42 Dreams of Arizona Bay

I was introduced to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series several years ago, and loved them so much that I gave copies to my stepbrother as presents. Though they were supposedly children’s books, I think he thought they were a little too hard to read, perhaps too dark. My landlord liked them so much that she bought me new copies to replace the battered second-hand copies I had loaned her.

I am glad that The Golden Compass is getting its spotlight in the movies, but part of me knows that the dark, subtle gripping magic of the books would be lost in the transfer to mass-market film. I don’t want to disappoint myself by taking part of my imagination away.

I won’t see the movie, but I spit on the idea of the controversy. Religious people love to get upset about something they don’t understand, or haven’t even seen. It’s entertainment. It’s fantasy. It has a different religious base, but parallel to this world’s own. And because the religious fanatics critics don’t have an imagination, nor can they tolerate any opinion or view of reality different from their own, they have to trash it. I’ve heard the series denounced as an atheist manifesto. I’m re-reading it right now to see if I get that out of it. I’ve read it several times. I’m an atheist, so I’d delight to pick that up. But if I didn’t pick that up on the first several readings, as an atheist, you can be sure that a kid won’t, either. And I don’t think that a kid is certain to decide to be an atheist from these books, especially if their parents give them an otherwise grounded and loving raising in the church. Instead of teaching to dislike everyone that is different or doesn’t believe as they do.
The responsible thing to do if you object to the content, apart from exercising your right as a parent to not let your child read these books or watch the movie, is to explain the difference between fantasy and reality. As if a child doesn’t figure that out soon enough on their own. Don’t ruin it for the rest of us.

The premise is that there’s an alternate universe humans have physical manifestations of their souls, called daemons (pronounced demon, like my demon Data).

Lyra is our protagonist. A willful and untamed girl living among scholars in an imaginary college at Oxford. Her daemon, Pantalaimon, serves as her caution, her guide, her conscience. They are literally inseparable. Daemons are the opposite sex of their human, and are not fixed in a final form until puberty. Lyra’s Pan can change into whatever he’d like.

I loved the idea of having an animal constantly with me. A complement to my person. An opposite. The other half of a soul.

In other books, and a little in this one, Lyra will learn that not everyone gets a daemon. Intelligent, talking bears yearn for a daemon, but instead have their armor. She meets a boy from another world, perhaps our own, in The Subtle Knife, and she find out he has no daemon, yet is not a lifeless husk.

In the first book, children have been stolen away for experiments to separate them from their daemons, and to investigate something that seems to bother the establishment: Dust. A substance that is believed to be sin. Dust is best seen up in the far North, where Lyra has always been drawn to. And she gets entangled in the struggle between opposing forces of evil: her father Lord Asriel and her mother, the lovely Mrs. Coulter.

I tore through all three books (the third being The Amber Spyglass), watching Lyra’s growth into a young woman whose daemon would soon change forever. I so desperately wanted Pan to be a cat, though that’s not what he turned out to be.

I’m certain my complement would also be a cat.

The movie’s website has a quiz that helps determine what your daemon would be, based on a series of answers. The first time I took it, my daemon was a monkey, which I thought was oddly appropriate. But I couldn’t get it to work right on my blog, so I took it again, and thus got Elleron, a snow leopard.

I’m happy.

Still can’t get it to embed in my blog, but perhaps this link will work.