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As aventuras de Lyra e Will continuam a surpreender-nos por entre um rol de querelas mistícas entre bem e mal...

Lyra cresce, amadurece, descobre o amor, e... apercebe-se da urgência em criar um mundo novo e melhor!
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Coleridge in his criticism of Paradise Lost somewhere wrote that Milton was really of the Devil's party without realising it.

I don't know about Milton, but I feel that what Coleridge wrote was true of Philip Pullman channelling Milton by means of his appearance to William Blake in poetic vision while in Felpham, all of course transmogrified into a children's book - with armoured bears. Even the Jungian Daemons, anima and animus to every character, have their counterparts in Blake, while the sexual awakening of Lyra and Will prompted by Mary Malone's fond musings about Marzipan is the fruit of Milton's conception of Adam and Eve in Eden.

Three paths are open to me at this stage. The reinterpretation of Milton by means of Blake by Pullman, His Dark Materials as anti-Narnia, and the trilogy as a profoundly religious work written by a non-believer. All of these together place Pullman's work in a dialectic relationship with a dissenting Protestant tradition in English literature, these books are part of an ongoing conversation about culture, about Britain, and also about the family and upbringing.

If on the one hand Pullman was inspired to reinterpret Milton and Blake then he was also writing in response to C.S. Lewis by writing an anti-Narnia. The world of Narnia is a closed and tightly knit one. We are always in a family circle, family is always sufficient and saves a child from outside influences (so long as you are not a pubescent girl and have no thought of entering into adult sexuality) which are always wicked. Authority is good and directly experienced, although not comprehensible (because Jesus isn't a tame lion for goodness sake). And curiously the most we know about any of the parents in any of the Narnia books is the sickly mother from The Magician's Nephew.

Pullman takes an opposite approach. The family is nothing, its influence is weak. The child is open to the world, the world is a place of adventure, foreigners are friends rather than weird people with the wrong skin colour who are incapable of achieving salvation. Authority is fractured, remote, and corrupt. Parents are terrible role models. Witches have joy in the experience of creation, and armoured bears are proper bears who eat people rather than giant honey pawed embarrassing emanations of an Oxford Don's imagination. This is the battlefield for the dream of Oxford and what part it will play in a child's imagination. A battle fought in a culture war between Anglicanism and Dissent. If Anglicanism remains dominant - and I suspect that idea of an Establishment encompassing religious, civil, cultural, and political elites can be read across by readers into their own countries - Dissent still dissents.

The down side of this incredible openness and excitement about the universe and all its many varieties of Oxford is that that the series can be diffuse, some characters are much weaker than others despite having important roles to play in the story and more seriously it is hard to take the Authority and The Church seriously as antagonists when we see the heartless cruelty of chief rebel and Miltonic Satan Lord Asriel ultimately aided and abetted by the no less hideous and beautiful Mrs Coulter. While Lyra and Will for me did not emerge as synthesis, or resolution, or an alternative to either, but somehow always remained associated with the child sacrificing Lord Asriel. And what are we to make of a Republic of Heaven established by a Lord! Can the idea of the establishment of a Republic of Heaven move us as readers when the Authority lacks authority in the author's own text, the sprawl out runs the story, in effect we are with Satan at the beginning of book three of Paradise Lost surging through the unformed void where element fights against element in never ending anarchy.

But perhaps this is part of Pullman's point. The universes are such incredible places and our lives so exuberant and full of adventure that we can never follow all the possible stories fully. Scheherazade, does Pullman say, did not even come close, her constant digression into other stories which interrupt each other and fall over each others toes to such an extent that there is time for a child to grow to from egg and seed to fullness in her womb before she was half way done with them gives us but a fraction of the idea of potential plot-lines a story could follow. A storyteller must then be a vicious creature, like Blake's Urizen, dividing up the seamless cloth of creation into ugly pockets and then calling himself god.

Yet none of this is irreligious. Maybe for some it is an unfamiliar take, but then there is more, even to Christianity, than C.S. Lewis. Pullman's universes are steeped in religion. This is a creation, but just as in Blake's vision the original creator had been displaced by Urizen so too here power has been seized by a Demiurge. The argument is not over the place of religion in the universes but over who controls religion, is faith a matter of personal revelation or of a top down authority, a republic of spiritual equals or an absolute monarchy. A creation in which it is revealed that Dark Matter are Angels cannot be thought of as irreligious or Atheistic without exploding those concepts. What is Lyra and Will's journey to the afterlife than the Harrowing of Hell?

The ending came across as apt to me. The initial breach between worlds was an act of huge violence, Will's subsequent movement using The Subtle Knife again is violent, although since he only cuts rather than blows open with a explosion not quite as bad, however still this is no gentle business, it is plainly damaging and destructive. An ending in which these holes in the fabric of existence were not knitted together would have to be unremittingly bleak. The resulting human sorrow is part of Pullman's expansive vision. Here love is inevitable, so long as one can remember the marzipan, it is not something to be feared and rejected, it gifts us the pain of parting the Newtonian opposite to joys of intimacy.

For me this vast mixture of elements was hugely exciting. Dark matter and William Blake, Milton and Armoured bears, a joyful expansive approach of life in which actions have cruel consequences which our child protagonists will repent of. Way back in the first book we are told that irrespective of what other characters think or would prefer, they are engaged in a war and will have to fight, the only question is for which side. This may be true in our non-fictional lives, with the important difference that one does not need to turn coat to turn covers and sample what both sides have to offer, and even a child person is a complex thing that needs more than just one type of book to grow well.