Free Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon Page B

manifestation of Original Sin itself—the Church leadership has authorized Mrs. Coulter to lead a northern expedition of her own, one that will seek to determine whether Dust—Sin—can be forestalled, fended off, or eliminated entirely, by the intercision of a child before his or her daemon has “settled.” Naturally this course of research, carried out at a remote post in the Arctic,where Dust streams most plentifully, requires a steady supply of preadolescent subjects. Under Mrs. Coulter’s orders, teams of child-snatchers—known semimythically among the local children as “Gobblers”—fan out across England, baiting their traps with sweets and kindness. When her best friend at the College, a servant’s child named Roger, is stolen away by Mrs. Coulter’s General Oblation Board, Lyra determines to set off for the North and save him.
    The first volume of the sequence, The Golden Compass, is taken up with the competing schemes of Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter to understand and if possible control Dust, and with Lyra’s quest to find Roger and at the same time to convey to Lord Asriel (funded again and back in the North) a marvelous contraption called an alethiometer. The alethiometer is Pullman’s third great invention, after daemons and Dust. A beautiful instrument of gold and crystal, engraved with an alphabet or tarot of conventional symbols and fitted with knurls and indicator needles, the alethiometer will answer any question put to it, though it will not predict the future. When it comes to reading the alethiometer, a skill that normally demands a lifetime of training and study, Lyra proves to be a natural.
    Under the alethiometer’s tutelage, and with the help of a troop of stout Gyptians, Lyra makes her way north, learning, in the usual way of such journeys, even more about herself and her history than about the world she lives in, and discovering that there is a prophecy among the witches that she seems to be about to fulfill. Along the way she encounters an adventurer named Lee Scoresby, a Texan from New Denmark (her world’s U.S.), who comes equipped with a hot-air balloon and a greasepaint-Texan manner that will be familiar to readers of Buchan and Conan Doyle; and the appealing Iorek Byrnison, who in spiteof his Nordic name is a polar bear, or a kind of polar bear, polar bears in Lyra’s world having evolved opposable thumbs (they are mighty smiths) and the power of speech. Interestingly it is Byrnison the bear and not Scoresby the Texan who plays the Lee Marvin role in this novel, rousing himself from an alcoholic miasma of failure—it all turns on a question of bear politics—through admiration of the gifted and fiery girl.
    With the help of her companions, and following a number of hectic battles and one chilling scene of paternal anagnorisis (moment of recognition), Lyra fulfills her pledge to deliver the alethiometer to Lord Asriel and rescue Roger and the other stolen children—though with results that she finds, in the former instance, disappointing (Lord Asriel is stricken with a weird horror when he recognizes Lyra at the door of his polar fortress of solitude) and, in the latter, unexpectedly tragic, as poor Roger provides the means for Lord Asriel’s breaching of the border between worlds.
    The second volume, The Subtle Knife, introduces a new character, one who will come to assume an equal stature in the series to Lyra’s. He is Will Parry, a boy of roughly Lyra’s age who lives in a drab suburb near Oxford—our Oxford, this time. When we meet him, Will is struggling to protect himself and his mother—his father, an explorer and former Royal Marine, disappeared years before—from some sinister men, vaguely governmental, who are after the letters that Mr. Parry sent back home from the Arctic just before his disappearance. It’s a struggle for Will because his mother is no help at all; she’s mad, affected by some kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder that leaves her barely