And now for a wrap-up of a few final Amber Spyglass thoughts that I couldn’t fit into my earlier posts.
First, beyond all the other reasons I hated the ending of The Amber Spyglass as a child, I also loathed it as yet another variation of the evergreen classic of the children losing the magic at the end of a children’s fantasy novel: Peter and Susan can’t return to Narnia because they’re too old, Fern loses interest in talking animals because a boy took her on the Ferris wheel, etc.
Upon reread, I discovered that this isn’t technically what’s happening at the end of The Amber Spyglass. Yes, the timing does happen to coincide with Will and Lyra falling in love, but technically Lyra loses the ability to read the alethiometer because that ability was given to her by grace (by the rebel angels, one presumes) and has been taken away now that her quest is over. And Will breaks the subtle knife (which gives him the ability to travel between worlds) because the subtle knife turns out to be releasing a soul-eating Spectre every time it opens a doorway between worlds.
So they’re not losing the magic because they personally have grown too old, which at least still leaves room for another child (for instance, the child reader) to have a magical adventure. They’re losing the magic because every magic doorway forever must be closed, because the magic portals are actually EVIL. The magic was BAD ALL ALONG.
***
And finally, swinging back around to Dust. In the first book, Dust is a big mystery: it settles on humans, especially adults, but not animals, not even the armored bears who talk and wear armor and have kings etc. The Magisterium thinks that Dust is sin, which, okay, the Magisterium and I clearly have a different understanding of sin (the bears clearly have the ability to knowingly do wrong, which is how I would define sin), but sure! Why not! The Magisterium is clearly supposed to be wrong anyway and the story is great, so I’m not getting bogged down in metaphysics.
Unfortunately, the story became less great and the metaphysics became more explicit. In The Amber Spyglass, we learn that “Dust came into being when living things became conscious of themselves.” Dust is like “the stars of every galaxy in the sky, and every one of them was a little fragment of conscious thought.” And the doorways between worlds are draining away the Dust, and without Dust, “Thought, imagination, feeling, would all wither and blow away, leaving nothing but a brutish automatism; and that brief period when life was conscious of itself would flicker out like a candle in every one of the billions of worlds where it had burned brightly.”
Well, first of all, this breaks Pullman’s own worldbuilding. We know that the armored bears are capable of conscious thought, feeling, and even imagination: we saw Iofur Raknisson with his doll daemon perched on his knee. They understand themselves to be bears, think about what it means to be bears, and understand death. Why don’t they get Dust?
I think the answer to the armored bears question specifically is that Pullman hadn’t fully thought through that aspect of his worldbuilding in book one. But unfortunately for Pullman, this issue is far wider than the armored bears. It touches on one of my pet topics of animal intelligence, and can I just say: Holy Descartes!
So animals are merely brutish automatons, incapable of thought, imagination, or feeling? I realize that research in animal intelligence has become more widely known since this book was published in 2001, but that was still decades after Jane Goodall did her pioneering chimp research. The general public may not have been up on the intelligence of cephalopods and crows, but we knew great apes and dolphins were smart. We may have even been vaguely aware of elephant intelligence.
And I simply feel that if you are writing a book series about the nature of consciousness, maybe you should, in fact, familiarize yourself with the latest research about the nature of consciousness.
It’s incredibly frustrating that Pullman is taking aim at the destructive impact of certain Christian teachings on Western society but straight-up recreates the belief that humans are different from animals not merely in degree but in kind. We are not simply the smartest animals, we are the only conscious animals at all, in fact not really animals but marked out by the cosmos as different by the way that we attract the glowing golden particles of conscious thought that are Dust.