8. Northern Lights: Dogma, Destiny, and Dæmons

Bira and her demon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep one side out of

“sight of the kitchen. The three great tables that ran the length of the hall were laid already,”

the silver and the glass catching what little light there was, and the long benches were pulled out ready for the guests. Laira stopped at beside the master's chair and flicked the biggest glass gently with a fingernail, the sound rang clearly through the hall. You're not taking the seriously, whispered her demon. The haze yourself. Her demon's name was pantalignment, and he was currently in the form of a moth, a dark brown one, so it's not to show up in the darkness of the hall.

Crouching behind the high table, Laira darted along and threw the door into the retiring room,

where she stood up and looked around. She'd lived most of her life in the college, but had never

seen the retiring room before, only scholars and their guests were allowed in here, and never females. Even the made servants didn't clean in here, that was the butlers job alone.

“Pantalignment settled on her shoulder. Happy now. Can we go? He whispered.”

"Don't be silly. I want to look around. What do you think they talk about?" Life was said. All big hands are say. You know, Copney accent. Because before she'd finished the question, she heard voices outside the door. Behind the chair, quick. whispered pantalignment, and in a flash, Laira was out of the armchair and crouching behind it. It wasn't the best one for hiding behind. She'd chosen one in the very

center of the room, and unless she kept very quiet, the door opened. So hello, everybody. That was the 26th take of the opening of Philip Pullman's northern lights, or as American listeners. If we have any American listeners, you will know it as the

Golden Compass. So it's the first book in the Dark Materials, Trilogy, his Dark Materials,

and won the Carnegie Medal, as the best children's book of 1995, paving the way for lots of other awards that Philip Pullman won for the other books. He then did another Trilogy, the last of which the Rose Field came out just before Christmas. And of course northern lights has twice been adapted for the screen. There was a film, Big Hollywood film with Daniel Craig in the Col Kidman in 2007, and there was a Big Budget BBC series in 2019. Now, those films had

perhaps slightly inferior acting performances to Tabby's performance. Absolutely, they did. In that introduction. So it's an exciting book. It's Children's Book. It's a thrilling adventure story. It's one of the most popular books published in Britain, northern lights in the last 30 years or so. It's got fantastical creatures. It's got parallel worlds. It's got talking animals.

“For a child reader, I think in particular, it's a really, really gripping mystery story.”

We're following the protagonist Lyra, and she goes to try and find her missing friend in the distant north. But also, on why it merits its place in this show, is it is a book about so much more. It's a book about evil and good. It's above about growing up. It's a book about, in particular, God, the existence of God, or the non-existence of God, and about the tyranny exerted by authoritarian institutions and organizations. It's about dogma and free will and all of these kinds of things.

So there's a lot going on. And as the titles, the various titles suggest his dark materials, or the Golden Compass, there are references to people like John Milton and William Blake and so on. So there's loads to talk about, isn't it, Abbey? Yeah, absolutely. There is because the three books put together. They are much more than a fantastical children's adventure, which they are also. But together, the three books that northern lights, the southern knife and the amps by glass,

they kind of mirror human development through Lira from childhood to womanhood. And the reader tends to be growing up with the books as they read to them. So you start to understand the kind of the deep heart of these books. You know, it's all about the loss of innocence that is entailed in the transition from childhood to adulthood. And, you know, as the books themes get darker and darker and lie, as forced to confront kind of the mysteries of the universe, the complexities of love,

both filial and romantic. Kind of their maturity, their maturity deepens as well. So northern lights is the sort of, is the most accessible, I guess, the lightest of them, the most obvious in a venture story of the three books. Definitely, it's most obviously kind of a children's book because we see Lira's world and the forces of evil that she's battling, kind of through the eyes of a 12-year-old her eyes. And the narrative kind of retains this childlike excitement and this

But the existential questions at the heart of it and the kind of philosophical debates raging in her world around her. They gradually creep into her consciousness and into the narrative and so the readers consciousness as well. And the process is set in motion in this book, Northern Lights, mainly towards the end of it, because Lira makes a shocking discovery. She discovers who her parents are. And she commits a terrible act of betrayal that will see someone very

dear to her murdered. And we will be revealing these questions and mysteries after the break. So there'd be some spoilers. Of all spoilers on this show. We're like--

No, in the first half, and in the second half. We do like small people's fun.

But Dominic, what did you make of it? Because I know that you were slightly more skeptical of Northern Lights than perhaps I was. Uh, do you know what? I wouldn't say I was skeptical. I'm tiny bit maybe a bit of a Philip Pullman skeptic, but that's not the same as being a his-darmaterial skeptic. So I was obviously now don't want to read this book. It came out at a time when there were two series really that had caught the National Imagination. Someone was

Harry Potter and the other was his-darmaterial. And of course, they were kind of published at the

“same time, the late 1990s, early 2000s. And the standard thing I think for people to say sort of”

literary people was, you know, all the attention is monopolized by Harry Potter, but his-darmaterials that that trilogy is so much deeper and darker and, you know, more worthy of adult scrutiny and all this kind of thing. And I ended up reading it partly because the BBC had a big thing called the the Big Read where people voted on their favorite books. And this was one of the contenders. This series was one of the contenders. And I saw the BBC's little documentary about it. And I was

fascinated by, you know, the chalk of Milton and Blake and this idea about dust which will come to and sin and all of this kind of thing. And actually, when I read it, I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed this one much more than the others in the trilogy because I think it wears that Philip Pullman has a tendency to be a little bit didactic and to be a bit excessively palemical. And I felt that this one was lighter and that the adventure story, I have to say,

I thought it when I first read it and I still think it now. I think the adventure story is brilliant and you're done. I think it's extremely imaginative and I think if I had read this, I think when I was 12, I would have loved it. What about you, Tapia? You probably did read it when you were 12, did you? I did. I read it when I was about 10 or 11, I think. And I would say that it was the formative book of my childhood, my favorite book for years. I just cried when I finished

the trilogy. I mean, in part, just because I was heartbroken that it was all over and I could never

read them for the first time again. And Northern Lights specifically, the idea of demons as well,

“especially, I think it fundamentally reshaped my inner world and my imagination. I remember when”

I was just like, I kind of spent hours or days living with pretending that I had a demon on my shoulder or whatever it was and that could exist in my world, but only I could see it, that kind of thing. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, but obviously the first time I read it as a 10 or 11 year old, I just thought it was a fantastic page-turning adventure story. And so it remains, but then as I got older, I'm particularly reading the second book in the third, it came across as something far

deeper and more powerful, exactly what kind of I suppose you were talking about early when people say

that it's worthy of adult scrutiny. I definitely found it to be. And I never found that the kind of

palamic element of it got in the way of the story. Just a quick thing before we move on, because we're talking about Philip Pullman and we're talking about his influences and we'll also talk about obviously the characters and the kind of narrative devices of the book. Just a quick question, I know you're a massive Harry Potter and a Tolkien fan. And you were growing up as well and you still are. How would you rank this compared with them? Because I know how much you love them. You still think this is the number one

“for you, the most informative. Yeah, I think definitely the most informative. In terms of nostalgia,”

it's gotta be Harry Potter. In terms of the world that I want to escape into and distract myself with it's Harry Potter. In terms of kind of just pure sort of love, like a love for the writer and a love for the world. And the world I would draw maps of and stuff, who'd be mid-life. But this is the one that emotionally I think had the biggest hold on me. Well, that's a lot of that is because of because of Lyra, right? Because Lyra is such a, she's a character that I would imagine female

readers in particular empathize with. And then she has her first love and all of that kind of thing, her experience and maturity, all of that. I was growing up with Lyra as I was reading it. And as you say that that first love thing is big. The demon thing is big. I was a child that liked history, and it was set in this kind of world that was sort of Edwardian, and I liked that. So it played into all the right things to me as a 10 or 11 year old girl. As I said, I'm a slightly pulmon skeptic

in some ways, but I don't have a massive animus against him. Phillip Paulman was born in Norwich in 1946.

He lived in Zimbabwe for a time, I think, like you tabby. Yeah, like me. He lived in Australia,

which you didn't. And here's up settling in North Wales. Perhaps no offense to our Welsh listeners, but slightly on glamorous choice after those initial furries into the exotic. So he's a massive reader. He read those of poetry when he was at school and stuff and he went to Oxford's Exeter College and did English, graduated in 1968. He became a teacher in Oxford. He taught the Victorian literature. He was really interested in a folk tales and things.

And he all this time, the 70s, 80s, he was writing children's books, Phillip Paulman. And the big hit for him was the Sally Lockhart quartets. That's the 1980s. That's the Ruby in the smoke and things like that. That was a TV version with Billy Piper. And then the moment

when he really became an sort of national figure was when he first published Northern Lights,

“which is 1995, I think. And then the rest of his dark materials, trilogy. And I think the”

difference between him and let's say JK Rowling. JK Rowling, of course, is somebody who's been drawn into lots of controversies more recently. But while she was publishing Harry Potter, she was not a controversial figure at all. She was a kind of media darling. Now Phillip Paulman was controversial. And it was all about the issue of religion. So this runs right through the his Darth material trilogy, the treatments of religion. And he really

lent into that when he was published in them. So in 2002, he was asked if he was if his books were anti-Christian or anti-God and he told the Daily Telegraph. If there is a God and he is as the Christians describe him, then he deserves to be put down and rebel against. As you look back over the history of the Christian church, it's a record of terrible infamy and cruelty and persecution and tyranny. And of course, this shows up in various ways in the books and particularly in America,

more kind of traditionalist sort of evangelical or hard-line Catholic groups in particular, were not happy at all were they? No, so the Catholic league among other religious groups actually labeled the series atheism for kids. And it's often appeared on the American Literary Association's

“list of most challenged books ranking his highest second, I think, in 2008. It's been banned”

by school boards, particularly in places like Canada for some reason. Wow. And it's also historically the books have been removed from a lot from libraries because of parental complaints, because of the anti-Church rhetoric of them. And then the 2007 movie with Nicole Kidman, that was both heavily criticized for watering down the Christian, you know, the anti-Christian, the anti-Christian message of the books. But then also, it was boy-cotted by religious groups who feared that it would lead children

to read the more offensive books. So, I mean, you can't really win. And then, of course, famously the kind of English polemesis, writer, journalist Peter Hitchens, he described Philip Paulman as the most dangerous author in Britain. I mean, he later renounced this statement. But what do you make of that Dominic? So much of this is the idea that Philip Paulman is an overtly atheist figure who hates the church and who hates God and all of this kind of thing, which is obviously

“I think wrong. I think sometimes he's courted this in his interviews, but Philip Paulman's books”

absolutely stamped of the religiosity. So, his grandfather was a Church of England vicar, he obviously grew up steeped in this world, the Bible, and indeed, sort of Christian imagery run through his books. His actually gone out of his way to say, it's not an atheist, but an agnostic. I guess the one thing, you've sort of alluded several times to Dominic's going to be very hard on Philip Paulman or whatever. I would have just suspected that you found him a bit tiresome.

More than objecting to his views, I think you just don't like someone that makes the point. Yeah, but anything. Yeah. You just don't have opinions. Yeah, you're not wrong. No, actually, I tell you what it is, it's like, I really like the Chronicles of Narnia and Philip Paulman loads the Chronicles of Narnia, he's described them as ugly poisonous vial life-hating, nauseating, dribble, loads some disgusting and continue a few of life. So,

hideous and cruel, I can scarcely contain myself when I think of it and tell me, I know that you like the Chronicles of Narnia too. And I think this is just massively over the top. And I think, you know, he's elevated CS Lewis into his great hate figure. I mean, in many ways,

you could argue CS Lewis is the real antagonist of his diameterials that they're basically a

massive attack on Lewis and Lewis's fantasy vision. You know, because obviously the Chronicles of Narnia are overtly Christian, not the most children even recognize it. I do find that a little bit tiresome. However, separating the author's interviews from the book is really important. Yeah, I think that's true of all art forms, actually. Of course, it doesn't diminish the book at all. So on the book, he got the idea as we

theory and stuff, that's a lot of that in there, isn't that? Yeah, he was really into kind of the

idea of dark matter. So this is kind of this invisible form of matter, it makes up 85% of the universe, but no one really knows what it is because it's not made up of atoms. So it's kind of inexplicable. So he was fascinated by that and he was fascinated by quantum theory and this is the idea of multiple worlds. And so these concepts put together with his great heroes, John Milton and William Blake. He had this strange world living in his head, but he couldn't quite create a narrative

out of it. And then it clicked for him. And I love this point because it reminds me of how Tolkien had kind of this world, this mythology in his head, Middle Earth. And then it kind of became a story when he was sitting there mocking his handpapers and it was the whole Hobbit living in a hole under the ground. The Philip Paulman, the great connector, the thing that kind of unlocked

“the story for him was demons. And I think these are ingenious. I think now his greatest invention.”

And these are animal manifestations of the human soul. We are looped, you know, the opening reading introduces them. Lyra has a demon called pantalignment. And one day he was walking around his garden and he suddenly realized that children's demons he'd had this idea of demons, they changed, but adults demons don't. And so he realized that this world and this story that had been floating around his mind, it was all going to be about growing up. And after that he started writing it in 1993.

So on the demons, I saw in an interview he said, one of the inspirations was sort of a renaissance, not artworks in which there would be Leonardo or Tepelo or Hobbein. They would have these portraits where there would be particularly a young woman or a woman, a lady kind of with an animal. So the lady with the hermen. Though with the hermen, exactly. Yeah, so my dad would send that to me as a postcard when he was away. When I was little

“and he would always say that I was the girl and then that was the hermen. And then when I was”

little I was pretended that my demon was an hermen. Oh, that's nice. Those artworks, the painter uses the animal. As a sort of, there is that there is a link between the creature and the person. The animal is meant to reflect some aspect of the sitter, the subject to the portraits, personality. And this is what Philip Pullman does with his demons. So to give the example Lira and pantalignment, pantalignment kind of is Lira, but is not Lira. So pantalignment is Lira's soul,

her conscience, her friend, her guide, he reflects aspects of her personality. And because she's a child

and therefore she's changing and developing all the time. So is pantalignment. So when we first meet

in what is he is a moth or something, isn't he? Yeah, a child's demon can change into anything. Which is a lovely, it's a lovely idea. It's about the sort of the mutability of your personality, but also you can take on, for a narrative point of view, it means that the demon can be a bird one minute, a bear, a dog, whatever. Depending on your mood as well. So if you're angry, your demon might turn into a lion or something like that. And your born in Philip Pullman's world,

clutching or holding your demon on your demon as part of you, and they can't be separated from you. And actually, crucially, you said that an adult's demon is fixed. This is mirroring the way them at your personality. Your soul, for want to a better word, is fixed when you are a teenager, you become who you're going to be. So one point in the book, Lyra is sailing up to the north. And she's talking to a sailor and she says, "Why do they settle down?" And the sailor says,

"It's part of growing up. There'll be a time when you're tired of his changing about and you'll want to settle kind of form for him." As you do, of course, for yourself. On, by the way,

your demon is usually the opposite gender from you, not always, but most of the time.

And actually, that sailor says to her, "There are times when you're demon, you're not happy with the form that your demon takes." What that's reflecting is people who are not happy in their own skin and are not happy with themselves. They're uncomfortable or whatever. As so many people are, of course. That's the thing. Demons really, really reveal things about a character without Philip Pullman having to explicitly spell it out. So really interesting, for instance, in the bell-sava

Savage, which is the prequel book to this series, there's a character whose demon is a hyena and he beats it. And it's emblematic of his self-loving from self, how much he hates

“himself, how uncomfortable he is to himself. So it's very, very interesting that I honestly think”

it's a truly, truly unique concept. It's a brilliant idea. So you just to think your demon was an urm in, do you? I think just because of that postcard and because Lira often had one. But I mean, speaking of which, at the end of this episode, I'm going to reveal to our listeners and viewers Dominic, what your demon will be. You know. I do. Yeah, I think I know you're well enough to make a sound judgment on that. So if people want to meet the real Dominic Sandbrook. Come on.

No one wants to know. No one wants to meet that person. But also, no, he is, I do.

It's going to be like a hippo, going to be so depressing. Let's talk a little bit about the,

“about the book. So now we've explained demons. Yeah, let's get into the plot. We start in Oxford.”

That opening reading is where the book begins with Lira, a mischievous orphan, Lira Belacqua, and her demon, pantalignment who we've met, and they're trying to sneak into the retiring room of Jordan College. And this is where she's lived all her life, raised by the servants and the scholars of the college. And while hiding in the retiring room, she sees the master of Jordan, slip a powder into a glass of wine for a man who will soon be arriving and we learn

it's called Lord Asriel. And we also learn is Lira's uncle. So the implication is that he's going to try and poison Lord Asriel. Lira jumps out of the last minute and prevents Lord Asriel from drinking the wine. And because of this then, she spends the rest of the evening hiding in the cupboard watching Lord Asriel give this talk to the scholars. Yeah. And the talk is all about dust. And this is a mysterious substance linked to human consciousness. And Lord Asriel proved to

the scholars over the course of this lecture that parallel worlds exist, that dust has something to do with the connection between a human and their demon. Anyway, he's later exiled to the Arctic. Meanwhile, and this is kind of the thriller mystery element of the book across the country,

“children are going missing. And they are being kidnapped by secret group, known as the goblas.”

But this is linked to rumours that this is linked to a beautiful woman whose demon is a golden monkey. But we know nothing more than that. Then a glamorous woman arrives at Oxford and this is Mrs. Cater. And we don't know anything about her. But she totally captivates and enchants Lira. And as a result, Lira goes with her back to London. But as she's leaving Jordan, two things happen. She realizes that her best friend, Roger, the kitchen boy is missing. And this worries her because

of all the children that have been kidnapped. And this is the the motor of the narrative because she's going to want to find Roger, right? Exactly. Exactly. Roger has been taken by the goblas Lira later sets out to find him. But she's also given this mysterious device by the master of Jordan and told to keep it secret. And this is an elithiometer and or truth teller and it is a heavy golden compass, hence the title of the book in America, the golden compass,

“with several hands and pictures around the dials of its face. And it can answer almost any question.”

But it takes years and years and years of study to learn how to read it and learn how to interpret what it tells you. Strangely though, Lira learns over the course of weeks. We don't know why. And this instrument, the golden compass, is named after the golden compass that God uses to create the universe from chaos in book 7 of Milton's Paradise Lost. So there you see his influence again. And it's then stayed the furvid wheels and in his hand he took the golden compasses

prepared in God's eternal store to circumscribe the universe and all created things. So here the compasses are used to kind of create order and build barriers, whereas in northern lights Paulman does the opposite. The elithiometer fractures the limitations of the universe because it can provide all knowledge. So in its provision of endless provision of answers, it kind of belies traditional Christian teachings. It's a tool of liberation rather than control. Yeah,

exact case. It's an instrument of endless knowledge and therefore liberation. But Dominic take us through the next part of the book. Lira makes a couple of discoveries, doesn't she? So she discovers that's actually, Miss Skulter is leading the gobblins. So she's a baddie. And they're actually

the general ablation board and they're part of the Magisterium, which is basically the church

and which is the sort of oppressive authoritarian institution that controls Lira's world. And basically the gobblins, the church, the Magisterium, as they're called, are kidnapping these children. They're going to experiment on them in some way. Lira escapes. She runs away. She's taken up with these people called Egyptians who are kind of, I mean, they're basically Gypsies, kind of Romany people who live on canal boats and sort of sail around the fence,

talking to Dutchman. And with the Egyptians, she goes off to the north, the arctic, trying rescue, trying to outermate Roger and rescue these kidnapped children. And she discovers when she's there, I mean, it's a bit of a spoiler but not that much. She discovers that the experiments are, the Magisterium are trying to, they're using a sort of

guillotine device to separate people from their demons. So to basically cut off your soul, I suppose.

This is an unthinkably awful thing to do in this world. It's compared at one point to cutting off the general organs of small boys or something like it's truly heinous. I was about to say that's, that's, that's the obvious parallel is the practice of castrating boys to make castraties singers. Exactly. So all kinds of exciting antics, she meets an armoured bear called Yorick Burnison. He's brilliant. I love him. He's a great creation,

actually. So these talking bears, the were armour, fighting bears, she meets some witches. I know

Seraphina Pecula. I did. Yeah. And basically after all kinds of exciting adventures,

she rescues Roger and she goes to try and find her uncle, Lord Asriel, this guy who was almost poisoned at the beginning of the book. They're up in the north and the Arctic and she thinks the basically, Lord Asriel has been taking prisoner. She wants to rescue him and she wants to give him the Ellie Theometer. And that's her kind of mission. And actually, when she gets there and meets up with him, what happens next is much more terrible and more devastating than she could possibly

have imagined. It will literally shatter her world. Yeah. It will shatter her world. Very good. So the world, let's talk a little bit about the world, the fantasy world. So the funny thing about this is a fantasy book, is that basically, there's one of the things that I'm slightly

pulling and skeptic about, is that for somebody who's made a great name for himself, I'm

“really incredibly successful writing fantasy. He's generally pretty down on fantasy, isn't he?”

So even though he's created this world, he sort of distances himself from other fantasy writers. That said, I think the world is very well observed and is fun and I can see why a child reader would want to escape into it. So for example, starting in Oxford, it's funny how Oxford plays a part and so many of these kind of fantasy world. So obviously CS Lewis was at Oxford, Gerard Tolkien wrote the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings at Oxford. It works because Oxford

feels like a fantastical place, especially to outsiders. It's got all the colleges. It's got buildings of weird names. It's got the weird rituals and traditions. They're kind of honeycoloured stone and all and the paintings and all of that kind of thing. It feels like a fantastic landscape already. And what he does, I think, really nicely is he brings in elements like the people on the canal barges, the gypsies and all of that kind of thing. And it feels like it originally observed

immersive landscape for a child reader, I would say. It definitely does, but also because you don't need to do much to our Oxford, the real Oxford, to make it fantastical, as you say. He brilliantly integrates the fantastical elements of the story into the Northern Lights, but in such a way that it's very believable and it loves you into forgetting sometimes that this is a fantasy and not kind of just an adventure story, you know, because the world is full of real scientific principles

from our world and this anchors us implausible reality throughout, even while we're encountering

“you know, armored bears, demons, witches, because I think in Northern Lights, the world building,”

the magic and the fantasy, it's just not the point. It's a book or a series, far more preoccupied with kind of existential questions from our world, which he then maps onto this strange replica of it and it also gives demons a kind of unique imaginative value because you can almost believe that they could exist in our world in a way that say Hogwarts can't, they fit in more easily. It's more rooted, you think, than the world of Hogwarts. Yeah, exactly. It's a little less silly. I guess

I don't mean silly to be a criticism. No, but it's conceivable that people could walk around and that, like, there was actually a point, it was in the trilogy where we realised that we all do have demons, you just can't see them in our world. You know, it's that kind of thing. But I do think as well that, you know, what you said about how Paul was quite down on fantasy, like he said before that he doesn't much care for it, that he didn't want to write a

pure fantasy of the tall consort, undconnected at any point to the real world, because the real

“world was exactly what fiction ought to be dealing with. I think that's not true. I actually think”

he's been disingenuous there. I think that's something he exaggerates in order to kind of drive home his apparently drive home is sort of anti-religious message, because fantasy can have a softening effect on, I don't know, like a strong point or a strong message. And so rooting the imaginative features of this book in reality theoretically keeps the link between the villains of the book, the church and the church of our world, much more oblique. I do think that's entirely

further because you can, this is a fantasy that it's a world full of strange beings.

Well, I think it's wrong and too can, so first of all, he has created a very attractive

and immersive fantasy world, even if he denies it. And secondly, somebody like Tolkien, or I mean, especially Tolkien, actually, he's writing about the real world. I mean, the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit completely reflect the world of the, you know, early 20th century Britain, Tolkien's own experience in the first world war, the fact that he's writing the second world war, it's nonsense to say that it's pure escapeism and it's unconnected with the Oxford that Tolkien

was living in when he wrote about it. But also, ironically, given his scathing for CS Lewis, this is a fantasy that actually in many ways does resemble Narnia. You know, Narnia is a strange you know, inconsistent mix of legend and mythology and folklore and made up mythical bit of

mythos. You will remember, my favorite, my favorite, Narnia beast is at the end of the London

“Witch and Wardrobe. Yeah. There's a bull with the head of a man. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Not even a”

man with the head of a bull. It's totally random. It's one big, mystical trip. But that is also true of Pullman. It's so random. So you have these armored bears that speak and their armor is kind of like a soul and they live in this sort of Spartan society and they have this primal wisdom. And then you have flying witches who are kind of like pagan goddesses, you know, beautiful and young and they fly around the airholding pine branches. And then you have Lee Scorsby, who's a human

aeronaut from Texas. For yeah, from Texas, you fly around an air balloon. There's nothing magical about him, but just how, highlights how random it all is. He's a cowboy from the wild west, talking to a flying witch. Yeah, but that's the fun of it, isn't it? That's the joy. I have no problem with this. I love it. Lots of books of that kind aimed at that kind of readership. I would say so from about 10 to 15 or something. They have this kind of mad mix of like hot air balloons,

“you know, Zeppelin's, talking animals, all that stuff. And it's fine. A child never questions”

that because a child is arguably more sophisticated. We do the knelalt. So a child is basically,

you know, it's fine. It's a fiction. You can put it in anything where it's an adult we're very boringly demand consistency. So you massively got into this through Lyra, right? That's I'm imagining that a lot of girls in particular who read this book see themselves as Lyra. Of course, you would just as a boy would see themselves as Harry Potter. Yeah, I dressed up as her for National Book Day. Did you ever was called? Or to fly a wear? What did Lyra want? Well, I wore a very hot

fur coat and mittens, which in the middle of Kenya was really uncomfortable. Oh, my word. Like so many child protagonists in these kinds of adventurous stories, she's an orphan, it's really important to get the child's parents off stage so that they can be free to have adventures and things, although actually in this book her parents are then brought back on stage.

“She's been raised in Oxford, hasn't she? She's very independent. She's a fun character, I think.”

She's stubborn and she's a little bit spiky and kind of headstrong. Yeah, she likes to explore, climb up on the roof and she steals barges and she messes around and goes into places. She's not meant to go into in the sellers and all that kind of thing. She's rude to figures of authority or all the good things. Yeah, there's an interesting contrast between her and pantalignment her demon. She's more daring and reckless than all of these things and

he is more cautious, isn't he? He's a bit more like her conscience who's sort of the break on her ambitions. You know, you sure don't it shouldn't be careful or that kind of thing? Yeah, he's kind of her protector and his name is a nod to this because it's pan plus a lemon in Greek and that's merciful compassion. And that's a bit that contrast liars kind of headstrong. Yeah. You know, slightly rude rebellious, danger-loving streak. This is a massive massive part of

a character. She's actually called Silver Tongue by the polar bears when she manages to win back her friend Yurik Bernison's throne by telling a big lie basically. Yeah. And so she, and she takes great pride in this trait of her as being able to trick people. But she's also loving and loyal

and she inspires great love and others. So the witch is the bears, the scores be. But she's never

older than she is. You know, she's clearly a child throughout with a child, world view, a child's interests, a child's excitement. And this naïve, you know, there are scenes for instance when she's called up asleep in a hot air balloon and these adults are speaking above her about this great destiny that sits on her shoulders. And this makes her quite a pityable figure actually, you know, a child with a great destiny. It's a classic kind of children's book, trick to say of the narrator

or the protagonist or whatever, like Harry Potter. Yeah, it's the hero's arc, isn't it? It's classic. The hero's arc, or Luke Skywalker or something, you know, a great destiny has been foretold for you all this kind of thing. And it's, and it's for this reason that the enemy, the Magisterium, fear you. But this is quite a unique destiny, I would say. In her case. In her case. Yes, because she it's bound up in the Bible. Like all great destiny. She is Eve. The second Eve. The second Eve. Yeah,

exactly. She's going to fall in love. She's going to commit an act of sin or disobedience or whatever. The falling in love will do this. She is also going to be guilty of a terrible mistake or a betrayal. Yeah, you describe it as a betrayal. I mean, it's not a conscious betrayal. It's it's not an inadvertent betrayal that will lead to this horrible, horrible act of violence at the

end of the book against her great friend Roger. And after which the world will never be the same again.

And that sort of trauma that that guilt that she's been partly responsible for that kind of lives with her, doesn't it? Yeah, but we don't find out what that is till the end. And we don't

And they call her the second Eve. You know, this figure who's going to bring about some kind of vague and you beginning for humanity, that she who will commit some great act of disobedience. And in doing so, we'll destroy the authority, the God of this world. But we don't know anything more than that. But if Lyra is the Eve of this book, then her mother, as we will discover, resembles Lilith from the Bible. And Lilith in the Jewish folklore was Adam's first wife

who was banished for not being submissive. And she subsequently viewed as a very demonic figure, a woman who goes around actually sealing people's babies. And this actually bears an uncanny resemblance to the woman revealed to be Lyra's mother. So Dominic, would you like to give the

“game away? Massive spoiler in coming? Yeah, I think people would have were, even if people”

haven't read the book would have worked out that basically this character misses cult of this incredibly glamorous woman is Lyra's mother. To me, she's the best character in the book, apart from the armoured bear, Yorick Bernison, who I read back. She was played by Nicole Kidman in the film. Very well, I thought. You'd like, I like Ruth Wilson actually as the in the TV series. I think Ruth Wilson's brilliant as her. Yeah, but you've got a flash in the game and you're,

it's not, it's Ruth Wilson. And not even skin in the game, I've got a flash in their game. She's, um, she's a big fan of the rest of history so that does reflect very well on her. Oh, what a great person. What a great person. The reason Mrs. Colter is so interesting is because she's basically the archival in of this series. But there are these moments, but she can't help but betray a real love for Lyra and this almost redeems her at certain points.

“Yeah, her daughter, exactly. Her daughter, exactly. And you know she's a baddie from the beginning”

because her demon is a baddie. And he's a demon gives it away. Yeah, he's this incredibly sort of excessively luxury and monkey. He's beautiful. Yeah, he's got really long silky fabric in a kind of disturbing way, I think. Yeah, but he's got this creepy little face and this creepy little hands.

And unusually, he's the only major demon in the book to never have a name and to never ever speak.

And I think this is an ingenious little device because it represents the hidden repressed evil and Mrs. Colter and how she silences her conscience. And she battles with her demon more than most. She treats it with this kind of cold attachment and even physical cruelty. She hits it at one point. So that's a bit like, like, you feel the pain of that slap. And particularly when it vise against her kind of up surges of love for Lyra, but the monkey itself can be shocking

the violence. Her monkey is her. I was going to say her id that's not quite right, but her monkey is her dark side. It's Mr. Hyde. Yeah, it's Mr. Hyde. Her monkey is the evil within her, but there

“is also good. I mean, that's what makes the such a great character is that she is torn between her”

enormous ambition and her kind of the cold side of her personality because she's been kidnapping all these children. And the scenes when she does that, you know, they're quite chilling. Like, she basically will seduce children with chocolate and stuff. And then snatch them away. I mean, it's that classic fear that all children have. But at the same time, when it comes to Lyra, she does show her genuine affection. You know, there are flashes of real emotion in one arts.

And there is something quite fairy tale, I think, about her. Isn't that the idea of the woman tempting you away with chocolate or whatever? Yeah, definitely. But I actually think that's deeply sinister. And we know that Philip Paulman loves fairy tales in folklore. You know, he rewrote the grim fairy tales. And the kind of horror of them, the creepiness of them, is massively massively emphasised. And because of this, you know, the idea that she's this sort of beautiful fairy godmother

figure, it can be really, really sinister and her sweetness becomes really saccharine. And this is

never ever more true than this really horrible scene, actually, when she tenths a young Oxford

Urchine called Tony Maccaros, a Maccarios away so that he can be kidnapped and sent to Bolvanger. And she stands there in the shadows, watching him. And then kind of almost, I don't know, she's sort of tempts him over and her monkey is playing with his demon, almost flirting with his demon. And she sort of says, do you like, you know, hot chocolate? And then she says, oh, I've got more than I could possibly drink. Why do you come and help me drink it? And then he's, you know,

captivated and follows her. Do you know what, though, Tubby? Just think about that. That's again, I mean, I know Philip Paulman hates C.S. Lewis. But that's the white witch in the line, the witch in the wardrobe with Edmund and the Turkish delight. It is, it totally is. So he follows her into this locked into this locked room and locked door and then she opens it and he goes in and then

the last line is Tony will never come out, at least by that entrance and he'll never see his mother

again. So, you can see that, you know, Mrs. Colter's incredible beauty and her elegance and her grace and her sophistication. It's all serves as a kind of mask, hiding a manipulative cruel and

the Magisterium in the first place who will get to probably later, because she is one of their agents.

And she's her charm, they use her charm to advance their own agenda, for instance. She wins the loyalty of this user per polar bear king, who Lira then has to have vanquished by her friend, Yurik Benison. And all the while, she's actually using this to build her own power-blace base. And this is why she sets up the gobblas, the general ablation board, you know, to kidnap children, the children. I'm going to share something with the listeners now. I made a terrible mistake

before this recording started, because I said to Tabby, you're massively into this book, Tabby,

“and I think you should do loads and loads talking. And the result of that is that we have taught”

for too long, as some people, some pocus, as a massive trade secret, some pocus, a struggle to fill there a lot of half-hour. That's not an issue that we have on this show. After the break, all kinds of excitement will be revealing who Lira's father is, will be revealing why they're conducting these terrible experiments, will be exploring the influence of John Milton and William Blake on Philip Pullman's world. And very exciting for everybody. I will be revealing what Tabby's

demon is, so please don't go away. 30cm, only 78cm or 40cm, or only 87cm, or only 70cm. And here we have all the products in our period and in the action app, action, little price, great joy. Welcome back everybody to the book club. Now before the break, we said that we'd be solving all kinds of exciting mysteries, including the identities of our own demons. But first of all, let's talk about

the identity of Lira's father, because our mother has been revealed as this, as the sort of

“supervillain in some ways of the first book, Mrs. Colter, who is her father Tabby?”

Lira's father turns out to be her mysterious uncle, Lord Asriel, because he had an affair with Mrs. Colter, before Lira was born, Mrs. Colter was married. He ended up murdering Mrs. Colter's husband to protect Lira, and then his penny lessons are resolved and gives Lira to the scholars of Jordan College to be raised. And Lord Asriel is, for me, I think, the most interesting charismatic character of this book. And he is, in fact, the devil, but we will explain why

that is later. So his name, Asriel, it may come from as as rail, the angel of death in Jewish

mysticism and Islamic folklore. He describes large, muscular, physically powerful, his dark,

hair, sharp-faced features, and a face that is really intense and severe. I think in terms of his face, James McAvoy did him really, really well in the TV show. But Daniel Craig really got his

“mannerisms, I thought, his kind of chilliness, his chilliness is constantly emphasized, his”

hardness, his ruthlessness. And this comes out in his demon, who's a snow leopard, a beautiful snow leopard called Stellemaria. And she is ferocious and powerful, like him. But also, she reveals how confident he is in himself, because her behavior rarely diverges from him. And both are very closed, they give nothing away. So he's a darkly charismatic character. But unlike Mrs. Colter, reveals almost no affection whatsoever for his daughter, Lyra. Yeah, he's quite unlikable,

I would say, in this book. He's not easy to like, no. No, he's something he's, maybe,

admirable in some ways, in that he has this incredible poise and self-position. And he's clearly

extremely bright and visionary and ambitious. And he's free thinking, which is why he ends up being imprisoned. He's eloquent and persuasive. Yeah, but there is a real coldness to him, as we discover at the end, because he is the person to whom Lyra inadvertently betray her best friend Roger. And he is the person who will carry out this terrible act. He's hell bent on this mission. Yeah, and this is the devil, the devilish side of him, I suppose. The he's in rebellion against

the church and against God and against the kind of rules of this world. He has been doing all these kind of scientific kind of experiments and quests and things. And he has become convinced that this is just one of many parallel worlds. And you can glimpse these other parallel worlds through the Northern Lights, hence the title of the book. And he believes that with a massive burst of energy, you can break down the barriers between the world. You can create a bridge to other

worlds. And you can cross. And the way to create this burst of energy, it's a bit like splitting the atom. It is the act of severing a child from their demon, basically cutting out somebody's soul.

The child that appears is Lyra, and he is really shocked. Because it's his daughter. It's like that kind of, you know, this is the person you're going to have to sacrifice going on a very biblical kind of moment or moment from a Greek myth or something. Yeah, it's Isaac and Abraham. Isaac and Abraham, exactly. And he sort of staggers and he says, oh no, or terrible, or whatever.

“It's a very, very dramatic scene. By the way, I think it's brilliant. He's done. And then he sees”

behind her mate Roger, who she's rescued. And he thinks, oh, brilliant. I can kill him instead. And so with, you know, to Lyra's horror, I mean, it's a fantastic scene. They're very dramatic. Building towards this climax, he conducts the experiment to sever Roger from his demon. And this is what tears are holding the universe through which he can travel between worlds. And this moment, you know, it's a, it's a brewery of piece of writing, actually, because all

the narratives have been building to this. There's been a sense of gathering momentum. All the characters have kind of converged on this point. There's a kind of battle raging. And Lyra is kind of rushed to try to rescue Roger. But she's too late. And it's as though, you know, that it's both the sort of the intimate drama of Roger losing his soul. But also, the cosmic kind of drama of the, the heavens being split apart, this sort of pure energy ripping through the

skies as the, as Lord Asriel builds this bridge to another world. There's even romance, because he reunites with Mrs. Colter for the first time in life. It sees them silhouette, silhouetted against the Northern Lights, kind of tearing at one another like embracing, but separating both bent on different tasks. Yeah, I was rereading that scene this morning. I was really, you know, marveling at what a brilliant bit of writing this final pages of the book are.

It really is. To read that, I've never, I've never read it as a child. I can only imagine

how thrilling it must have been to be a child read it for the first time, getting to that point. It's devastating. It's a motiony, devastating. It's very unusual actually in a children's book that the quest on which the protagonist is set out fails and her friend effectively is sacrificed. But it's also, you get such a strong sense that it is the death of something for Lira, not just the death of Roger. Some innocence in her, some naivety is broken as he sort of lies there,

dying in her lap. And she watches her two kind of mighty, ferocious parents kind of embracing in light of another world. And she knows what? It's so dramatic. Do you know what? So many children's books for this age group involve a child searching for their father or their mother? I read

loads of books to Arthur when he was growing up my son that involved basically a particularly

a girl searching for her father. She's got a map and she's, you know, that kind of thing. It's such a hack-nid device. It's very unusual that the girl searches for her father and her father turns out to be in some ways the villain of the story who's going to end the book with this act

“of horrendous violence. But it's important to say to explain why it is that Lord Azrael is willing”

to commit what is essentially a murder. Like, what is he trying to gain? Why is he trying to blow a hole between universes? Well, he wants to create his own republic in another world, free from the authority of the Magisterium in order to destroy the Magisterium and destroy the Magisterium's god, the authority. So that's explained a little bit more about the Magisterium because they are

kind of the arch villains of this world of Laira's universe. Yeah. So this is the Magisterium is basically

the church, isn't it? It's the antagonist of the series. It is not the papacy. It's this sort of network of bureaucratic institutions that are often fuding against each other. They're going to rival departments. It's actually quite well done this. It's sort of, it's how government works. It's quite communist, isn't it? There's a lot of criminology to it, but it's any kind of big bureaucracy where there are different lots of departments kind of fighting each other. Let's call it the church

of simplicity. The church is basically trying to suppress or control scientific knowledge. It teaches that there are only two worlds. So there's our world and there's heaven and hell, but not all these parallel worlds. The church is particularly exercise by this thing that we've mentioned a couple of times whenever we explain which is called dust. So dust, the church believes dust is kind of original sin. The thing that gets the Magisterium going is dust and they think

that if they can get rid of dust, they can get rid of sin and what is dust. You want to explain.

“Dust is also called rustic of particles. It's kind of its catamastirious and secret for most”

of the book. We don't really know what it is, but we learn more about it as Lara does. And we learn from her spying the retiring room that it can be seen through certain kind of scientific instruments.

golden light. And we learn that it's conscious. It's attracted to sentient beings, but particularly adults, whose demons have settled. It swarms around you at adolescence. Children have far less dust than adults. And there's some indication that it's kind of linked to dark, the dark matter of our world. So we don't really know what it is. They don't really know what it is. We find out that in the book,

it's named from the Bible. Paulman does this quite cleverly. It's from the third chapter of Genesis. So

in the sweat of thy face, Shalt thou eat bread till thy return unto the ground. For out of it

“was thou taken for dust thou art and unto dust thou shall return. So that's what God says to Adam”

and Eve when they have fallen when they've eaten fruit from the tree of knowledge. They have been thrown from the garden of Eden. They've committed the ultimate act of disobedience. But in his first year as a Bible, there are demons and all that kind of thing. Yeah, so he rewrites Genesis 3, where rather than Adam and Eve realizing their naked, they realise that they can see the form of their demons. Yeah, the eyes of both them were opened and they saw the true form of

their demons. So we learn from this then that dust is original sin. And the reason that the church are trying to cut children away from their demons is they are trying to prevent the influx of dust that comes upon you when you hit adolescence, when you hit puberty and your demon settles. So they're

basically trying to reverse. Yeah, what does Mrs. Kolt say? So Mrs. Kolt has says this explicitly to

a liar. She says dust is something bad, something wrong, something wicked, grown ups and their demons are infected with dust. It's too late for them. But an operation on children would keep them safe from it. They're trying to reverse the fall, basically. They're trying to keep children innocent. Forever. In fact, what this cop does by separating you from your demon, I suppose symbolically you could say by preventing that point at which in life you become sexually mature, you have you start

to experience things, you start to question the world, you gain new knowledge by physically preventing that from happening in the book. It turns these children into tragic, genuinely tragic kind of zombie like wafes. They tend to die without their demons. The demon dies straight away, almost. And there's this scene where liar encounters a child who's been severed. This is actually the Tony Macarios

“that we described being tempted by Mrs. Kolt earlier on. It's a really sad moment, isn't it?”

And she finds him cowering in a shed in the middle of the north. And because he's lost his demon, ratter, he is clinging to a frozen piece of fish desperately. And that's not comical at all. It's actually absolutely tragic. And all the other characters who encounter him are terrified of him, because the idea of someone being without a demon is so monstrous, so abominable. It's so unnatural, which means that we should we should see any interference in this natural

process as an abomination as well. This is some of the stuff that obviously, you know, ultra Catholic critics didn't like about his book. Is that he is his target. I said his real target was C. S. Lewis, but actually his real real target is the idea of original sin. And the idea that you know sexuality, experience, maturity, mean a loss of innocence and that these are bad things. He thinks these are good things, and he wants to celebrate them. And the antagonists in his book

have a sort of almost a fantasy image of innocence childhood innocence that they want to preserve.

“Philip Pullman wants to celebrate the things that they regard as sinful and wicked. And that's why”

you're the act of cutting off your soul or trying to distance yourself from knowledge and experience and things. Our bad things for him and bad things in the book. Yeah. And the character of Lord Asriel, this idea of his kind of Republic of heaven and, you know, he's going to take on God and he's going to fight against the church and all of that kind of thing. He is obviously inspired isn't he by character from Paradise Lost, namely Satan. Yeah, he absolutely isn't, and Paulman

has admitted, has owned his debt to John Milton and Paradise Lost by actually saying that in writing the three books of his dark materials, he set out to rewrite Paradise Lost in three volumes. And I think he does do that, because over the course of the trilogy, he charts Lord Asriel's rebellion and Lara's temptation and fall. Anyway, before we get to why Lord Asriel

is basically modeled on Satan from Paradise Lost to give us a little bit of background about

about John Milton, because he's a really interesting figure. And I'm a big fan of his. Yeah. Well, Milton's one of the titanic figures of English literature, maybe not somebody

So Milton was a 17th century poet and polymerist and civil servant actually,

who was a fan of the parliamentarians in the Civil War. He was actually Oliver Kromel's secretary for foreign tongues, which is an excellent job title. He is on this sort of he is on what you might kind of more hard-line Protestant wing of the religious divide in 17th century England. He's supposed to kings to the divine right of kings. He's a Republican. He thinks, you interpret God and Bible through your own individual conscience rather than, you know,

you don't refer to God down to you. Yes, exactly. You don't refer to the authority of bishops and kings and so on. You know, Milton is a crumbwellian. Milton is somebody who serves

Kromel and then after the restoration 1660, when the monarchy returns and Charles II,

he's imprisoned for a little while and then he kind of, you know, lives quietly in obscurity. He's gone blind. But it was while he was blind that he wrote these two epic masterpieces, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, much more famously Paradise Lost. And this retails the biblical story of the fall of humanity through disobedience, but it kind of expands it into this majestic epic about freedom, the misuse of power. And in the poem Satan, who is a fallen angel,

who has rebelled against God, he and his fellow fallen angels gather and hell. And they decide to continue their rebellion by corrupting humankind, which is God's new creation, and Satan succeeds,

and is punished alongside Adam and Eve, and they're expelled from the Garden of Eden.

And the title of this trilogy, his dark materials, is actually taken from book two of Paradise Lost. So it's, but all these in their pregnant causes mix, confusedly, and which thus must ever fight. And I see a mighty maker, them all dain, his dark materials to create more worlds. So this is God, the chaotic matter from which new worlds are made by the creator. So this is like Lord Asriel, ripping a hole in universe in the universe, and creating a new world of his own in

a sense. But in this, he is not the creator. Lord Asriel is a very satanic character. Yeah, he will use a satanic character because he's satan. I mean, he's Lucifer. I mean, that's the thing isn't it? So satan in Paradise Lost. I mean, the thing that everybody was says about Paradise Lost is Milton makes satan in some ways the hero of the story.

“Yeah, I think that's true. The poem starts with satan's rebellion on the way. Satan is the protagonist.”

Satan has the courage when the other devils don't. He says, "I'm going to go out. I'm going to cross the abyss. I'm going to go to the Garden of Eden. I'll do the dirty work of corrupting Adam and Eve." You know, we're kind of with him. Now at the end, admittedly, he's turned into a snake and he has a pretty sort of miserable end to the story. But it's hard to read Paradise Lost Milton's great epic without a sneaking sympathy for this rebellious brave independent

mind that, you know, charismatic character, who is Lucifer. And this is massively debated. Like CS Lewis didn't read it this way at all. He said that Paradise Lost was like a defensive guard rather than satan. But if you compare the way that Heaven is described in the poem, it's kind of cold and autocratic and gauzy versus kind of pandemonium where satan is based and it's all and

“it's like this fiery delusion. It's all colourful and exciting. I think Satan is absolutely”

the anti-hero of the poem. And in this, Lord Asriel is a very satanic figure as we've said. He's a flawed devil fighting against the autocracy of the church to create a new republic so in the poem, Heaven of Hell. And like Satan, he defines himself in opposition to authority. And, you know, he embodies free will. He says to him, "This is culture at one point. I wanted to break out Marissa and I have." And like Satan rebelling against God, Asriel rebels against the authority,

the foe God in this world. And both kind of present their rebellion as the fight for knowledge and self-determination. And freedom. I mean, that's massively important to him. The one thing about him though, Tabi, the caveat is the book ends with him committing an act of hideous cruelty to Roger. So he's not a good man. No, he's not a good man. He's a man who will sacrifice anything in pursuit of his knowledge or his power or whatever, which if you were of the sort of

“Tolkien Lewis party, you would say is the, you know, that's the worst thing I can't figure out.”

It's unforgivable, exactly. Philip Pullman does kind of forgive it. I mean, I know we're jumping ahead of subsequent books and the trilogy. But to me, that's the greatest crime of the whole trilogy. Yeah, no, it's true. I think that is fair. But I think maybe the point is that, you know, all things must be sacrificed for the sake of a good fashion rebellion.

Blake. And I guess the thing with when in Blake is his innocence versus experience, isn't it? So

on the one hand, you've got the rebellion from Milton against God. And the other, you've got the celebration of experience rather than innocence. So this, this is all about dust and about, so the dust is, dust is experience, dust is maturity and knowledge and sexuality in all of

“those kinds of things. And even Lord Asriel thinks of dust, doesn't he, is a kind of a bad thing?”

He doesn't really care about dust. He kind of, he's unassessed in Mrs. Gordon at one point, come with me, come with me, smile the world and we'll find the source of dust and destroy it forever. Yeah. He's against the people that just want to get rid of dust. But in fact, dust is, it's secondary to his, to his enterprise, would you say? I think, yeah, he just doesn't,

it's kind of beneath him. But Lyra says at one point, the fact that everybody else,

they're all saying it's terrible. I experience sexuality, sin, whatever. And they're clearly bad people. I mean, she's talking about her own parents. She says to her demon pantalignment, if they all say it's so terrible, then it must be good. And she's the one character who sees their experience may be a better thing than innocence and innocence is not something to be celebrated. But so do the witches who have kind of an innate understanding of the world. They also celebrate

dust. So in that, we kind of have the celebration of experience over celebrating the loss of innocence. And you mentioned Blake there. That's a very, very bleaky and principle. Yeah. So Blake, for people who don't know, he's a romantic poet late 18th, early 90th century.

I mean, I say, he's romantic. He's hard to pin down. His contemporaries thought he was deranged

often because he was such a radical, you know, he's a critic. I love him. Of the monarchy, of organized religion, of social injustice, of industrialization, of all of these kinds of things. So he sort of stands apart from his times in many ways. And you know, running all through Blake's poems and all his works is this hostility to authority, to repression, to hierarchy, to being imprisoned, held down, he thinks the idea of sin is a way to trap people and to to bind your desires. He thinks,

oh, be the idea of obedience is wrong. He doesn't like the church, organized religion and dogma. He famously wrote pre-symbolic gowns binding with Brian's, my joys and desires. So repressing kind of freedom of thought. And he's, at his big thing, was he celebrated the imagination. And Paulman implies that dust is linked to imagination and creativity. So which, which, you know, you gain a great deal of with age and experience. And interestingly, there's a link between

him and John Milton because Blake wrote, you know, famously about John Milton. Milton, when he wrote about angels and God, it was though he wrote in fetters, and he felt like he was, you know, he's free when he's writing about devils and hell and the reason is that he was a true poet and of the devil's party without knowing it. Yeah, I love that. And this is a formula that Philip Paulman has used many times of himself that he's of the devil's party. That he feels like

the devil is the good guy. And it's not that he hates religion, actually. I think this is one thing people get wrong about Philip Paulman. It's not that he hates religion and he necessarily hates God. What he hates is the idea of dogmatism, and being imprisoned by dogma. And it's actually something that, so, I mean, he's had loads of debates with the former Archbishop of Canceby-Rourne Williams and so on. So actually, some churchmen find Philip Paulman really amiable and interesting,

because they think he's taking theological ideas really seriously and what he hates is the idea of repression and conformity that it's not that he hates being interested in religion. He, in fact, he's said himself many times as an agnostic, not an atheist. He's like Blake in that,

“Blake loves contradictions, you know, heaven and hell, innocence and experience. The truth is not”

simple. It's not as simple as, oh, Philip Paulman hates everything to do with a church, faith, belief. Not at all. There's something very, actually spiritual about a lot of Paulman's writings, you know, particularly when you write about the natural world, like there's this kind of divine pan psychism to it. You know, the idea that matter is conscious that God is incarnate in the natural world. That's a very Catholic concept actually. Right. As you say, he's just opposed to kind of

tyrannical systems and like Blake, Blake wrote, I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's. There's something related to religion in that. It's much broader, I think. So a question for you, because I know there's obviously so much here about the fall of man rewriting the book of Genesis, the idea of innocence versus experience, all of this kind of stuff. But when you read this book, when you were 12 years old or 11 or 10 or whatever it was,

“how much of that filtered through or was it just it? Because it is. I think that one thing that”

we probably not really drawn out as much as we could have done, is it's a really exciting adventure story for a child reader. I mean, going to the north, fighting armoured bears, being rescued by

About how much of the existential debate side of it filtered through to you when you were reading

for the first time. Absolutely none of it, I would say. The one thing I do remember noting was

that there was something going on with the fact that the witches and the polar bears were kind of animals and wild and free and related to nature and untamed versus this very organised, clinical, bold anger, which is the place where the children been caught and everything to do with the church was very neat and organised and ordered. A lot of the church had insects, as their demons or lizards sort of. So you could see that there was a contrast there. There was

something about the organised nature of the baddies that even a child could recognize. But I read it first and foremost is an adventure story and then as I grew older, when I reread a university and I had kind of fallen in love with Blake, then I could see all this far more clearly.

“But that's why I think he's wrong about CS Lewis's books, actually.”

I agree, yeah. You can read CS Lewis's books, you're not indoctrinated by Christian propaganda. I mean, it's there, of course, but most people who read the line in the witch and the wardrobe

never notice and it doesn't shape there. I mean, insofar as it does shape their world for you,

it shapes it in completely benign way and non-dogmatic ways. And I think that's true of this as well. That's why the critics are fully at home when I think and misguided because I think most children would read this completely oblivious to the fact that it's an anti-clerical book. I mean, it's I think it's a very anti-catholic book, actually. But I don't think most children would ever pick up on that, frankly. No. Definitely not. It's a great, it's a great

story. It's a great book, has great characters. So let's get to the crux of the episode. Enough of existential questions. Tabby, there is going to be talk of people's demons. So I have two thoughts for you. Okay. And well, actually I've really got one. I was going to come up with a sort of insulting joke one. If the one you chose for me was unflattering, but I'm actually just who's going to go first? Because I feel like this is a really high risk.

This is so high risk. I feel like it's a shoe tab where we've both got pistols trained on each other.

“I think I'm going to talk you through my process very briefly. Yeah, let's talk about your process.”

I basically have been away since like four a.m. going through this in my head and I'm like, how do you take it seriously? Yeah, and I landed at various animals on my way to the truth. So my first thought was, there's this one ongoing joke between Dominic and I that whenever he does

anything particularly weasely, he is small from the Hobbit. I never do it weasely just to be clear.

Fine, you know, cunning. You're cunning. Yeah. So I started with Snake and then I thought, no, that's harsh. Yeah. And I moved to a peon dog. Tiny dog, but very smart. And then Antonaceus. And then I went from the peon dog. Look it up. It's true. Terrify. And then I landed on otter because they clever and playful. They liked to kind of live in boroughs and sort of hunk of down, but they're, you know, kind of jokes does, but I thought that wasn't right. No, no,

that wasn't quite right. You're not that kind of cuddly. And then finally, I landed on your demon.

“Dead, dead, dead, dead. Yeah. Okay. So I think your demon Dominic Sandbrook would be a Raven.”

Let me tell you why. They are very, very clever. They are socially intelligent. They are have conditional loyalty. They are very, very loyal to, you know, certain people, people that, you know, people that, you know, fellow birds, I guess, that they've been strong bonds to. They can be very trusted companions if you earn their loyalty. They are not submissive. They're opinionated. They are playful and mischievous. You know, great banter about flying upside down and stuff like that.

And they're curious. So there you go. Oh, tell me, that's nice. I'll take it. Yeah. That was very nice. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Now you can just read the last one. Have you ever met an opinionated Raven? I actually, I actually used chat GPT to look up the characteristics of the Raven and it said it was opinionated. I can't believe it's a big bird. You don't know. No, I don't, but chat GPT clearly does. So I did, I, so I did, I wasted a lot of time. And I found a thing online that said it could

tell you your spirit animal, which I thought was similar. And I did it for myself and for you to try and work out what yours is. Oh, poor. I used my own intuition. I answered all these questions. It could be ages. And then right at the end it said, right, we're out to unveil the spruce animals. Like I pressed the enter. It said, now we want you to give us a pound. And I refuse to do the right

I've actually got you down as a Lynx. Seriously. Yeah. That's epic. I love that. Yeah, like that.

So a Lynx is kind of, I don't know, a Lynx is slightly solitary. It can bet it's not excessively. They're kind of nocturnal, stealthy. Yeah. So you have to later. Yeah. You've got toughed it ears. I think a Lynx and a Raven, I think that. I was so anxious that I was going to be a hippo or something. Deep down, I didn't really want to be a bird. But I said, I mean, if I was going to be a bird, the radio time once compared me to an owl, they said, I look like a comfortable

owl on a day trip. So you're not eating enough to be an owl? No, I think an owl is slippery. Yeah,

“agreed. I think, but there is a Raven. Somebody does have a Raven in the book. No, isn't it?”

The master of Jordan College or someone like that? It could well be. But the master is not a playful person. Right. Anyway, we need to give this a score out of ten. So I think we should market out of unnecessarily malicious gold and monkeys. Okay. That's the, that's the index we're using.

I'll go first because I know what you're going to give it. I'm going to give it eight.

Okay. I'm giving it eight. I'm marking it down for no good reason. I've published it up to point for him. Philip Paul and being cruel to C. S. Lewis when C. S. Lewis is dead and can't argue

“back. And I'm also deducting a point because I think Lord Azrael is not sufficiently punished”

over the course of the trilogy for his poor behavior at the end of the first book. I feel like Philip Paul is too much in love with him and I feel sorry for Roger who has a terrible terrible end. I don't think there's sufficient justice for Roger. He's like barb in strange things who, you know, with the person who was dragged into the swimming pool or something and killed

and people said justice for barb and she never read barb. Yeah, but no one cared about barb. Let's be honest.

I cared about barb and I care about Roger. So they care about Roger, I don't care about barb. I think you leave the goal post about there because we're not marking the trilogy. We're marking this book alone. I am going to give it a ten. I love this world. It changed my childhood. I love the concept of demons and dust. I love, as a child, you know, poor men's kind of clean, readable, slightly spare pros. Yeah, it just totally captivated my imagination and rereading it this time

it did, it did too. On multiple layers, you know, I liked the kind of more Blakey and elements of it, but it's just a great story and I love Lyra. So there we go. Okay, so we've got something very, very different. So that's, you know, in a since next week, just loads of experience because we'll be doing Sally Rune is normal people. Yeah. Back to the Bible, the week after that. Back to the Bible, back to Adam and Eve, actually in Canaan Abel with John Steinbeck's East of Eden. Then one of

Alan Partridge, we mentioned Alan Partridge, one of his favorite books, "The How Do The Basketballs."

“I think you're going to say everything Alan Partridge's biography. Not yet. That will come, that will”

go. Okay. And then Tabby's favorite book of all time, Sarah J. Masses Romanticie, a court of thorns and roses. So that's the fourth book we've got coming up. That's a lot of experience. And then that's a lot of experience. And then perhaps, well, a bit of a nice mixture of innocence and experience. The fifth week from now, because we will be doing Wilkie Collins's great Victorian sensation novel The Woman in White, one of the great thrillers, I think, of all time. So, if you're still listening,

thank you for me and my Raven and from Tabby and her links. Goodbye. Bye!