Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth

by Wright, John C.

  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.

  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 McG
uffin 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.)