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I was surprised to read on the Web highly negative reviews of the movie. This is often the case with a movie of a book that is greatly admired; reviewers examine the production history and every available bit of gossip about how it proceeded, and find objective excuses for their disappointment in whatever unreasonable hopes they had. I myself have been disappointed (with the movie adaptations of favorite books), especially in instances where the movie departs from the book because the director either has not read the book, or cannot understand the book. [A movie director friend of mine was of the opinion that movies that followed the book too closely earned lower marks with him; evidently that is the culture in Hollywood.]
"His Dark Materials," the Trilogy
The trilogy of books by Philip Pullman comprise a single continuous story, of proportions that warrant a trilogy, simply because it is so long. (Fantasy novels are often this way, for the simple reason that the author is constructing an alternate universe in which the rules are different from ours, and must make the rules as consistent as possible, so that they're plausible. That takes at least two books.)
[Added later (spoiler alert):
The plot of the trilogy is complex and resists summarizing. A large part of the story consists of the gradual exploration of the universe Pullman creates, in which our own is "weakly imbedded", as the topologists would say. In addition to human beings and their "souls" --and of course I, together with many of you readers, must make a valiant effort to keep reading with them haunting the pages-- there are these daemons, spirits in animal form that are paired with every human being in the World of the main character, Lyra Belaqua, a young girl of around 12, at the start of the story. The daemons of young people can change form at will, but at a certain age, they choose a particular animal form, and remain in that form throughout the life of the human. Daemons cannot move too far from their humans: a few yards at most, except in the case of Witches, whose daemons are birds (convenient for when the witch gets on her broomstick, or rather her pine branch). When the human dies, the daemon essentially turns into vapor, and disappears.
Early in the story, a man whom Lyra thinks is her uncle (but turns out to be her father) visits Jordan College (which exists in Lyra's World's Oxford, but not in the Oxford that is familiar to us) and reveals the existence of what he calls dust, a material that is initially revealed only in photographs taken under very complicated conditions. Interestingly enough, the Magisterium (what is, in Lyra's World, the entity that would be The Church in our own world, or more exactly, the Catholic Church) violently disapproves of the interest in, and study of, dust, and even mention of the term is considered heretical.
The first book is concerned with an experiment by an organization within the Catholic Church to try to systematically sever the psychic link between children and their daemons. In the apparatus they develop, the child and the daemon are enclosed in two metal cages, with their link presumably invisibly stretched between them, and a special guillotine-like cleaver, energized by an enormous electric charge, slices between the two cages. The child is left a mindless wreck, and the daemon vanishes. (Ordinarily, if the daemon is mortally hurt, the child dies.)
The experimental group (the Oblation Board) is looking for test subjects, and employ thugs to abduct orphan kids and their daemons from everywhere, including the streets of Oxford, to transport to a facility within the Arctic Circle, at which the experimental procedure is to be performed. Unfortunately for them, they abduct a gypsy boy called Roger whom Lyra has befriended.
Lyra learns about dust and sees a photograph of a man surrounded by dust, prevents her "uncle" (her father) Lord Asriel from being poisoned by a cleric who wants to stop him from experimenting with dust, and meets the wonderful and charming Mrs Coulter, a friend and benefactor of the Magisterium, all at about the same time. At this time also, Lyra is quietly given a fabulous piece of equipment called The Golden Compass by one of the professors of Jordan College, shortly before Mrs Coulter persuades Lyra to spend a week in her home, and reveals that she is in fact Lyra's mother. It is soon clear that Mrs Coulter wants the Golden Compass.
The Golden Compass, also called an Alethiometer, is a mysterious device that answers any question truthfully. The user controls three fixed arms, like the arms of a clock, and frames the question by pointing them at any three of 36 different symbolic images on the dial. A fourth arm then begins to move in sequence to certain of those same images, and this sequence is the answer. Obviously, both framing the question in terms of the symbols, and interpreting the answer takes considerable skill, but Lyra miraculously discovers that she has an intuitive skill for it.
Returning to her room one night, she finds the Alethiometer gone, and immediately realizes that Mrs Coulter has stolen it. She steals it back, and she and her daemon escape from the house, and narrowly miss capture by the thugs of the Oblation Board (called Gobblers), with the help of Roger's gypsy family. The Alethiometer tells Lyra and the gypsies to travel to the far north, which they do, and attempt to rescue Roger. In the process, Lyra encounters several of the most important protagonists in the entire trilogy:
Lee Scoresby, a "cowboy" from Texas, who is a balloonist, or Aeronaut.
Serafina Pekkala, the queen of a tribe of Witches. Witches are long-lived women, with magic.
Iorek Byrnison, an armored bear. This tribe of polar bears have learned how to work metal, and have the gift of speech.
In the second book, Lyra meets a young boy named Will, in "our" World, or the closest thing to our normal universe that exists in the universe of the trilogy. Will and Lyra, initially suspicious of each other, eventually team up to find Will's father, whom he has never met, at the direction of the Alethiometer. The latter also introduces them to Mary, a research physicist in Will's world who happens to be interested in a particular variety of Dark Matter called shadow particles, which Lyra and Mary agree must be a manifestation of Dust. Mary can "see" dark matter by means of hooking a subject into a specially-programmed computer. Her dark matter particles are actually attracted to conscious subjects, and are completely uninterested in inanimate things, unless they have been worked on by people. Lyra exclaims that dust behaves the same way. Lyra volunteers to be hooked up to the computer, and Mary is stunned by the fact that shadow particles completely cover Lyra from head to toe.
Lyra and Will are given a knife, called the Subtle Knife, which can open up windows from one World into another, and the second book is one of exploration, in which the young duo finally encounter Will's father, who turns out to be the same explorer whose photograph revealed Dust for the first time. Mary is hounded out of Oxford, and takes refuge in another World, but Will's father and Lee Scoresby are killed in a fight with troops of the Magisterium. Finally, Mrs Coulter turns up in the world to which the duo retreats to hide, and abducts Lyra.
In the third book, a great showdown is building up between Lord Asriel on one side, and The Authority (i.e. god, but not in so many words) and his Angels on the other, with The Magisterium fighting mostly on the side of the Authority, but generally to its own advantage. Mrs Coulter has returned to her own (and Lyra's) world, but high in the Himalayas. She keeps Lyra drugged and asleep, because, she says later, Lyra would otherwise have left her protection.
Mary finds herself in a World populated by sentient beings, with speech, but who look quite unlike humans, with fore-and aft limbs to which they affix wheels, and by means of which they move about like bicycles. They take Mary in, teach her their language, and among them Mary discovers a certain material with which she builds herself something like a telescope, which actually makes dust visible to the naked eye. She studies the dust in the world around her, and finds it clustered around the elephant-people who have befriended her, and also in the wheels they wear, which are the seed-pods of enormous trees.
Will follows Lyra to her world, carrying the Alethiometer she has left behind. He had met his father just before the latter dies. Will also meets Iorek Byrnison, who has decided to help Lyra in the great war that is imminent, though, as he says, the wars of humans are not relevant to him. Together they are able to rescue Lyra from her mother.
Lyra, while she was drugged, has seen Roger in a dream. Roger is in the land of the Dead, having been killed in an accident. He asks Lyra to rescue him, and she promises that she will. Will, too, is frustrated at having been unable to ask his father certain questions. Together they decide to look for the World of the Dead, which is just another world into which Will can cut a window, and then cut a window out of, to escape. It turns out that entering the world of the dead is not so simple; among other things, Lyra has to be parted from her daemon, Pan, which is excruciatingly painful for her, and Will is also in pain, though he does not have a daemon.
One of the hypotheses of the story is the belief that The Authority (used synonymously with "God") did not create everything, but that the Church teaches that he did, possibly out of ignorance. Angels appear in the story, and explain things at various stages to the human characters. There are also witches, and talking bears. The closest thing to "our" world is just one of innumerable parallel worlds, between which the main protagonists are able to move by means of rifts in the separating fabric between one world and another. The main character, a young teenager called Lyra, meets up with a boy from ("our") world, Will, and together gain possession of a special knife that is able to cut an opening in the air, so that the young pair are able to look into another world, and climb through into it.
The so-called Magisterium, a barely disguised proxy for the Catholic Church, is depicted as evil and deceitful. It is easy to see why --even if it is surprising-- there is such a large number of modern pieces of fiction that depict the Catholic church, or at least a proxy for it, as evil: the Church has resorted to actions that are evil simply for the purpose of controlling its members and for self-preservation. But of course an organization cannot do that, and still pretend to be the moral authority, even if it is argued that the evil --or wrongdoing, if you prefer-- is done by particular individuals within the Church, without the endorsement of the Church itself. Pullman, however, convinces the reader that the Magisterium is evil in intention, and not just by accident.
The three books are a thoroughly enjoyable read, even if one is startled by the turns in the story that seem to reveal a little more of Mr Pullman's system of beliefs than he must like to do-- certainly more than we see of J. K. Rowling's system of beliefs, for instance. Or perhaps I'm being naive; my suspicions of where stories come from are probably laughably simple-minded.
One of the main characters is a woman who turns out to be Lyra's mother, referred to as Mrs Coulter for most of the three books. (We learn her name, Marissa, somewhere in the middle.) She is depicted as intense, deceitful, egotistical and manipulative, but she is portrayed by Nicole Kidman also as very self-conscious and urbane, and somehow grates on my sensibilities. (This is a problem when a character makes such an enormous impression on a reader that no actor or actress can do it justice.) In the book, Lyra is a feisty young girl who is a fluent liar, able to dominate the street urchins with whom she plays in the alternate "Oxford University" by her wits and quick tongue. She is also painfully earnest (even if not in her speech), something that one does not see in the movie. The young actress, newcomer Dakota Blue Richards, certainly manages the air of a confident liar very well, but I failed to see the earnest, intense passion that fills the Lyra of the book. What we need is the intensity of Jody Foster with the slickness of young Dakota.
There are other problems. In the world of Lyra's Oxford, every human has a daemon, an animal-shaped being who can change shape almost at will, who is linked to his or her human with a psychic 'cord', and with whom it can communicate mentally. Lyra's daemon is Pantalaimon (Pan), and to some extent the daemon is a sort of alter ego, and the conversations between human and daemon illustrate, to some degree, the dividedness within anyone, which often comes through at a time of stress. In almost every case, the daemon's character is a representation of an aspect of the human's character. Lyra's daemon is loyal, fearful, curious, suspicious, except that it does not lie. So we are led to feel that Lyra's lying is a matter of entertainment, or expediency, not true deceitfulness.
In contrast, to my puzzlement, Marissa Coulter's daemon is a monkey whose signature characteristic is casual cruelty, such as tearing off the wings of flying creatures: bats, insects, etc. To represent Marissa Coulter as a creature of casual cruelty does not make much sense. At any rate, an adult should (at least for the sake of consistency) have a degree of control over the behaviour of his or her daemon. It does not seem reasonable that a character of such elegance as Mrs Coulter should have her daemon reveal her suppressed tendency for mindless cruelty. But the cruel monkey continues to be consistently cruel throughout the three books, a vicious bully of a monkey, bullying generally the daemons of those whom Mrs Coulter has in her control, or wishes to control. But my readers are of course welcome to read the books for themselves, and come to their own conclusions as to whether the monkey daemon makes dramatic sense, or whether Mr Pullman has stretched the plausibility of his character development in order to gain a useful tool for his plot.
The books, the Dark Materials Trilogy, is close to being a must-read. I hesitate to endorse the movie The Dark Compass as a must-watch, though it is very entertaining indeed. In spite of my reservations, Nicole Kidman turns in a fabulous performance, as does Dakota Blue Richards. Ian McKellan lends his voice to the Armored Bear, Iorek Byrnison, and Sam Elliot makes a fabulous Lee Scoresby, a rather formulaic Cowboy. (Sam Elliot can't avoid being a stereotype, because that's how the character has been written. I rather suspect that Mr Pullman imagined Sam E. while writing the character in.) Serafina Pekkala, the queen of the witches, is ably portrayed by Eva Green, even if my mental image was very different, and finally Daniel Craig creates the part of Lord Asriel, also just as much of a stereotype as the cowboy, really. One gets the impression that Philip Pullman was overwhelmed by a number of personalities while at Oxford, and they have found their way into his work, and he views them mostly from the outside. In contrast, the character of Mrs Coulter is written with genuine insight, which it would seem is hard for a man to do with a female character. But Mrs Coulter is much less of a real character than either Serafina Pekkala, or Mary Malone, who comes along in the second book.
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