Northern Lights / The Golden Compass

This review contains spoilers.

The first novel of the His Dark Materials trilogy, Northern Lights (the American title is The Golden Compass) is a fascinating fantasy novel that envelops a child’s adventure in an enticing theological debate: the protagonist’s journey into the North to save her friends is wrapped around discussions about sin, guilt, and the nature of the human soul.

We follow Lyra Belacqua, a young orphan girl who lives in Jordan College in a fantastical world that is much like ours, but with one crucial distinction: in her world, a part of each person’s soul lives beside them, assuming an animal form – and these beings are called daemons. One day, Lyra is visited by a mysterious woman, Mrs. Coulter, who takes her to London with the promise of making Lyra her assistant. At the same time, her friend Roger is kidnapped by a sinister group that the people call “Gobblers”.

“Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening Hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen,” this is how Northern Lights opens, with Lyra sneaking inside a forbidden room in Jordan College. It immediately shows us how the protagonist is prone to curiosity and disobedience, introducing her as a rebel figure. Just a few pages later, we also learn that she’s constantly beaten for her adventures in the College, that is, she’s well acquainted with the notion that transgression brings punishment, but she doesn’t care. In short, she’s a wild thing:

“In many ways, Lyra was a barbarian. What she liked best was clambering over the College roofs with Roger, the Kitchen boy who was her particular friend, to spit plum-stones on the heads of passing Scholars or to hoot like owls outside a window where a tutorial was going on, or racing through the narrow streets, or stealing apples from the market, or waging war.”

Even more important than her rebellious nature is the fact that Lyra is introduced alongside Pan, her daemon, as a pair or a duo. It’s “Lyra and her daemon:” the bond that connects them is vital. A daemon works almost as a spirit animal, whose form changes during childhood and eventually settles during puberty, mirroring that person’s personality. A child’s nature is still developing, their mind is a melting pot of feelings and ideas, and so their daemons change all the time to reflect that. But when a person grows up, their personality becomes more fixed, and so their daemons settle into a single form that represents it.

This is taken into account in Lyra’s society. Since a dog represents obedience, people tend to assume that a person with a dog daemon has a servile disposition: “As Lyra held her breath she saw the servant’s daemon (a dog, like almost all servants’ daemons).” This fantastical element is also used to show that people have a dual-sex nature, possessing a bit of both sides inside them: a person with a daemon of the same sex is a rare sight in Lyra’s world.

And Lyra’s daemon functions very similar to a superego, the part of ourselves that is supposed to urge caution, control our impulses, and repress desires. One of Pan’s first lines to her is, “Behave yourself.” He admits he’s a coward and often complains about her actions (“Hiding and spying is for silly children”), encouraging her to behave. Pan is basically Lyra’s polar opposite, the necessary counterbalance to her wild nature, a means of self-control.

Despite Lyra’s energy, most of Northern Light’s narrative is propelled by the side characters, namely Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter. Asriel is introduced through Lyra’s eyes: “her uncle, a man whom she admired and feared greatly. He was said to be involved in high politics, in secret exploration, in distant warfare, and she never knew when he was going to appear.”

Asriel is often described in ambivalent terms by Lyra: admiration and fear, pleasure and apprehension. She loves when he visits her, even though just the sound of his voice is sufficient to send Lyra “a shiver of cold surprise.” He’s unpredictable in her eyes, involved in matters too grand, his motivations unfathomable to her. Asriel is a fierce man with an imposing, belligerent presence: “It was a face to be dominated by, or to fight: never a face to patronize or pity,” the narrator remarks.

When Lyra tells Asriel that she has discovered his true identity and now knows he’s not her uncle, but her father, his answer is a simple and dismissive, “Yes. So what?” His indifference toward Lyra is one of his most defining traits, as it is the fruit of his ego and arrogance: only Asriel matters to Asriel.

Mrs. Coulter is another crucial character that has a somewhat similar effect on Lyra. She also hides her identity – she’s Lyra’s mother – and she has the same unmistakable presence: when she’s in a room all eyes and ears are on her. Coulter leaves Lyra in awe: the word “intoxicated” is even used to describe the girl’s state around the woman. The ambivalence that so marks Asriel is also prevalent in Coulter’s descriptions, showing how these two characters are very much alike: “What Mrs Coulter was saying seemed to be accompanied by a scent of grown-upness, something disturbing but enticing at the same time.”

But, unlike Asriel, we know right away that Coulter is keeping her dangerous side hidden from Lyra. Asriel is also dangerous and violent, but this side of him is there for everyone to see: his first physical interaction with Lyra is not a hug or a kiss, but twisting her arm in anger. Now, Mrs. Coulter doesn’t let her anger show, she’s actually kind, gentle, and civilized, but it’s all a façade. We know she’s behind the child kidnappings because one chapter shows a woman with a golden monkey doing it, and she has that daemon, but Lyra takes a while to discover this. In other words, both Asriel and Mrs. Coulter kill people, but the difference is that while this is a part of Asriel’s fearsome persona, with Mrs. Coulter it’s a dirty secret.

Daemons are primarily used as a quick summary of a character’s overall personality (snakes are cunning, dogs are servile, and a great snow leopard is commandeering, dangerous, and imposing) but they also work as a way to reveal the relationship between characters. Take the final scene with Mrs. Coulter and Asriel. While they argue about whether she should go with him or not, their daemons act in what appears to be a BDSM dynamic, showing how Asriel and Mrs. Coulter love, but hurt each other: “Their daemons were playing fiercely; the snow leopard rolled over on her back, and the monkey raked his claws in the soft fur of her neck, and she growled a deep rumble of pleasure.”

Mrs. Coulter defies gender roles. The narrator describes how she’s a woman “so unlike female scholars or gyptian boat-mothers or college servant’s as almost to be a new sex altogether, one with dangerous powers and qualities such as elegance, charm, and grace.” Again, it’s her civilized aspect that is brought up as dangerous, since it hides her true intent. When Lyra starts to doubt Mrs. Coulter, she manages to escape and ends up meeting the Gyptians.

The Gyptians are a wandering people that live in boats. They are marginalized and oppressed, receiving no help from the police when their children are kidnapped. However, they are as fierce as Asriel and Mrs. Coulter, and so decide to travel themselves to the North to where the children are supposedly being kept: they intend to save them no matter the cost, even though they are ill-equipped to battle. But they are kind to Lyra, as they owe a debt to Asriel, and agree to take her in.

Northern Lights doesn’t hold back in the language when it comes to violence. When a Gyptian woman talks about what the gobblers might want with their kids, and about the rumors of what they do with them, there’s no euphemism in her words: “We hear about children with no heads, or about children cut in half and sewn together, or about things too awful to mention.” The leader of the Gyptians, Lord Faa, answers her by promising more violence in the form of revenge, “we shall strike such a blow as’ll make their hearts faint and fearful. We shall strike the strength out of’ em. We shall leave them ruined and waste, broken and shattered, torn in a thousand pieces and scattered to the four winds. My own hammer is thirsty for blood.”

Lyra’s friends possess a warlike disposition. When she arrives in the North, she meets an armored bear, Iorek Byrnison, who makes an even bigger impression than the Gyptians. “War is the sea I swim in and the air I breathe,” he says. The first time Lyra meets him, she notices how his voice alone is enough to shake the earth, and how even his smell is overpowering. His description is something we would expect to be attached to a villain: “Lyra had an impression of blood-stained muzzle and face, small malevolent black eyes, and an immensity of dirty matted yellowish fur.” “Malevolent” is hardly a common adjective attached to a friend of a child protagonist, but Northern Lights revels in ambivalent characters and rejects any form of simple binary characterization.

While Lyra’s friends seem barbarian (just like her), the villains of this story boast a civilized look. They are the scientists that perform an operation called “intercision”, which is the separation of a person from their daemon. The image of a severed child is striking: Lyra encounters a little boy huddled against a row of gutted fish, clutching one as if his life depends on it. He was looking for his daemon and found only the hollow corpse of an animal to grab.

The scientists that do the intercision don’t have a horrible appearance to mirror their souls. On the contrary, they appear “smart and educated and important.” Evil in Northern Lights hides beneath a civilized façade, and there’s cruel intent behind gentle gestures. Mrs. Coulter is the symbol of that, as Lyra remarks:

“All the other things she’d seen, and even the hideous cruelty of the intercision, she could cope with; she was strong enough; but the thought of that sweet face and gentle voice, the image of that golden playful monkey, was enough to melt her stomach and make her pale and nauseous.”

And the reason for the intercision, for why they are cutting a person’s soul away from them, is directly related to the most important theme in the book, as it’s the bedrock of both Asriel and Mrs. Coulter’s motivations. The reason is a magical substance called Dust, which has a religious framing, getting its name from a passage in the Bible: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground, for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

Asriel tells Lyra to grab a Bible and read a passage from the book of Genesis so that she can understand Dust better. He explains that Dust is an elementary particle that can be seen and studied, but one that the Magisterium – this world’s version of the Roman Catholic Church – fears greatly, as it believes it to be connected to the Original Sin, to the moment where Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and started to recognize good and evil.

In this version of the story, Adam and Eve have daemons, of course, and their presence is vital to the tale because it makes its theme more visible, giving form to the gain of consciousness and personality that came with the eating of the fruit. This is what Asriel reads about Adam and Eve after they fall to temptation:

“And the eyes of them both were opened, and they saw the true form of their daemons, and spoke with them. But when the man and the woman knew their own daemons, they knew that a great change had come upon them, for until that moment where it had seemed that they were at one with all the creatures of the earth and the air, and there was no difference between them: and they saw the difference, and they knew good and evil; and they were ashamed, and they sewed leaves together to cover their nakedness…”

“And that is how sin came into the world,” Asriel concludes, “sin and shame and death. It came the moment their daemons became fixed.” The reason for cutting children’s daemons away, then, becomes evident: Mrs. Coulter, an agent of the Magisterium, wants to preserve their sinless souls.

The question that the narrative presents us is: if the Church could revert the Original Sin, and prevent people from gaining self-consciousness, would it do it? And would it be a good thing? Mrs. Coulter has no doubts about the matter. For her, self-consciousness is sin, it’s bad, it’s evil, and it harms us. She explains it as such to Lyra:

“At the age we call puberty, the age you’re coming to very soon, darling, daemons bring all sorts of troublesome thoughts and feelings, and that’s what lets Dust in. A quick operation before that and you are never troubled again.”

The connection with puberty is crucial to the discussion because it connects “self-consciousness” with rebellion, with an adolescent’s inclination to question things, the urge to disobey, the need for independence, and to think for themselves. The Church not only defends that this is sinful, the narrative seems to argue, but their solution to the matter is even more heartless: the people who are cut by Mrs. Coulter and lose their daemons become dead inside, empty vessels ready to be directed by the Magisterium. In other words, self-consciousness is a sin only because it makes a person hard to control.

Northern Lights only falters when it comes to a prophecy related to Lyra, as it doesn’t add to its major themes and ends up feeling like it’s there just because it’s a genre trope. Prophecy always brings with it the question of “free will vs destiny” and the characters talk about this openly: “You speak of destiny,” a character says, “as if it was fixed. And I ain’t sure I like that any more than a war I’m enlisted in without knowing about it. Where’s my free will, if you please? And this child seems to me to have more free will than anyone I ever met. Are you telling me that she’s just some kind of clockwork toy wound up and set going on a course she can’t change?”

In other words, there’s a clear attempt to avoid the problem of the prophecy removing Lyra’s agency. They say she must be free to make mistakes, for example, so the destination may be set, but how she gets there is up to her. There’s a character, however, that defends that free will is indeed a farce, a lie we must tell ourselves to keep going: “We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not,” the witch Serafina says. In the end, however, the prophecy doesn’t play a big part in the novel and works just as a clunky set-up for the sequels.

Northern Lights is a fascinating novel that boasts a plethora of larger-than-life characters and a complex theological discussion on the nature of sin and consciousness. It’s a brilliant start to the His Dark Materials trilogy.

February 15, 2023.