The Golden Compass and Philosophy by Richard Greene

Author:Richard Greene
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812698152
Publisher: Open Court

Lyra’s Oxford actually begins with two addresses directly to the reader—a frontispiece quotation describing Oxford (taken from an actual book), but attributed to one Oscar Baedecker’s The Coasts of Bohemia and a preface from an author. It is not signed by Philip Pullman (nor by anyone else), but the reference to the coasts of Bohemia might make us feel entwined in a fictional world.

Early on, Lyra speaks “severely” to Pan when he suggests that the starlings overhead may mean nothing. “Everything means something . . . We just have to find out how to read it.” Yet she herself is finally revealed as having rushed too fast to settle on a meaning. We follow her reliance upon such diverse sources as personal recollections, local legends, scholarly point of view, and street maps, all of which initially seem appealing because they might bring an end to uncertainty. Yet the map, for example, which bears a hand-written notation at the top, “Mary Malone lives here,” is inserted literally into the text so that it breaks into a question about time, which would seem a certainty but is not necessarily so. Lyra wants certainty; Pan is urging her to slow down: “Don’t. Wait. Hush.” Lyra’s own ego-involvement as the flawed puzzle-solver reminds us also that Lyra is now growing to maturity in the world of scholars, not of armored polar bears, where a tourist map also carries ads for esoteric scholarly books and nothing is quite as it seems.

Lyra’s not the only one being encouraged to make mistakes in interpretations. Through his use of a variety of birds, all of which have established allusive or connotative backgrounds, Pullman leads the reader on to make something of it. The starlings are gritty, urban, unloved birds, and yet we learn eventually that they were acting to protect Lyra. The swan arrives, not like an isolated Zeusian sexual antagonist, as we might have thought, but hurtles in like a protective bodyguard and one who must be returned to his community at the end. The nightingale song provides more solace than answers: we know now that Will’s dæmon is a nightingale and that Will and his dæmon can function apart from each other, but could this nightingale be Kirjava? Both Lyra and the reader learn that the ability to stay open to meaning and process is more important than the ability to close down too fast on a conclusion. At the end, after Lyra and Pan have left the alchemist, Sebastian Makepeace, and they wonder about the sound of a bird,

‘Things don’t mean things as simply as that,’ Lyra said, uncertainly. ‘Do they?’

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