Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth (25 page)

Unlike
Hamlet
, not only is there no climax to
The Amber Spyglass
, there is no plot, merely a disconnected series of events. In the case of the death of Metatron, which, (in a properly constructed book, would have been the climax), I could not for the life of me figure out how killing off one bad guy, even if he was the Caesar of Heaven, would halt or even hinder the Roman Empire of Heaven.

If there was one evil being done by the Empire of Heaven, such as a war or an oppression that only that one Seraphic ruler had ordered but which the Praetorians, Patricians and soldiers, (or, if you like, Cherubim, Principalities, and Angels), had no interest in pursuing, then offing the one ruler would stop that oppression: but Mr. Pullman makes it clear that the evils of Jehovah are systemic. Killing Jove and Metatron could not uproot the Evil Catholic Church on earth, or even hinder the operations of her officers.

You see, in a well-crafted book, the evil empire of heaven would have been doing something, up to something. In a well-crafted book there would be, in other words, a plot. There would be a goal to which the good guys are moving, and a means they select to achieve; a yardstick of success and failure. There would be a goal to which the bad guys are moving, and a means to achieve it.

Let me use a clear example. I pick this example because it is clear, and it is good craftsmanship, not because it is great writing. In
Star Wars
, the McGuffin was the blueprints to the armored battle-station Death Star. The good guys wanted to use the plans to blow up the Death Star, the bad guys wanted to recover the plans. Unlike Pullman, George Lucas establishes before even Act One, in the introduction word-crawl, this plot point. Space Princess has the blueprints. Dark Helmet in Act One captures Space Princess. To recover the plans, Dark Helmet uses drugs and torture on Space Princess to get her to talk. That is a plot, because the bad guys want something, and they are using a certain means to get it.

Plot Twist one: Good Guys rescue Space Princess. This would seem to thwart the plot of the Bad Guys, because now they cannot discover the plans from her; but, aha! Dark Helmet let Space Princess escape, so that Bad Guys could secretly follow Space Princess back to Rebel Base just in time for Big Fight Scene. Good Guys now try to use captured plans to blow up Death Star; Death Star now tries to use megadeath beam-weapon to blow up rebel base, but gas giant is in the way. If Good Guys blow up Death Star first, they win; if Bad Guys blow up rebel base first, they win.

See? THAT is a plot. Each party has something he is trying to accomplish, and he is opposed by a contrary party whose actions are mutually exclusive, and therefore antagonistic to, the first party.

Now, let us look at Pullman's opus. The McGuffin here, the "plans to the Death Star" was the Subtle Knife, the god-killing weapon. But there are no bad guys on stage when the knife is introduced. The conflict with Evil Tyrant God is not in Act One; it is not even clear until late in book two, or maybe book three. The Evil Church sends out an assassin to kill Lyra, but it is not clear what this will accomplish for them. I frankly don't remember what happens to that assassin—did Will get him with the knife? Get lost in a sewer and die? The scene did not make enough of an impact to lodge in my memory. As for the leaders in heaven of the Evil Church, one of them dies by falling out of bed, and the other one is seduced and pushed into a Bottomless Pit by a side character. The hero and heroine, as far as I know, never even hear the news that anything has happened to the bad guys.

The good guys have no goal. The bad guys have no goal. There is motion, and speeches, but no plot. Nothing is done by the end. What makes the Church in the final volume unable to send out a dozen more evil assassins to mug the girl? What advantage or disadvantage did it do the Evil Church to have the wheeled elephant things on another world innocent or fallen, if these words have any meaning in this context?

The arbitrary plot points in Pullman are countless. When Mrs. Coulter announces that she has the power to seduce Metatron, on the grounds that all angels are consumed with lusts of the flesh, this plot point is introduced when and only when needed. It is not part of the background of the rest of the story. It could be removed without damage to the rest of the story. It does not crop up again. It is not explained, even though it would have been easy for the author to do so.

This plot point also seems arbitrary because there is no sense that the author thought through the implications. To use a simple example, if you found out young women on this planet wore men's hats with wide brims whenever they walked out-of-doors, and then found out they were afraid that the angels in heaven would see them and carry them off, then the dress code of this planet would have a logical relation to the plot point. Or if women were not allowed to walk abroad without an armed priest or something. Or if the world had many stories of Nephilim and Demigods, men who were the offspring of the Sons of God and the Daughters of Eve. Or if Lyra's older sister had been carried off by a lustful angel. Or something. If the details were correct, it would seem like a real planet.

The Pit into which Mrs. Coulter pushes the archangel likewise is arbitrary. It is not the pit that was foretold to us since chapter one as the Dread Pit of No-Escape. This is arbitrary writing, as if a character in Act Three picked up a vase, announced it was a gun, and shot the antagonist with a mortar round issuing from the vase mouth.

Let us remind ourselves of other arbitrary plot points.

Will. The plot promises us the boy will kill God with a magic knife: he doesn't. He does not kill God at all; God dies by falling out of bed, through no action set in motion by the main character or any character. Will uses the Knife to open the breathing envelope around God to help Him, but the air accidentally dissolves Him in a heavy-handed attempt at irony. The Subtle Knife does not kill God, or even God's regent Metatron.

Asriel. The plot promises the evil Kingdom of Heaven will be overthrown and replaced with Republic, a place where humans get a say in how the universe is run. It isn't. As far as I can tell, two officers of the Evil Kingdom die, God and Metatron. Nothing in the book indicates that Archangel Michael will not don the crown of heaven and continue the war. The war has no point and no victory conditions.

Lyra. The girl is supposed to be the new Eve. Apparently this is a sterile Eve, because no new race is born of her. Being the "New Eve" of the entire universe is evidently the same thing as being a freshman co-ed in college. Ho-hum.

Mary. The ex-nun was supposed to be the new serpent. She simply is not. There is nothing and no one she talks to that is persuaded to depart from submission to the evil God. The wheeled creatures were not Church victims. No one is in chains to be set free.

There is no new Eden, no victory, no change, no nothing.

The Evil Church. It is merely arbitrarily said to be evil, but nothing in the plot shows it to be evil. It sends out an assassin to kill a child, but this is done apparently for no reason, and it is not a worse thing than what Asriel does in killing children to open a gate to a new world.

The Evil God. As far as I can tell the Evil Church does not even know that the Evil God exists. He does not give them Dust-power or create evil miracles when they are starting their evil inquisitions, because there are no evil miracles and no evil inquisitions on stage. Killing Evil God would not put Evil Church out of business, or even require a half-day holiday to change the branding.

Mrs. Coulter. Starts out evil, decides to rescue her child, and then sacrifice herself to slay Metatron. None of these motives are established, and nothing comes of them. Certainly Lyra never finds out what happened to her Mom. I don't remember if she even knew it was her Mom. Had Metatron died by choking on a fishbone, or some other death as arbitrary and stupid as the one that felled his boss, not a single word in the book that led up to that event and not a single word in any scene that comes after would need to be changed. No references are made to it: the act exists in a vacuum; nothing is accomplished.

This list could go on and on. Indeed, I am hard pressed to think of a single event or plot point that is not introduced arbitrarily and then swept off stage without meaning and without consequences. There was no reason given as to why Lyra was the "Chosen One" who could read the Golden Compass, no explanation of who made the artifact or why. Nothing comes from any prophecies about her, which means that the art of reading the Dust for clues about the future (Lyra's only skill in the book) means nothing.

If all the prophecies are fake, what is the point of having your main character girl be a prophetess?

Nothing comes of Will's wound to his hand. Nothing comes of Will's missing father. Nothing comes of Lord Asriel's experiments: he breaks through to a new world, but so what? All that means is that he released another specter into the environment. Lord Asriel gathers a titanic army, but so what? Mrs. Coulter offs the head general on the other side. We all know that the killing of Yamamoto would have stopped World War II, right? Oh, wait a minute….

Does the homosexual angel who was banished from heaven ever get back again and revisit his sodomite lover? Aside from whether you think this plot element is Politically Progressive or jarringly tasteless for a children's book, the fact of the matter is that the plot never returns to this character, and we never find out. Just one more point where the plot suffers from attention deficit disorder.

Let me emphasize the most pointless plot point on this whole pointless list.

Lyra kills the ghosts. This is a particularly egregious example, and the flaw would have been particularly easy to fix. All you have to do is set it up and follow through. Nothing in her character or in the plot before this scene makes her, or the reader, or anyone, have any stake in the outcome, emotional or otherwise, in this scene. It makes sense on no level, either as metaphor or as literature. Why would the ghosts prefer oblivion to a disembodied existence? If their new life is not oblivion, then either they are going to some sort of reincarnation, to a self-hood-destroying union with the Cosmic All, or to a Last Judgment: in this last case the Evil Church is correct about life after death. In the other two cases, the Hindu or the Buddhist is correct, neither of which has any representatives in the plot. For an atheist book to be preaching an oriental religion is baffling to say the least. Nothing comes of it. Nothing that was wrong is set right because the ghosts are dead.

Compare it to a parallel situation in
The Farthest Shore
by Ursula K. Le Guin. In that book, the unwise wizard Cob attempts to extend his life by necromancy. But his necromancy upsets the equilibrium of the spirit world, and of the world of men. Crops are failing. Magic spells are fading. The Wise are forgetting the names of things. The dragons are dying. All that is good and fair is draining out of the scheme of the world. The door between the world and the afterworld is breached. The living world is becoming slowly to be like the death world.

The Archmage of Roke, Sparrowhawk finds and confronts Cob, who, by then, is neither alive nor dead. Cob has forgotten his own True Name. Now Sparrowhawk must walk through the land of the dead to undo the fracture Cob made in the wall between life and death. This is accomplished, but at a tremendous cost: the magic of Sparrowhawk, greatest of magicians, is gone. But the magic of the world is saved. It is the yearning of the magician Cob for endless life, for Yin without Yang, for Day without Night, that causes the catastrophe.

I must emphasize yet again that I am not talking about the ideas in
The Amber Spyglass
, I am talking about the plot. In
The Farthest Shore
the fact that some imbalance is draining the magic from the world is established in Act One. The reason for the evil is revealed to be something understandable: a necromancer wanted to interfere with the natural balance between life and death in order to win more life for himself. The consequences of the terrible act, and the sacrifices needed to affect a cure, are carried through with admirable plot logic. That Sparrowhawk loses his magic is melancholy, and even unexpected, but it is not arbitrary.

The scene with Lyra killing, (or whatever), the ghosts is almost identical in concept, except that Pullman does everything clumsily that Le Guin does with effortless grace. There is this stuff called Dust, which is apparently demon-stuff. Or maybe it is sexual energy. Or maybe it is self-awareness. Or maybe it is the wisdom that rejects religion. Or maybe it created the universe. Or…. If the author had any idea of what this stuff is, he did not make it clear to this reader, at least. The Dust produces Angels, who are all-powerful beings ruling the universe. Except that they are weak, hollow-boned creatures that a crippled thirteen-year-old can defeat in a wrestling match: Will cracks their bones with his wounded hands when they get in his way. The Evil Church somehow, back in the past, imprisoned a bunch of ghosts in a boring afterworld. Why? Unlike Cob, no reason is given, at least, none I can recall. (I am not willing to go back and reread these books to find the passage where the reason is given, if it exists.)

The boredom makes the ghosts yearn for oblivion. Why? Just because. Lyra shows up, and, for no reason, uses the Subtle Knife to open a gateway into oblivion for them, and the joyful ghosts all annihilate themselves, so that their soul-atoms can be carried off and be recycled. Why? No reason. Does anything come of this? No.

Maybe I am wrong on this point: after all, the harpies were tormenting the ghosts with memories of their sins and crimes. If you actually think people like Stalin and Hitler and Mao, (or, if you are Dante, people like Brutus, Cassius, or Judas), deserve no worse penalty than merely a verbal recitation of their list of crimes, (a pretty doubtful "if"), then why not use the Knife on the harpies and simply kill the harpies, instead of killing the ghosts? Why not open a gateway into some other environment, a place with nice things to look at, rather than into oblivion?