness,” insofar as our humanity and its convincing representation are constituted through contradiction, inconsistency, plurality of desire, absence of abstractable message or moral. It’s telling that the epithet most frequently applied to God by the characters in
His Dark Materials
is “the Authority.” This fits in well with Pullman’s explicit juxtaposition of control and freedom, repression and rebellion, and with his championing of Sin, insofar as Sin equals Knowledge, over Obedience, insofar as that means the kind of incurious acceptance urged on Adam by Milton’s Raphael. But the epithet also suggests, inevitably, the Author, and by the end of
His Dark Materials
one can’t help feeling that Will and Lyra, Pullman’s own Adam and Eve—appealing, vibrant, chaotic, disobedient, murderous—have been sacrificed to fulfill the hidden purposes of their creator. Plot is fate, and fate is always, by definition, inhuman.
Thank God, then, for the serpent, for the sheer, unstoppable storytelling drive that is independent of plot outlines and thematic schemes, the hidden story that comes snaking in through any ready crack when the Authority’s attention is turned elsewhere. In
Paradise Lost,
we find ourselves, with Blake, rooting for the poets, for the “devil’s party.” Satan is one of us; so much more so than Adam or Eve. There’s a puzzling pair of exchanges in
The Amber Spyglass,
when Lyra attempts to cheer the denizens at the outskirts of Hell, and sing for her supper, by telling them the story of her and Will’s adventures up to that point. Like the accounts that Odysseus gives of himself, Lyra’s is a near-total fabrication, replete with dukes and duchesses, lost fortunes, hairbreadth escapes, shipwrecks, and children suckled by wolves, and it’s meant to be absurd, “nonsense”; but in fact it’s made out of precisely the same materials, those dark materials of lies and adventure, as
His Dark Materials.
And the poor dwellers of the
suburbs of the dead, listening to Lyra’s tale, are comforted. It comes as a surprise, then, when having reached the land of the dead itself, Lyra’s tale, with the apparent complicity of the narrator, is violently rejected by the Harpy, that humorless, bitter, inhuman stooge of God: “Liar!” Later, the Harpy hears Lyra’s more accurate account of her voyage and approves it, because, apparently, it sticks to the facts and includes references to the substance of the corporeal world that the Harpy has never known. But so does the lie; and so, in spite of, or in addition to, its stated, anti-Narnian intentions, does
His Dark Materials.
Lies, as Philip Pullman knows perfectly well, tell the truth; but the truth they tell may not be that, or not only that, which the liar intends. The secret story he has told is not one about the eternal battle between the forces of idealist fundamentalism and materialist humanism. It is a story about the ways in which adults betray children; how children are forced to pay the price of adult neglect, cynicism, ambition, and greed; how they are subjected to the programs of adults, to the General Oblation Board. Each of its child protagonists has been abandoned, in different ways, by both of his parents, and while they find no shortage of willing foster parents, ultimately they are betrayed and abandoned by their own bodies, forced into the adult world of compromise and self-discipline and self-sacrifice, or “oblation,” in a way that Pullman wants us—and may we have the grace—to understand as not only inevitable but, on balance, a good thing.
Still, we can’t help experiencing it—as we experience the end of so many wonderful, messy novels—as a thinning, a loss not so much of innocence as of wildness. In its depiction of Lyra’s breathtaking liberty to roam the streets, fields, and catacombs of Oxford, free from adult supervision, and of Will’s Harriet the Spy-like ability to pass, unnoticed and seeing everything,
through the worlds of adults, a freedom and a facility that were once, but are no longer, within the reach of ordinary children; in simply taking the classic form of a novel that tells the story of children who adventure, on their own, far beyond the help or hindrance of grown-ups,
His Dark Materials
ends not as a riposte to Lewis or a crushing indictment of authoritarian dogma but as an invocation of the glory, and a lamentation for the loss, which I fear is irrevocable, of the idea of childhood as an adventure, a strange zone of liberty, walled, perhaps, but with plenty of holes for snakes to get in.
F
OR AT LEAST THE
first forty years of their existence, from the Paleozoic pre-Superman era of
Famous Funnies
(1933) and
More Fun Comics
(1936), comic books were widely viewed, even by those who adored them, as juvenile: the ultimate greasy kids’ stuff. Comics were the literary equivalent of bubble-gum cards, to be poked into the spokes of a young mind, where they would produce a satisfying—but entirely bogus—rumble of pleasure. But almost from the first, fitfully in the early days, intermittently through the fifties, and then starting in the mid-sixties with increasing vigor and determination, a battle has been waged by writers, artists, editors, and publishers to elevate the medium, to expand the scope of its subject matter and the range of its artistic styles, to sharpen and increase the sophistication of its language and visual grammar, to probe and explode the limits of the sequential panel, to give free reign to irony, tragedy, autobiography, and other grown-up-type modes of expression.
Also from the first, a key element—at times the central element—of this battle has been the effort to alter not just the
medium itself but the public perception of the medium. From the late, great Will Eisner’s lonely insistence, in an interview with the
Baltimore Sun
back in 1940 (
1940!
), on the artistic credibility of comics, to the nuanced and scholarly work of recent comics theorists, both practitioners and critics have been arguing passionately on behalf of comics’ potential to please—in all the aesthetic richness of that term—the most sophisticated of readers.
The most sophisticated, that is, of
adult
readers. For the adult reader of comic books has always been the holy grail, the promised land, the imagined lover who will greet the long-suffering comic-book maker, at the end of the journey, with open arms, with acceptance, with approval.
A quest is often, among other things, an extended bout of inspired madness. Over the years this quest to break the chains of childish readership has resulted, like most bouts of inspired madness, in both folly and stunning innovation. Into the latter category we can put the work of Bernard Krigstein or Frank Miller, say, with their attempts to approximate, through radical attack on the conventions of panel layouts, the fragmentation of human consciousness by urban life; or the tight, tidy, miniaturized madness of Chris Ware. Into the former category—the folly—we might put all the things that got Dr. Frederick Wertham so upset about EC Comics in the early fifties, the syringe-pierced eyeballs and baseball diamonds made from human organs; or the short-lived outfitting of certain Marvel titles in 1965 with a label that boasted “A Marvel Pop Art Production”; or the hypertrophied, tooth-gnashing, bloodletting quote-unquote heroes of the era that followed Miller’s
The Dark Knight Returns.
An excess of the desire to appear grown up is one of the defining characteristics of adolescence. But these follies were the inevitable missteps and overreachings in the course of a campaign that was, in the end, successful.
Because the battle has now, in fact, been won. Not only are comics appealing to a wider and older audience than ever before, but the idea of comics as a valid art form on a par at least with, say, film or rock and roll is widely if not quite universally accepted. Comics and graphic novels are regularly reviewed and debated in
Entertainment Weekly,
the
New York Times Book Review,
even in the august pages of the
New York Review of Books.
Ben Katchor won a MacArthur Fellowship, and Art Spiegelman a Pulitzer Prize.
But the strange counterphenomenon to this indisputable rise in the reputation, the ambition, the sophistication, and the literary and artistic merit of many of our best comics over the past couple of decades, is that over roughly the same period comics readership has declined. Some adults are reading better comics than ever before; but fewer people overall are reading any—far fewer, certainly, than in the great sales heyday of the medium, the early fifties, when by some estimates
*
as many as 650 million comic books were sold annually (compared to somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 million today). The top ten best-selling comic books in 1996, primarily issues making up two limited series, Marvel’s
Civil Wars
and DC’s
Infinite Crisis,
were all superhero books, and, like the majority of superhero books in the post
-Dark Knight,
post
-Watchmen
era, all of them dealt rather grimly, and in the somewhat hand-wringing fashion that has become obligatory, with the undoubtedly grown-up issues of violence, freedom, terrorism, vigilantism, political repression, mass hysteria, and the ambivalent nature of heroism. Among the top ten best-selling titles in 1960 (with an aggregate circulation, for all comics, of 400 million) one finds not only the
expected
Superman
and
Batman
(decidedly sans ambivalence) but
Mickey Mouse, Looney Tunes,
and the classic sagas of
Uncle Scrooge.
And nearly the whole of the list for that year, from top to bottom, through
Casper the Friendly Ghost
(#14) and
Little Archie
(#25) to
Felix the Cat
(#47), is made up of kids’ stuff, more or less greasy.
To recap—Days when comics were aimed at kids: huge sales. Days when comics are aimed at adults: not so huge sales, and declining.
The situation is more complicated than that, of course. Since 1960 there have been fundamental changes in a lot of things, among them the way comics are produced, licensed, marketed, and distributed. But maybe it is not too surprising that for a while now, fundamental changes and all, some people have been wondering: what if there were comic books for children?
Leaving aside questions of creator’s rights, paper costs, retail consolidation, the explosive growth of the collector market, and direct-market sales, a lot of comic-book people will tell you that there is simply too much competition for the kid dollar these days and that, thrown into the arena with video games, special-effects-laden films, the Internet, iPods, etc., comics will inevitably lose out. I find this argument unconvincing, not to mention a cop out. It is, furthermore, an example of our weird naïveté, in this generation, about how sophisticated we and our children have become vis-à-vis our parents and grandparents, of the misguided sense of retrospective superiority we tend to display toward them and their vanished world. As if in 1960 there was not a
ton
of cool stuff besides comic books on which a kid could spend his or her considerably less constricted time and considerably more limited funds. In the early days of comics, in fact, unlike now, a moderately adventuresome child could find all kinds of things to do
that were not only fun (partly because they took place with no adult supervision or mediation), but absolutely free. The price of fun doesn’t get any more competitive than that.