La Belle Sauvage

Book of Dust Volume One 'La Belle Sauvage' by Philip Pullman sat, incredibly, for several months, on the arm of the sofa. Having agreed to read it together there just weren't moments when we were all in the house and available at the same time, and then Monkey kept going away visiting and then we had the house move and it just dragged on and on. The dust (but not the Dust) has settled and now, finally, we managed to read. Philip Pullman did not disappoint, but then I would never have expected him to. It was wonderful to re-enter the world of the alethiometer, to meet old friends (though somewhat younger than they were last time) and find new ones. 

Malcolm Polstead and his daemon Asta live on the river and own a boat, La Belle Sauvage. The boat herself becomes as much of a character as anyone else, and her fate is just as vital to the plot. The insidious influence of the church, represented by the Consistorial Court of Discipline, is encroaching on daily life, recruiting school children to spy on their friends and family. The arrival of a baby at the priory across the river, brings a variety of strangers to The Trout inn, all very curious about her. After witnessing peculiar events on the riverbank Malcolm is befriended by the scholar Hannah Relf, who's appearance in His Dark Materials is unremarkable, but here she draws him unintentionally into the underground movement 'Oakley street'. When another of our old friends, Farder Coram, arrives and gives Malcolm some timely advice we know to trust him, though all that follows takes on a magical quality; who is responsible for the flood is never quite clear. 

We enjoyed being able to spot people we already knew, and to feel familiar with the terminology of Lyra's world. The book does much to satisfy the need to know more detail, more background to the events in Dark Materials, to broaden the picture of the other world. We jumped back in as if we had never left. 

Here is Malcolm on the riverbank watching a stranger search for something he has dropped:

" 'We could go and help,' said Asta.
Malcolm was torn. He could still see the grebes, and he very much wanted to watch them, but the man seemed as if he needed help, and he was sure Asta's eyes would find the thing, whatever it was. It would only take a minute or so.
But before he had the chance to do anything, the man bent and scooped up his cat-daemon and made of quite quickly down the towpath as if he'd decided to go and get help. At once Malcolm backed the canoe out of the reeds and sped forward to the spot under the oak tree, where the man had been standing. A moment later he'd jumped out holding the painter, and Asta in the shape of a mouse shot across the path and under the bush. A rustling of leaves, a silence, more rustling, more silence, while Malcolm watched the man reach the little iron footbridge to the piazza and climb the steps. Then a squeak of excitement told Malcolm that Asta had found it, and squirrel-formed she came racing back, up his rm and on to his shoulder, and dropped something into his hand.
'It must be this,' she said. 'It must be.'
At first sight it was an acorn, but it was oddly heavy, and when he looked more closely he saw that it was carved out of a piece of tight-grained wood. Two pieces, in face: one for the cup, whose surface was carved into an exact replica of the rough overlapping scales of a real one and stained very lightly with green; and one for the nut, which was polished and waxed a perfect glossy light brown. It was beautiful, and Asta was right: it had to be the thing the man had lost." (p.29.30)

Thanks Philip, we eagerly await the next instalment.

Dark Materials (at last)

I have been waiting to write this review for what seems like years. I was pointed to these books by a friend, back before the third book was published in 2000, and we read them aloud as a family (I say 'we' and for a change this did include my ex in the experience, I remember having to hand over the book when I was crying too much at the end to carry on reading). The books have been an ongoing passion for Creature, read and re-read to the point of memorisation, listening to the tapes on long journeys and then several years ago we went to Oxford and spent four hours queueing in the rain for an open casting for the part of Lyra when the films were planned. I sat in horror as we watched the closing scene of The Golden Compass as I realised to what extent they were going to butcher the story, so lets not go there (though to give due credit most of the actors were well chosen for the parts and the characters, if not the plot, were excellently executed). Over the last couple of weeks I have been listening to the tapes again while painting in my bedroom so have come back to a review I started a couple of years ago and decided to finish it.

Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy consists of Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. The first, Northern Lights, tells the tale of Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon, who live in a world like this one but different, their life at Jordan College and how political changes come to their world and take them away from everything they know. She is an ignorant wild child with a mysterious background who by simple childish curiosity finds herself caught up in monumental changes. Learning to use the alethiometer, which communicates with Dust, she travels with the gyptians to the far north, the land of the northern lights, and armoured bears and witches. And her father Lord Asriel, who blasts an opening into another world and leads Lyra into the second book. The Subtle Knife introduces Will, who lives in 'our world', but who's search for his missing father leads him quite by chance to find a window through which he enters another, where he encounters Lyra. Although they think they have their own tasks to pursue they find themselves inexplicably bound together. Will unintentionally finds himself in possession of the Subtle Knife, which cuts openings between worlds, and with the help of the witches they set off in search of his father. In the third book the story diverges on many paths: in one Lyra has been taken by Mrs Coulter and hidden in a far distant mountain cave, to protect her from the evil intentions of the church; in another we follow Will as he travels in search of her; in a third there is Mary Mallone, a research scientist from Will's world who learned from Lyra how to communicate with dark matter, and who travels to the world of the Mulefa and who has a vital role to play in the unfolding events; and finally we have the republic established by Lord Asriel in yet another world, from where a great army is gathering to fight the might of the established church. Oh yes, and then there's Mrs Coulter and her golden monkey, beautiful and wicked, a threatening presence throughout the story, until she redeems herself at the end.

Now that is a really brief summary of the story, go to Wiki if you want more details, and a full rundown of the cast of characters, because there is so much more to it than a fantasy story about two children. It is an exploration of philosophical, metaphysical and religious ideas. It is a challenge to the whole idea of religion, and the effect that it has had on humanity. And yet at the same time it creates the idea that religion is real, we meet 'God' and the angels and go to the land of the dead. He embraces the idea that there is more to life than we can know or understand, but seems to conclude with the idea that it is our responsibilities towards our fellow human beings that should be the defining feature of what makes life good and worthwhile. 

I think that what marks out good fantasy writing (if this can strictly be called fantasy, I am not so sure) is that the world that is created and the ideas within it are complete, logical and coherent. It is what is so good about the Discworld, and what is weak about the Harry Potter books. Things that happen have to be credible within the confines of the imaginary creation. This is something that Philip Pullman achieves spectacularly and on an impressive scale. Sometimes he waffles a bit and occasionally the story moves too slowly, but you can forgive him those things. He never talks down to his readers and does not shy away from being demanding or intellectual. Having said that two things remain unanswered questions for me: firstly the idea of daemons, and the nature of their physical presence. They seem to be real solid creatures, but how do they come into being, are they born with the person and yet on death they vanish into nothingness. And secondly I was left very disquieted by his idea of death, of the idea of a consciousness left trapped in the world of the dead. And his solution was the one thing that, when I thought about it further, was unsatisfying: if there are an infinite number of universes and thus an infinite number of dead souls, and only one exit, you could still wait an infinite time in the land of the dead. Or does the soul not have a sense of time passing. I am not sure, but it still sounds unbearable. It is essentially what makes me an atheist, that the concept of eternity is non sensical to a human being, and non existence is preferable to an eternity of anything, even paradise. This is what I like about the books, that they cause you to think about such big questions. But also it's not just to be clever; it is such a great story and appeals to the child in you that wants there to be more to life, for there to be adventure and discoveries, for there to be a purpose to life and a heroic task to undertake, for there to be magic.

I could quote all sorts of things, we must have a hundred favourite moments from the story but I will give you this as a taster, from The Subtle Knife, Will finding the window:

"The cat stepped forward, and vanished.
Will blinked. Then he stood still, close to the trunk of the nearest tree, as a truck came round the circle and swept it's lights over him. When it had gone passed he crossed the road, keeping his eyes on the spot where the cat had been investigating. It wasn't easy, because there was nothing to fix on, but when he came to the place and cast about to look closely, he saw it.
At least, he saw it from some angles. It looked as if someone had cut a patch out of the air, about two metres from the edge of the road, a patch roughly square in shape and less than a metre across. If you were level with the patch so that it was edge-on, it was nearly invisible, and it was completely invisible from behind. You could only see it from the side nearest the road, and you couldn't see it easily even from there, because all you could see through it was exactly the same kind of thing that lay in front of it on this side: a patch of grass lit by a street light.
But Will knew without the slightest doubt that the patch of grass on the other side was in a different world.
He couldn't have said why. He knew it at once, as strongly that he knew fire burned and kindness was good. He was looking at something profoundly alien.
And for that reason alone, it enticed him to stoop and look further. What he saw made his head swim and his heart thump harder, but he didn't hesitate: he pushed his shopping bag through, and then scrambled through himself, through the hole in the fabric of this world and into another." (p14-15)

You can pop back to Midsummers Day 2009 when we took a visit to Will and Lyra's bench in the Botanical Gardens in Oxford, which is another of my most visited posts. I am guessing that, even though it is 12 years since the final book was published, there were a few people gathering the other day to sit on the bench, just as we did.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman.
I really wanted this book to be something engaging and it just wasn't. We have been fans of Pullman for years, I started reading His Dark Materials to the children on the recommendation of a friend and have loved them ever since, I recall waiting impatiently for the final instalment to be published.

This book is a retelling of the story of Jesus as if he were twins, Jesus being the one going out doing the preaching and the miracles, and Christ observing him from the sidelines and watching and planning for the future. So he retells briefly lots of little incidents that are related in the gospels, and meanwhile Christ is busy writing it all down under the guidance of a mysterious stranger claiming to be an angel. There is only one character really, that is Christ, but I don't get him at all. He is not particularly devious or anything and you get no sense of his motivation. Jesus is just this distant figure in the background, until the very end where we see him in the Garden of Gethsemane basically praying to a god he no longer seems to believe exists, and then Christ himself plays the role of both betrayer and the resurrected Jesus.

I guess it is a neat little critique of how 'the church' has altered and twisted the original message of Jesus and become this monolithic institution that is only interested in perpetuating it's own power and influence. But it doesn't say anything that has not been argued better in other places, and to put it in a novel adds nothing to the debate. He makes little jibes about the virgin birth (having a handsome young man come through the bedroom window claiming to be an angel) and then Christ participating in a 'fake' resurrection, but you are not sure what he is trying to achieve, whether it is a criticism of the Jesus story or of the institution of the church as a whole. I am not sure who the book is aimed at, the writing is a little deadpan and devoid of any real characters. All in all I was very disappointed.

15 books

So I found this idea on a series of blogs yesterday evening, people gave it different titles and different emphasis, see here or here or here, but with the same basic principle. So these are my books, not really 'favourites' but ones that have had an impact on me, maybe on my thinking or opening up something new to me, or left a lasting impression or maybe just important for a while. These first 9 are fiction then the last 6 are non-fiction.

1. The Sneetches and other stories by Dr Seuss. Though I do love The Sneetches it is the story about the trousers with no-one inside 'em that stayed with me (What was I scared of), because it really scared me as a child. I have read Dr Seuss endlessly to my kids, The Lorax and How the Grinch Stole Christmas being other favourites.
2. That was then and this is now by S.E. Hinton. This is the book from my teenage years that stays with me. It is about friendship and growing up, and mostly it was the ending I remember, where Bryon makes a choice that is so hard, but the right thing to do.
3. The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula le Guin. Another book I fell in love with as a teenager, and waited 20 years for the fourth and fifth books which she wrote to continue the tale of Ged and Tenar. Fantasy writing at its best and an ending that was absolutely, perfectly satisfying.
4. The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks. I started reading this trilogy at about 15 or 16, it is about a young woman having a baby 'out of wedlock' (set in the 60's so not really acceptable) and I just loved the people in it and the romantic notion of the ongoing relation ship between Jane and Toby. Just life and friendship (I can see a theme developing here:-)
5. The Magus by John Fowles. A boy in my English A level class carried this book around with him for two years, and I was always curious about it, so I read it, and it started me on my 'John Fowles' period (through my early twenties). A wonderfully complex book, with lots of ideas and history. I went on to read everything else he wrote, The Collector was one of my favourites.
6. Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling. Although I don't love these books I had to put them in because they were such a big and ongoing part of our lives for a few years. We read them over and over, at one point I did a three day stint, reading the first three books one after another while we all sat in the spare room, stopping only for drinks when my voice gave out. It is something the children remember and still talk about.
7. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. This has to be in because they are basically the best books I ever read to my kids, and the most challenging for young people in terms of their ideas and philosophy, they really make you think. It continues to be M's favourite and she has read and listened to the tapes so much she can practically recite them.
8. The Woman who Walked into Doors by Roddy Doyle. A startling book because it is the story of an abused woman, and you totally forget it is written by a man. I love it because it made me understand the thinking of another person in a way you rarely find. And I have never had such an overwhelming physical reaction to a book; at the end, when she finally breaks and hits him with the frying pan, I wanted her to hit him again, until he was dead, the sense of release of the anger and frustration was quite intense.
9. We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver. This is the most recent book on the list. It's about being a parent and made me think very hard about what that involves. It challenges every preconception you might have on the subject, and I tend to find that is a good thing in a book.
10. 117 Days by Ruth First. I bought this when I was at college. In retrospect it makes me feel I was so ignorant and naive, but maybe it is important to recognise that you are ignorant so you can do something about it. 117 days is how long Ruth First spent in detention as an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa. I remember being outraged that such a thing could happen, only to find, or course, that much worse injustice is commonplace throughout the world. I learned a lot from it about politics and injustice and the power of protest.
11. How Children Fail by John Holt. This was merely the first of John Holt's books that I read, and basically it has informed all of my adult life and the way I chose to bring up my children and our adventures into education otherwise than by schooling. So it is the most important on the list.
12. The Cap or The Price of a Life by Roman Frister. This is the only book I have read about the Holocaust. It changed me because it is a personal story, so unlike the television images of mass horror you have one person and what happened to them, and what the impact of the experience meant to them. It is written with brutal honesty, mixing his childhood story with his current life. He does not try to present himself as anything other than a real person, there is no heroism, only survival. It stays with you.
13. To Have or To Be by Erich Fromm. Wikipedia describes him as a humanistic philosopher. I bought this little book second hand, I think I had probably read about it as I remember seeking it out. I found it very thought provoking and it articulated something for me that I suppose I had felt instinctively but not put into words.
14. The New Internationalist is not a book but a publication that I subscribed to for many years as a student and afterwards, and again recently for the last few years. It informs me about the world and stops me feeling totally ignorant about global issues. It has an essentially radical standpoint, looking critically at the status quo and seeking better solutions to the world's problems.
15. Road Atlas. Tish thought it was funny that I put the road atlas on the list, but it is something I use all the time and has had a big impact on my life. For many years when we were actively involved in Education Otherwise we travelled frequently to gatherings and to see friends all over the country, and using the road atlas to plan the journey was vital for me when traveling alone with four kids. Definitely a book I could not live without.

Midsummer's day with Will and Lyra

Today we had the most perfect visit to Oxford. It is midsummer's day and M had requested that we go to the Botanic Gardens to go to Will and Lyra's bench. For those of you not familiar with Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' trilogy I should probably just tell you to go and read it because it is far too complex to explain in a few sentences. At the end Will and Lyra agree to meet every midsummer's day at midday at a particular bench in the botanic gardens, since it is a place that exists the same in both of their worlds. There is quite a detailed description of how they reach the bench and I was not totally convinced that it was a real place but we decided to go anyway. We were hoping that it was long enough since the book was published for there not to be hoards of people thinking the same thing.

"There was an ornate gateway, with stone seats inside, and while Mary and Serafina sat there, Will and Lyra climbed over the iron fence and into the garden itself. Their daemons slipped through the bars, and flowed ahead of them into the garden.

"It's this way," said Lyra, tugging at Will's hand.

She led him past a pool with a fountain under a wide spreading tree, ......

... and then struck off to the left between beds of plants towards a huge many-trunked pine.
There was a massive stone wall with a doorway in it, and in the further part of the garden the trees were younger and the planting less formal.
Lyra led him almost to the end of the garden, over a little bridge, to a wooden seat under a spreading low-branched tree.

"Yes!" she said. "I hoped so much, and here it is, just the same.....
Will, I used to come here in my Oxford and sit on this exact same bench whenever I wanted to be alone, just me and Pan. What I thought was that if you - maybe just once a year - if we could come here at the same time, just for an hour or something, then we could pretend we were close again - because we would be close, if you sat here and I sat here in my world -"

"Yes," he said, "as long as I live, I'll come back. Wherever I am in the world I'll come back here - "

"On Midsummer's Day," she said. "At midday. As long as I live. As long as I live ..."

He found himself unable to see, but he let the hot tears flow and just held her close." (P.511-512)

We arrived at the bench and found it occupied by a young man. We waited around a bit thinking he would leave, but he didn't. So eventually I went up to him and asked if he was sitting there for some reason. And he said yes, he was waiting for his girlfriend and he was planning to propose to her right there because the book was special to them both. We were all so overwhelmed at something so romantic that of course we gave them the moment there on the bench with Will and Lyra. His young lady was five minutes late and we sat at a discrete distance and hoped everything was alright. But it turned out just fine and she said 'yes' and here they are:
After a little while we did get to have our moment on the bench too, not too long however because there were quite a few other people all coming for the same reason. One young girl from Ireland had come over specially and had waited several years for the opportunity.
M reading the book right there.
And someone had carved Lyra's name in the arm of the bench.
While we waited this robin appeared and hopped about our feet as we sat on a nearby bench. It seemed kind of appropriate to me. He seemed a bit like a daemon.
As we were walking back up into town M paused and looked down the adjacent side street and spotted this lovely gateway, which just happens to be the college where the open casting was held for the part of Lyra in the 'Golden Compass' film. Every time we have been to Oxford since M has insisted we try and find it but we never have, obviously because it is farther down the high street than we might be bothered to walk. We came here in April 2006 with Julie and R and stood in line for four hours in the rain.
To finish off our trip to Oxford we went to Yo Sushi for lunch to celebrate Tish's graduation from college. We had a lovely meal, but in trying to stack up all the bowls to take a photo we knocked them flying and made a huge mess!