Like so many Pullmanites eagerly awaiting the release of the third and final installment in The Book of Dust trilogy, I was quite eager to get my hands on any bit of new material to help dull the edges of anticipation.
Fortunately, last week saw the release of Serpentine, the third short novella the Pullmanverse has produced. It began as a hand-written story auctioned off for charity in 2004 after the successful stage production of His Dark Materials. Only now has it been published for a global audience. It takes place a year after the events in Lyra's Oxford, when our heroine is a teenager at school. This adventure begins to set the table, even as an admittedly slim appetizer, for the full-on feast that became The Secret Commonwealth.
So this is my analysis of Serpentine - spoilers and all - though I do want to offer a bit more than a review. It's always nice to bring something unexpected, but hopefully still entertaining, to the party.
Yes, Serpentine is short, weighing in at about 68 pages. For those who literally expected it to be the finale to The Book of Dust, well ... no. This continues the tradition of the short but sweet aforementioned novellas. Having said that, I would consider it a sound investment for the HDM completist.
The book itself is pretty handsome, with a rather lyrical and kinetic cover. It will look especially nice on a shelf, preferably snuggled next to the other novellas. Aside from Pullman's prose, which is always a treat, it features lovely little woodcut images/illustrations by Tom Dunbury.
Pullman has said before he laments the exclusion of pictures from books, so most of the British editions of his work feature illustrations. The prose style is nice and the font size is easy to read, and the book itself is light and attractive. Short or no, the story is worth examining, as it offers a general look at Lyra and her daemon Pantalamion after the events of The Amber Spyglass. But even more intriguing, it also offers a specific look at the relationship between human beings and their daemons in general, which are much richer and more complicated than we had originally imagined.
The driving engine of the story is actually Lyra's growing uneasy preoccupation with what happened to Pan after they were forced to painfully separate on the shore of the world of the dead in HDM. With very few exceptions, humans and daemons are not supposed to break the mystical link that binds them together. They are mirror images of the other, after all. Here we see the faintest fracture between the two that tragically erupts into a fault line years later.
The action takes place in the iconic North of the first novel, as Lyra travels to an archaeological dig at Trollesund funded by Jordan College. Legendary characters like Lee Scoresby and Iorek Byrnison merit appreciated shout-outs. The story on display here, however, centers on Dr. Lanselius, the consul who acts as something of a conduit between the outside world and the magical, mysterious world of the witches.
When Lyra timidly goes to inquire about her own ability to separate, Lanselius educates both her and the audience on how the witches accomplish the same feat. He intuitively guesses her intentions, and it is later revealed he and his serpent daemon can separate as well. During their conversation, Pan and Lanselius' daemon visit the garden outside his house, investigating some cloud-pine left behind by the witches. As such, the consul intuits that Lyra and Pan also have the ability to separate.
For young witches, Lanselius points out separation is practically a rite of passage. There is a region in Siberia where a cataclysmic war with "the spirit world" once took place. After it became an abandoned wasteland, witches have to pass into it, though their daemons are afraid to follow them. This gauntlet allows for purposeful separation to take place.
Anxious to deal with her own guilt and alienation regarding Pan, Lyra learns that one witch she knew, Serafina Pekkala and her daemon Kaisa, experienced much the same thing. Lanselius assures her that all of the witches "felt a great betrayal" after the act, although he admits it was even worse for Lyra, as she had no idea what to expect. After her own terrible split with Kaisa, Serafina simply "waited, and treated him kindly, and said nothing."
Lyra realizes she will have to do the same with her daemon, which means she will have to "keep on not knowing" what happened to him when they parted ways for the first time in their life. Dr. Lanselius tries to comfort her, noting "You know, it isn't really surprising that there are things about ourselves that still remain a mystery to us .... Maybe we should be comforted that the knowledge is there, even if it's withheld for awhile."
Thus the daemon remains a remarkable metaphor for mysterious aspects of ourselves or our consciousness, remarkable not the least of which for being - at least in this alternative Brytain - actually outside the person they're an aspect of. These externalized animal forms are not simply some form of cute decoration, as Pullman insists.
"I hope that, above all," he writes in the closing notes to this particular story, "these books are about being alive and being human."
Along these lines, I would like to shift the focus from the narration to some of the meaning lurking behind it. Like Serpentine itself, this is but the briefest of introductions to what will no doubt be an enormous theme of the book I'll hopefully write eventually. Still, as the human-daemon relationship is at the forefront of this little tale, it seems too relevant and interesting not to mention.
In more than one interview he's given or even article he's written, Pullman has noted the influence of Dr. Iain McGilchrist on his thinking over the past few years. This profound intellectual has been both a student of literature as well as of science and medicine, which has proven an exceptionally fertile ground for him. McGilchrist is best known for the now iconic book The Master and His Emissary, along with its meaningful subtitle, The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.
In the quickest shorthand, McGilchrist goes along with debunking the once popular psychology regarding the function of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. It's not that the right hemisphere is creative and emotional and the left hemisphere is grounded and rational. Both hemispheres are actually involved in all patterns of mental and emotional activity, be they reading or writing or engineering or mathematics or analytics. However, the way in which the hemispheres process and interpret the world is completely different.
If we think of it mainly in terms of focus or attention, and speak rather broadly, the right hemisphere of the brain is much more aware of the world it's in and the life it's living. Its attention manages to be more open, broad, sustained, alert, flexible, and intuitive than its counterpart. By contrast, the left hemisphere is often narrow, rigid, focused, mechanical, prone to certainties, and much more concerned with the parts than the whole.
McGilchrist noted this same brain structure is present in all animals, and hypothesizes it has to do with successfully obtaining food in the wild. The left hemisphere has to narrow in on its dinner and prey, while the right has to be more open to its surrounding environment and be on the look out for danger or potential mates and so on.
For further information, this is a straightforward animated video that begins exploring these ideas. It's one of the most fascinating strains of thought I've found in recent years, and many people have said it provides an interpretation of not only society as a whole but their own personal lives as well that is rich and revolutionary. While I am quick to point out that this is not an exact correlation, this work in neuroscience is a very powerful lens through which to view the human-daemon relationship in Pullman's work.
For instance, the alienation between some humans and their daemons can be seen as corresponding to the alienation between the two halves of the brain, and the way they process and assimilate the world. This is a very simple example, but much of the dialogue in the last part of Serpentine can be used to illustrate this.
On the tractor ride back to the archaeology camp, Pan tells Lyra that Dr. Lanselius hadn't actually known about their ability to separate until Lyra had inadvertently let it slip. The consul's daemon had told Pan that when they had been away in the garden, exploring the cloud-pine. As for Lyra, "Her attention had been focused entirely on Dr. Lanselius himself."
Intriguingly, Pan then reveals that Dr. Lanselius and his snake daemon could separate as well. Lyra is confused by this. "Wait. He didn't tell me he'd done it, but she showed you." Pan confirmed that this is indeed what had happened. Lyra mused that maybe they should have done the same and not overtly told them. Pan agreed. "Yes, just let them see."
Next, Pan soon reveals that Lanselius and Serafina were once lovers, initially chalking his observation up to seeing a scarlet flower that the witch once wore in her crown. He said the flower was a token of their love, only to initially backtrack and simply hint that he had "worked it out." The snake daemon didn't "tell" him, he just intuited it. Lyra then assured him if Pan knew something, she would soon "know" it too.
Notice these exchanges somewhat resemble McGilchrist's outline for the right and left hemispheres of the brain. If we take daemons as a loose analogy for the former, and their human counterparts for the latter, the dialogue takes on a deeper meaning. Like the left hemisphere, more concerned with narrowed attention and directly talking to convey knowledge and information, Lyra was focused exclusively on her conversation with Dr. Lanselius. Like the right, Pantalamion was subtly and intuitively working things out, taking in the situation in its entirety.
When Lyra goes on interrogate Pan about the other things he and the snake daemon had talked about, he tellingly remarks, "The fact remains that you don't notice anything, and I do." If the right brain was rooted in speech, this could be a remark it could just as easily make about the left.
Remember the right hemisphere tends to be much more grounded in reality, and takes into account the whole, rather than just the parts. But yet just as with real human mind, both daemon and human are not simply part of the same being, they are the same being, ultimately whole and inseparable. They nonetheless have different ways of viewing reality.
"You're more observant, you're this, you're that. I never notice anything ... " Lyra complains to Pan as more snow begins to fall. "That's all true, Pan. I know it is." Then she sums up their delicate balancing act well. "You notice things for me, and I think of things for you. We do what we're good at."
But she is wise enough to realize they desperately need to nourish each other and maintain their connection and dialogue. "We used to be kind to each other. We are each other. We shouldn't have secrets. We should tell the truth to each other." McGilchrist has said as much concerning the two hemispheres of the brain, and how many of the ailments of current Western civilization are caused by a break similar to the human-daemon separation in Pullman's narrative.
As night falls and the snow gathers on the ride back, Lyra and Pan finally have their much needed heart to heart talk. Lyra confesses she knows she did something horrible to him when she abandoned him on the shores of the world of the dead, and that he had the right to keep his experiences to himself. She didn't want to push him, but at the same time, she didn't want him to ever feel that she didn't care about him and his well-being.
Unknowingly laying groundwork for The Book of Dust trilogy, Pan goes on to let her how even all witches and their daemons do not come out of the separation process whole again. Tragically, this most intimate relationship is severed for other people in their world as well, with humans and their daemons sometimes refusing to speak or even touch each other.
"They only live half a life, really."
Such is metaphorical of the crucial relationship and balance between the right and left hemispheres of the brain, with human beings in the real world acting in often total estrangement to vitally important aspects of themselves. But more on that in a later book.
In conclusion, Lyra thinks back to the abyss she very nearly fell into in the world of the dead, while Pan and his fellow daemon Kirjava were off exploring on their own. At the same time, the daemons had fallen into a river and gone over a waterfall. Both somehow sensed what the other was going through, hinting at their still powerful connection after all.
After a quick word about crucial characters like Will Parry and Mary Malone from HDM, Pullman writes "They both fell silent. But this falling was into the loved and familiar, into safety." For the purposes of this short story, Lyra and Pan earn a temporary reprieve, with both respecting the other. "[Lyra] felt proud of him, because not many people had daemons as clear-sighted as Pantalamion. She stroked his head and settled down deeper in the furs as they fell asleep."
Unlike the "falling" when they were separated and making their way without each other, this "falling" is blessedly together, and if no more had been written on their story, one would hope their relationship was back on its way to being repaired.
Well, thanks to anyone who actually read this far down, as this review feels about as long as the novella itself. But I just wanted to explore some themes and metaphors in anticipation of what is to come later, in whatever format. Serpentine was not much on action and adventure, but it did offer a nice snap shot (or lantern slide), of the ever-intriguing world of Lyra and Pan.
One thing I failed to mention was Pan's idea concerning how he and Lyra might be able to bypass the alethiometer altogether, and tease knowledge and insight out of the universe directly, without using the truth telling device as a medium. Now that is a fascinating idea, and I for one am eager to see if Pullman will capitalize on it in the final novel ....
P.S. This is a great little article on the publication of Serpentine, so enjoy!
Stay Dusty My Friends
#PhilipPullman #HisDarkMaterials #TheBookOfDust #Daemons #Dust
No comments:
Post a Comment