Philip Pullman: Northern Lights 1995. The Subtle Knife 1997. The Amber Spyglass 2000. All published by Scholastic Children's Books.

I’ve always loved some children’s books – the Earthsea trilogy (Ursula le Guin): Penelope Lively: C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series. But finding Philip Pullman’s trilogy just before Christmas has been the greatest experience yet. At their best, adults write for children with an imagination, warmth, often spirituality, which contrasts with the bleakness of much grownup fiction. The many accolades for this prizewinning trilogy stress that it is for people of 8 to 80 (why stop there?), and it has certainly kept me completely hooked over this winter. As one critic, Francine Stock, says: "this is classified as children’s fiction, but it is as uncompromising and passionate as writing gets".
It is partly the sheer scale and quality of Pullman’s imagination. There are many parallel Universes in his world. Lyra, the heroine (and she truly is one), finds her way into another world in her search to defeat her father’s cruel work: "so Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky" . But they subsequently discover the Subtle Knife of the second book, which can cut through into any different universe its owner wants it to. The inhabitants of the many realities live in worlds within worlds of their own – the millions of Witches and thousands of Angels can move through barriers at will: the Gallivespians of the third book are tiny , spurred, highly mobile creatures who are professional spies: the armoured bears of the first book, whose leader Iorek Brynison is Lyra’s great friend, live in the northern areas of the earth and are truly formidable: the mulefa community are a benign group who are diamondshaped, wheeled, and have trunks and appear later in the story. These are just some of the glorious creative variety of beings co-existing in the different spheres.
The story is a spiritual journey in the classic tradition – a search for an understanding of the evil underlying our present situation, and for its remedy. In the third book Lyra and her friend Will journey to the land of the dead – a Hell quite as frightening as Dante’s Inferno. There is also a numinosity to the books, a sense of spirit, and an acceptance of soul. In the very first line, Lyra appears in her world in Oxford (but rather different from our Oxford) with her daemon. Everyone has a daemon in her world. Hers is called Pantalaimon: he was born with her and will die with her, and never go far from her. He is her life’s companion. If they are separated by force, they will both die, at least in spirit. He can take many different shapes to express the circumstances they are in, and to aid her. With his presence she is never lonely. Each person has a deep connection to soul. And with this, for Lyra, comes a lifelong sense of work to be done – a Great Work.
Pullman is wonderful at fear and terror. He doesn’t shirk anything. He really looks at the pits of experience. He is also a very lyrical writer, with great appreciation of beauty, truth, courage and stoicism. The books are about ways of seeing, different kinds of knowledge, and a recognition of how spirit could be recognised by all.
We begin to find out through the books that there is an old Authority who ran the world, but he has run out of steam, though he is still supported by many significant forces with Inquisitorial weapons who are persecuting people from a very Calvinist sense of evil. Old religion is seen as a very different form from spirituality. Lyra’s separated and frightening, very powerful parents, play strong different roles in this fight between Wholeness and Division, Love and Hate, Biodiversity and Sameness, Heaven and Hell, Compassion and Cruelty, Original Blessing and Original Sin. However, Lyra, on the edge of adulthood, with her friends, is the person who must make the journey and the choices that are necessary to save all the universes from destruction.
In his final acknowledgements, Pullman cites Milton’s Paradise Lost and William Blake. A work of this quality has to have great inspiration. I also found great resonances with my favourite Dante’s Divine Comedy and Dante’s journey (with his ‘daemon’ Vergil) through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. I do feel that Pullman has written a true myth for the early 21^st century, using modern physics and technology, a great sense of our time, wide reading, and a huge gift of story-telling. It is altogether 1288 pages of real enjoyment and involvement: what more, for an avid reader, could you want?
I was disappointed in the two Harry Potter books I have read. J.K.Rowling has many great skills, particularly in naming and in action. She also has a great sense of evil and different realities. But, for me, there isn’t much soul in her work. I find Philip Pullman’s trilogy light-years on from this, as his vision is truly conceived and inspiring, maintaining a strong and gripping storyline through the diverse realities of hell and paradise in many forms. For me, it feels like what it is to live now.
Jean Hardy.

It is an old claim that reason hates imagination - that the scientific mind 'unweaves the rainbow' and leaves us with a gray world from which illusion and fiction are banned. Dickens' Mr Gradgrind illustrates the potential truth of this idea. But the fictive imagination, with its indispensable power to suspend disbelief, is as tough as a gingko tree. I recommend Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer as a triumphant example of one way of fusing fiction and the claims of reason.
At college Kingsolver was a biologist and it was only after working as a scientific writer for the University of Arizona that she made the transition (significantly perhaps when suffering from insomnia during her first pregnancy), into writing her first novel, The Bean Tree.
To her scientific background add a childhood spent on a Kentucky farm, and you begin to get some idea of the resources at her disposal. At the core of Prodigal Summer is a quality of attention - ever-enquiring and judicious, very rational but deeply appreciative, with which all three main characters approach the world of nature. The interest is inclusive. 'You're nature. I'm nature,' says Lusa, echoing Rachel Carson's 'man is part of nature', and in fact another main character, Nannie Rawley, has named her child after this pioneer of ecological sanity.
The characters are in three groups each living in different habitats on Zebulon Mountain while an Appalachian spring turns into summer all around them. The one who lives closest to nature, high up on the mountain in her solitary cabin, is Deanna Wolfe the Forest Ranger. She is intensely preoccupied with watching and trying to safeguard the family of coyotes who have crept into the area to make a bid for the ecological niche left by the extinct red wolf. She becomes involved in a complex loving-and-opposing relationship with the wanderer-hunterer from Wyoming, Eddie Bondo who says, 'I'm a ranching boy from the West, and hating coyotes is my religion. Blood of the lamb so to speak. Don’t try to convert me and I won't try to convert you.' Deanna sees the human's mass extermination of predators, for sport but with plausible excuses about the safety of farm stock, as motivated by fear and stupidity. The progress and resolution of this most serious fight, carried on in action and in sparky dialogue, is deeply engaging.
Further down the mountain is Lusa Landowska, a Polish-Arab-American from what the locals see as the awesome metropolis of Lexington, who finds herself caught in an unresolved conflict with her farmer husband. Young and recently married, they are at odds in ideas and language - a rawness of misunderstanding between them makes his death in a road accident the more horrifying. But Lusa, whose main interest in her research scientist years was in moths and pheromones, has had a revelatory moment not long before Cole's death. Across the width of a field she smells the honeysuckle that Cole is picking to bring to her. She thinks: 'This is how moths speak to each other. They tell their love across the fields by scent. There is no mouth, the wrong words are impossible…she considered a language which could carry nothing but love and simple truth.'
Another dialogue is carried on between close neighbours who live at the bottom of the mountain on the edge of the town of Egg Fork. Nannie Rawley, an elderly organic smallholder, is regarded with frank detestation by Garnett Walker, a Christian fundamentalist who states, 'The earth and its inhabitants were created in 4300 B.C… I am a scholar of Creation science.' Garnett is a character conceived with great tenderness, insight and humour. Through his exasperation with Nannies' organic methods they become involved in an unfolding series of moves, mishaps and arguments. At one point she is able to explain to him that indiscriminate crop spraying simply increases the numbers of pests since their more slowly reproducing predators are also decimated and the surviving populations get out of balance. There is a fairly unambiguous message that the economic difficulties of the farmers in the area are caused by pesticides and big business. The only exceptions to the trend are the Amish who are glimpsed from a distance as a traditionally farming and thriving group.
The links between the apparently separate characters are manifold and are placed with an exuberant craftsmanship which distinguishes the whole book. These links typically form around natural phenomena; for instance there is a huge felled chestnut tree left on a remote part of the mountain; several very diverse characters have a special relationship with this tree which they consider to be exclusively theirs, whereas in fact their deeper affinities meet and knit together through it.
Perhaps most impressive of all is the confidence and energy with which our stale 'either-ors' of intelligence versus feeling, science versus spiritual awareness, local versus global are presented and transcended.
Christine Avery