Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth (24 page)

The problem is that the atheist message is boring and undramatic: life's a mechanical process and then you die. Now, as you believe one thing or another, you might take this message to be fact or fiction, but, true or false, it is always a false fiction, by which I mean an undramatic one. In fiction, we can come across a dungeon full of disembodied ghosts. In Christian fiction, the solution is to send them to their judgment, (think of the movie
Ghost
for a literal judgment, when dark shadows or bright lights come for you. A figurative last judgment might be the final scene in
The Lord Of The Rings
; Frodo's journey on the ship is symbolically a journey to heaven); in New Age or Buddhist fiction, the solution is to send them on to their next reincarnation, or to halt the wheel of reincarnation and send them to nirvana, (think of the movie
What Dreams May Come
, or even the ending to the television movie version of the
Mahabharata
).

But in atheist fiction, the only solution is to say that there are no ghosts. In atheist science fiction, the solution proposed by
Star Trek
or any number of
Scooby-doo
episodes is perfectly dramatically satisfying: any being pretending to be supernatural is a fraud, a computer you can destroy with a phaser, or Mr. McGready from the Haunted Museum wearing a rubber mask. In epic fantasy, where there actually are supernatural wonders, the ghosts cannot be frauds, so they have to be mistakes, and be aborted. Watching the dead commit suicide so that they are more dead (deader?) is boring. Where is the drama?

I suppose if you are so shallow you think an organism is the only sacred thing in the universe, gee, I guess being bodiless is an unimaginable horror to you. But no one could be that shallow, could he be?

Oh, wait. It turns out that the mysterious Dust that is needed for the life-force of the universe is nothing more or less than sexual liberation. Orgasm stuff. The only point and purpose of religion is to suppress the almighty Orgasm, and the only thing that can throw the universe out of its cosmic balance is chastity and marriage.

Maybe I read that part of the book wrong, because I was skipping pages and giggling with boredom about then. Someone clear me up on this point, please. Better yet, don't clear it up. Leave me with my illusions. I am not willing or able to believe Mr. Pullman, or anyone older than a very lonely and slightly perverted fifteen-year-old, believes something so blatantly stupid.

I would not have minded the preaching, (I was an atheist when I read these books), if the story had not been dropped. The Subtle Knife is never used for its foretold purpose. Lyra's role as the new Eve or the ex-nun's role as the new Serpent is never resolved. The battle with the Authority is never set up, and also never resolved—if Pullman meant for us to believe that killing one officer in a hierarchy would stop the whole Church from doing whatever it is doing (and what was it doing?—we are never told), then he is making an assumption the readers are given no reason to follow. World War Two did not end the moment FDR or Yamamoto died.

All this would be forgivable if Mr. Pullman were a bad writer. He is not. He is a very good writer: this means he knows better. One of the most chilling and unearthly scenes I have ever read in any book ever, one of the most striking scenes, is the one where the ex-nun scientist runs a test on the intergalactic Dark Matter and finds it has a hidden intelligence: the dark matter communicates with her. Who are you? she asks. Angels, they answer. Then they reveal what kind of angels: The exiles. The free angels. The ones driven out of paradise. The angels of the darkness. Fallen angels.

The scene was great. Imagine something like
Close Encounters Of The Third Kind
, and slowly decrypting the coded message from the distant aliens, only to discover that you are talking to something that is standing behind you in the dark and empty room where you are hunched over your computer, and that something is a demon.

Of course, the whole point and emotional power of this scene is fumbled not long after, when it is discovered that the fallen angels are the good guys, or, rather, that there are no good guys.

Nothing I have ever read, not by Heinlein and not by Ayn Rand, has been more blatant in dropping the story-telling, and devoting its pages to preaching a message. The writer was drunk on sermonizing. If this plotline was a motorist, it would have been arrested for driving while intoxicated, if it had not perished in the horrible drunk accident where it went headlong over the cliff of the author's preachy message, tumbled down the rocky hillside, crashed, and burned.

I am not criticizing the message. When I was an atheist, I read those books, I was on his side, and I was in his camp: and yet the third book bored me, because it made a mind-bogglingly simple error in plot.

I am not criticizing his skill as a writer. His first book
The Golden Compass
is something that deserves its rewards, and he has a right to be proud of it.

I am not claiming that there is not some deep meaning to the atheist message I am too shallow to see. I will merely take it for granted that the partisans defending this book can see the Emperor's fine new clothes and I cannot because they are Enlightened and I am Benighted. Let us merely grant this point to get it out of the way.

My big problem with Pullman is the two related writing errors of (1) plot points introduced only when convenient and not before (2) no follow-through; plot points set up but then simply forgotten.

I am claiming the PLOT SUCKS.

Lest I use a technical terminology you non-writers cannot follow, allow me to explain. In professional writing, we professionals say the PLOT SUCKS when the actions of the characters do not flow from causes previously established in the narrative, or when the reactions of the events that follow do not reflect any consequences. In the first case, something comes out of nowhere; and in the second case, nothing comes of it.

In telling a tale, a narrator is trying to cast a spell, to deceive the reader, (with the reader's cooperation, of course), into the illusion that the events being portrayed are unfolding before his eyes. The basic ingredient of the magician's cauldron is, of course, verisimilitude. The events need not be real, or even realistic. They can be larger than life or smaller than life or true to life. They do not need to follow the logic of real life cause-and-effect. But they must follow the story-logic of make-believe. The author can say what happens: but he cannot say, like a child playing a game, that it only happens because of his say-so. The puppeteer cannot stick his naked hand down in front of the small curtain or box that forms his theater lest he ruin the show. If the events or plot elements appear out of nowhere and vanish with no consequence trailing after them, it is too much unlike life. The event seem to be inauthentic, inorganic, unnatural, and each thing that happens does not seem to be happening because of what the story requires, but merely because of what the author wants. If your plot has events and elements that don't fit into the rest of the plot, if the plot is arbitrary, the spell is broken, artistic integrity flies out the window, and the reader is betrayed.

There are two ways in which a plot can suck.

The first is called the Gunrack Rule or Chekhov's Gun Rule. If you establish in Act One that there is a gun hanging on the wall, by Act Three it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't have been hanging there in the first place. Guns that hang on walls and never go off are a distraction to the reader, a useless element, a protuberance.

This second rule is a complement to the first: If you need to have your character fire the gun in the Third Act, you cannot simply have a god lowered from the stage machinery and hand the gun to him. This is called Deus Ex Machina. While normally this term is used to mean the writer uses an arbitrary mechanism to have the plot end well, the word is still apt in cases, such as here, where the writer uses an arbitrary mechanism to have the plot creak and lurch like Frankenstein's monster stiffly from one disconnected event to the next.

My complaint is that, not one nor two, but each and every plot element I can recall to mind either was an Unfired Gun or was a Deus Ex Machina.

Some might claim that there are no universal rules to writing. Not everyone needs to obey Chekhov! Such famous literary luminaries as Zachariah Snarfblorcht or the famous Ugo von Pfphlzu routinely violate these rules!

The only problem with relying on the example of these famous artists, of course, is that I have never heard of them, and the names sound made-up to me. Maybe I am a philistine and these rarefied artistes are too profound for my pedestrian tastes. That may be. On the other hand, maybe there are some writers who can violate the rules of writing and do it well. My claim is that Mr. Pullman is violating the rules of writing and doing it badly.

Now, dear reader, if that is my complaint, it does no good to tell me that an arbitrarily unhappy ending that splits Will and Lyra is mature and deep and shows that life does not have easy answers and blah blah blah.

My complaint is that the reason that forces the separation is not previously established, and has every earmark of being thrown in by the author without forethought or foreshadowing. My complaint is not that the arbitrarily unhappy ending is unhappy; my complaint is that it is arbitrary.

To prove that the ending was arbitrary, let us look at the scene where it is announced that anyone living in another world for ten years gets sick and dies. Change that one sentence. Now tell me what, before that point in the manuscript for three books, what else would also have to change to make the manuscript self-consistent? I cannot think of a single plot-point, paragraph, or line.

Pullman could have easily established the unhappy ending in his background in the same way the Tolkien established the downfall of the Three Rings of the Elves once the One Ring was destroyed. Tolkien establishes his mood in scene one, when rustic hobbits at the pub talk about the elves passing through their land to the Gray Havens, there to board ships that go to some hither shore, never to return. This mood is followed through, and the plot point stated explicitly, in the scene where Galadriel is tempted by the One Ring. It is established that the end of the One Ring spells the end of the Elven magic; and that Galadriel and her people must fade and pass away to the West if the Ring is destroyed. The melancholy ending in Tolkien is established from Chapter One, where the passing of the elves to the sea is mentioned. Had Tolkien rewritten the scene where Sam sees Frodo off on the last ship out of Middle Earth so that Frodo simply decided to stay, and keep his elf-friends with him, and the elves suddenly returned to their ancient numbers and powers, and all the glory of the old days suddenly and for no reason sprang into being, that would have been a happy ending, but an arbitrary and stupid one, for it would have violated what was already established.

The melancholy ending in Pullman is exactly this kind of arbitrary and stupid one: the author merely says that no one can emigrate to other worlds, and we are expected to believe it. Well, I do not believe it. It violates what was already established, in mood if not in plot logic. Why is the gate between Lyra's world and Will's impossible to maintain, but the gate to the underworld is possible to maintain? What is there about the Subtle Knife that makes it impossible to find some safe way to use it? As best I can recall, the Dust Demons promised to destroy the Specters that were the side effect of Knife-use. Why not simply have a Dust Demon stand by each time Lyra and Will went to see each other? Is this not a reward in keeping with those whose action has overthrown the tyranny of heaven? Who else in the plot died because of interdimensional travel sickness? Why are the Dust creatures immune to it? How do we know the demons were not simply lying about this point?

My complaint is not that the ending is unhappy.
HAMLET
ends unhappily, and yet the author there does not suddenly announce that the cup quaffed by the Queen contains poison only after she drinks it. The author there establishes in a previous scene which blade and which cup will be poisoned, and who is doing the poisoning and why.

I am not talking about plot twists. A plot twist requires more clever set up, not less; more attention to detail.

In
HAMLET
, when the Queen drinks a cup of poison meant for the Prince, that is a plot-twist. It is unexpected, yet not unbelievable, that the Queen might pick up the cup waiting for Hamlet and carouse to his fortune. Indeed, even in Act One the evils that follow the Danes from their wassail are foreshadowed. But since in the previous scene the audience was told that Claudio would place a poisoned pearl in the chalice of the prince, it is a surprise, it is a plot twist, but it is not arbitrary, it is not Deus Ex Machina, for Laertes to announce that the Queen's been poisoned after she drinks.

So, the argument cannot be maintained that Pullman is indulging in a plot-twist or an unexpected turn of events in his narrative. A writer needs to have a plot to have a plot-twist. One needs to see a road to see an unexpected turn in it.

Imagine the same scene in
HAMLET
if Pullman had written it. Hamlet, using a mystic pearl, places the poison in the cup to kill Claudio. We are all told Hamlet will die by drinking the cup. Then Claudio dies choking on a chicken bone at lunch. Then the Queen dies when Horatio shows her the magical Mirror of Death. This mirror appears in no previous scene, nor is it explained why it exists. Then Ophelia summons up the Ghost from Act One and kills it, while she makes a speech denouncing the evils of religion. Ophelia and Hamlet are parted, as it is revealed in the last act that a curse will befall them if they do not part ways.

Think I am kidding? I am not even being subtle. The pearl is the knife. Claudio is Evil God. The chicken bone is him falling out of bed. Horatio is Mrs. Coulter. The Death Mirror is this sudden, unexplained, stupid abyss that winged angels cannot fly out of. Ophelia is Lyra, and the Ghost is the ghost.