8. Northern Lights: Dogma, Destiny, and Dæmons

To what extent is Pullman’s novel a critique of organised religion? How was Northern Lights inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost? And, did Northern Lights reshape the landscape of modern children's literature? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of Northern Lights, the world it was born of, and the novel itself. You can order and explore our favourite Folio books at http://foliosociety.com/thebookclub Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Lorcan Moullier Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Lyra and her demon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to 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. Lyra stopped beside the master's chair and flicked the biggest glass gently with a fingernail. The sound rang clearly through the hall.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  You're not taking this seriously, whispered her demon. Behave yourself.

• 1:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Her demon's name was Panta Lyman, and he was currently in the form of a moth, a dark brown one, so as not to show up in the darkness of the hall. Crouching behind the high table, Lyra darted along and through 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 maidservants didn't clean in here. That was the butler's job alone. Panta Lyman settled on her shoulder.

• 2:05Speaker 03

  Happy now? Can we go?

• 2:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  He whispered.

• 2:08Speaker 03

  Don't be silly. I want to look around. What do you think they talk about?

• 2:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Lyra said, or began to say, in her Cockney accent.

• 2:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because before she'd finished the question, she heard voices outside the door.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  Behind the chair, quick!

• 2:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Whispered Panta Lyman, and in a flash Lyra 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 centre 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. It 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.

• 3:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  He then did another trilogy, the last of which, The Rosefield, 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 and Nicole 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.

• 3:36Speaker 03

  Absolutely, they did.

• 3:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  In that introduction. So it's an exciting book. It's a 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 as she goes to try and find her missing friend in the distant north. But also, and 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 a book about growing up. It's a book about, in particular, God, the existence of God or the non-existence of God.

• 4:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  And about the tyranny exerted by authoritarian institutions and organisations. 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 there, Tabby?

• 4:43Speaker 03

  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, The Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amp Spyglass, they kind of mirror human development through Lyra from childhood to womanhood. And the reader tends to be growing up with the books as they read 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 Lyra is 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.

• 5:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 5:36Speaker 03

  Definitely. It's most obviously kind of a children's book because we see Lyra'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 naivety. And to her, it's kind of a thrilling adventure. She's on a quest to find a missing friend. 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 reader's consciousness as well. And the process is set in motion in this book, Northern Lights, mainly towards the end of it, because Lyra makes a shocking discovery. She discovers who her parents are and she commits a terrible act of betrayal that will

• 6:20Speaker 03

  see someone very dear to her murdered.

• 6:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  And we will be revealing these, these questions and mysteries after the break.

• 6:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  So there'll be some spoilers. There are always spoilers on this show.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  Not in the first half, but in the second half.

• 6:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  We do like to spoil people's fun.

• 6:34Speaker 03

  But Dominic, what did you make of it? Because I know, I know that you, you were slightly more sceptical of... Northern Lights than perhaps I was.

• 6:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Uh, do you know what? I wouldn't say I was skeptical. I'm a tiny bit, maybe Philip, a bit of a Philip Pullman skeptic, but that's not the same as being a His Dark Materials skeptic. So I was obviously an adult when I read this book. It came out at a time when there were two series really that had caught the national imagination. So one was Harry Potter and the other was His Dark Materials. And of course, they were, they were kind of published at the same time, the late nineteen nineties, early two thousands. And the standard thing, I think, for people to say, sort of literati people was, you know, all the attention is monopolized by Harry Potter. But His Dark Materials, that that trilogy is so much deeper and darker and, you know, more worthy of adult scrutiny and all this kind of thing.

• 7:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, um, the BBC's little documentary about it. And I was fascinated by, you know, the talk 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 polemical. 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.

• 8:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think the adventure story is brilliantly done. I think it's extremely imaginative. And I think if I had read this, I think when I was twelve, I would have loved it. What about you, Tabby? You probably did read it when you were twelve, did you?

• 8:17Speaker 03

  I did. I read it when I was about ten or eleven, I think. And I would say that it was the formative book of my childhood, my favorite book for years. I actually 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 kind of fundamentally reshaped my inner world and my imagination. I remember when I was little, I would kind of spend hours or days like 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.

• 8:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, that's nice.

• 8:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. But obviously, the first time I read it as a ten or eleven year old. I just thought it was a fantastic, page-turning adventure story. And so it remains. But then as I got older, and particularly reading the second book and the third, it came across as something far deeper and more powerful, exactly what kind of, I suppose, you were talking about earlier, when people say that it's worthy of adult scrutiny. I definitely found it to be. And I never found that the kind of polemic element of it got in the way of the story.

• 9:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Just a quick thing before we move on, because we'll talk about Philip Pullman and we'll talk 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.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  I am.

• 9:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  When you were growing up as well, and still are.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 formative?

• 9:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think definitely the most formative. In terms of nostalgia, it's got to be Harry Potter. In terms of like, 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, you know, the world I would draw maps of and stuff, it would be Middle Earth. But this is the one that emotionally, I think, had the biggest hold on me.

• 10:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, that's a lot of that is 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 of maturity, all of that.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  I was growing up with Lyra as I was reading it. And as you say, 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

• 10:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  was sort of Edwardian and I liked that. So it played into all the right things for me as a 10 or 11-year-old girl.

• 10:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  As I said, I'm a slightly Pullman skeptic in some ways, but I don't have a massive animus against him. Philip Pullman was born in Norwich in 1946. His father was in the Royal Air Force and died in a plane crash in Kenya when he was seven. He lived in Zimbabwe for a time, I think, like you, Tabby.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, like me.

• 11:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  He lived in Australia, which you didn't.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  No.

• 11:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he ended up settling in North Wales. So perhaps no offence to our Welsh listeners, but a slightly unglamorous. Choice after those initial forays 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 nineteen sixty eight. He became a teacher in Oxford. He taught Victorian literature. He was really interested in folk tales and things. And he, all this time, in the seventies, eighties, he was writing children's books. Philip Pullman. And the big hit for him was the Sally Lockhart Quartet. That's in the nineteen eighties. That's the Ruby and the Smoke and things like that. There was a TV version with Billy Piper. And then the moment when he really became a sort of national figure was when he first

• 11:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  published Northern Lights, which is nineteen ninety five, I think. And then the rest of the His Dark Materials trilogy. And I think the difference between him and, let's say, J K Rowling. J K Rowling, of course, is somebody who's been drawn into lots of Controresses more recently.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  But while she was publishing Harry Potter, she was not a controversial figure at all. She was a kind of media darling. Now, Philip Pullman was controversial and it was all about the issue of religion. So this runs right through the His Dark Materials trilogy, the Treatments of Religion. And he really leant into that when he was publishing them. So in two thousand and two, he was asked if he was, if his books were anti-Christian, 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 rebelled 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.

• 12:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  And particularly in America, more kind of traditionalist, sort of evangelical or hardline Catholic groups in particular, were not happy at all, were they?

• 13:05Speaker 03

  No. So, so the Catholic League, among other religious groups, actually labelled the series Atheism for Kids. And it's, it's often appeared on the American Literary Association's list of most challenged books, ranking as high as second, I think, in two thousand and eight. It's been banned by school boards. Particularly in places like Canada, for some reason.

• 13:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  And it's also historically, the books have been removed 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 criticised for watering down the anti-Christianity, the anti-Christian message of the books. But then also, it was boycotted 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 polemicist, writer, journalist, Peter Hitchens, he described Philip Pullman as the most dangerous author in Britain. I mean, he later renounced this statement, but what do you make of that, Dominic?

• 14:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  So much of this is the idea that Philip Pullman 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 Pullman's books are absolutely stamped with 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. He's actually gone out of his way to say he's not an atheist but an agnostic. I guess the one thing, you've sort of alluded several times to, oh, Dominic's going to be very hard on Philip Pullman or whatever.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  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 a point.

• 14:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  About anything.

• 14:55Speaker 03

  About anything, yeah. You just don't like people to have opinions.

• 14:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, you're not wrong. No, actually, I tell you what it is. It's that I really like The Chronicles of Narnia, and Philip Pullman loathes The Chronicles of Narnia. He's described them as ugly, poisonous, vile, life-hating, nauseating, drivel, loathsome, disgusting, and containing a view of life so hideous and cruel I can scarcely contain myself when I think of it. And Tabby, 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 C.S. Lewis into his great hate figure. I mean, in many ways, you could argue C.S. Lewis is the real antagonist of his Dharma materials, 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 that most children even recognise it.

• 15:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  I do find that a little bit tiresome. However, separating the author's interviews from the book is really important.

• 15:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's true of all art forms, actually.

• 15:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course, it doesn't diminish the book at all. So on the book, he got the idea, as we will discuss, from William Blake, John Milton, his interest in science as well, so quantum theory and stuff, that's, there's a lot of that in there, isn't there?

• 16:04Speaker 03

  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 eighty five percent 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 marking exam papers and it was the whole, a hobbit living in a hole under the ground.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  For Philip Pullman, the great connector, the thing that kind of unlocked the story for him was demons. And I think these are ingenious. I think they're his greatest invention. And these are animal manifestations of the human soul. We allude, you know, the opening reading introduces them. Lyra has a demon called Panta Lyman. And one day he was walking around his garden and he suddenly realised that children's demons, he'd had this idea of demons, they change, but adults' demons don't. And so he realised that this world and this kind of 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 nineteen ninety three.

• 17:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  So on the demons, I saw in an interview, he said, one of the inspirations was sort of Renaissance and whatnot artworks in which there would be, you know, Leonardo or Tietolo or Holbein. They would have these portraits where there would be particularly a young woman or a woman, a lady, kind of with an animal.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  So the lady with the ermine.

• 17:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Though with the ermine, exactly.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, so my dad would send that to me as a postcard when he was away.

• 17:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hmm.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  Uh, when I was little and he would always say that I was the girl and then that was the ermine. And then when I was little, I was pretended that my demon was an ermine.

• 17:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, that's nice.

• 18:00Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 18:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Those artworks, the painter uses the animal um 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, the subject to the portrait's personality.

• 18:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  And this is what Philip Pullman does with his demons. So to give the example of Lyra and Pantalimon. Pantalimon kind of is Lyra, but is not Lyra. So Pantalimon is Lyra's soul, her conscience, her friend, um, 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 Pantalimon. So when we first meet him, what is he? Is a moth or something, isn't he?

• 18:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, a child's demon can change into anything.

• 18:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Which is a lovely, it's a lovely idea. It's about the sort of immutability of your personality. But also, you know, you, you can take on, I mean, for, for a narrative point of view. It means that the demon can be a bird one minute, a bear, you know, a dog, whatever.

• 18:59Speaker 03

  Depending on your mood as well. So if you're angry, your demon might turn into a lion or something like that.

• 19:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  And you're born in Philip Pullman's world clutching or holding your demon, aren't you? Your demon is part of you.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  And they can't be separated from you. And actually, crucially, you said, you know, an adult's demon is fixed. This is mirroring the way in which your personality, your, your soul, for want of a better word, is fixed. When you are a teenager, you become who you're going to be. So at 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. Oh, by the way, your demon is usually the opposite gender from you. Not always.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 19:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  But, but most of the time. And actually, that sailor says to her, there are times when your demon, you're not happy with the form that your demon takes.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  What that, what that's reflecting. Is people who are not happy in their own skin and not happy with themselves. They're uncomfortable or whatever, as so many people are, of course.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  That's the thing. Demons brilliantly reveal things about a character without Philip Pullman having to explicitly spell it out. So really interestingly, for instance, in La Belle Sauvage, which is the prequel book to this series, there is a character whose demon is a hyena and he beats it. And it's emblematic of his self-loathing for himself, how much he hates himself, how uncomfortable he is with himself. So it's very, very interesting that. I honestly think it's a truly, truly unique concept.

• 20:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's a brilliant idea. So you just think your demon was an ermine, did you?

• 20:35Speaker 03

  Uh, I think just because of that postcard and because Lyra 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.

• 20:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  I do. Yeah, I think I know you well enough to make a sound judgment on that. So if people want to meet the real Dominic Sandbrook.

• 20:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Come on.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  Stick around.

• 20:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  No one wants to meet that person. But also, knowing as I do, it's so obviously going to be like a wart hog or something.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  That's so predictable, honestly.

• 21:04Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 21:09Speaker 03

  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 Lyra, a mischievous orphan, Lyra Blackwell, and her demon, Pantalimon, 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 Lyra's uncle. So the implication is that he's going to try and poison Lord Asriel. Lyra jumps out at the last minute and prevents Lord Asriel from drinking the wine. And because of this, then, she spends

• 21:51Speaker 03

  the rest of the evening hiding in the cupboard, watching Lord Asriel give this talk to the scholars.

• 21:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  And the talk is all about dust. And this is a mysterious substance linked to human consciousness. And Lord Asquith approves 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 a secret group known as the Gobblers. But this is linked, there are 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. Coulter and we don't know anything about her, but she totally captivates and enchants Lyra.

• 22:41Speaker 03

  And as a result, Lyra goes with her back to London. But as she's leaving Jordan, two things happen. She realises that her best friend, Roger, the kitchen boy is missing and this worries her because of all the children that are being kidnapped.

• 22:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  And this is the motor of the narrative because she's going to want to find Roger, right?

• 22:58Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. Roger has been taken by the Gobblers. Lyra 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 alethiometer or a 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, Lyra 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

• 23:41Speaker 03

  to create the universe from chaos in book seven of Milton's Paradise Lost. So there you see his influence again. And it's then stayed the fervid 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 alethiometer 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.

• 24:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's a tool of liberation rather than control.

• 24:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. It's an instrument of endless knowledge and therefore liberation. But Dominic, take us through the next part of the book.

• 24:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Lyra makes a couple of discoveries, doesn't she? So she discovers that actually Mrs. Coulter is leading the Gobblers. So she's a baddie. And they are actually the General Oblation Board and they're part of the Magisterium, which is basically the church and which is the sort of oppressive authoritarian institution that controls Lyra's world. And basically, the Gobblers, the church, the Magisterium, as they're called, are kidnapping these children. They're going to experiment on them in some way. Lyra escapes. She runs away. She's taken up with these people called the Egyptians, who are kind of, I mean, they're basically Gypsies, kind of Romani people, who live on canal boats and sort of sail around at the fens, talking to Dutchmen. And with the Egyptians, she goes off to the north, the Arctic, to try and rescue, try

• 25:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  and track down her mate 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.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  This is an unthinkably awful thing to do in this world. Like, it's compared at one point to, like, cutting off the genital organs of small boys or something. Like, it's truly heinous.

• 25:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  I was about to say, that's the obvious parallel, is the practice of castrating boys to make castrati singers.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 25:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  So all kinds of exciting antics. She meets an armored bear called Yorick Bernison. He's brilliant. I love him.

• 25:57Speaker 03

  Love him.

• 25:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's a great creation, actually. So these talking bears that wear armor, fighting bears. She meets some witches. I know you love the witches, Tabby.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  I do.

• 26:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  You named your cat after a witch, I think, didn't you?

• 26:07Speaker 03

  Seraphina Pecola. I did.

• 26:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, in the Arctic, and she thinks that basically, you know, Lord Asriel has been taken prisoner. She wants to rescue him and she wants to give him the alethiometer. 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.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  It will literally shatter her world.

• 26:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  It will shatter her world. Very good, Taffy.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 26:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the world, let's talk a tiny bit about the world, the fantasy world. So the funny thing about this is a fantasy book is that basically it's one of the things I'm slightly Pullman skeptic about is that for somebody who's made a great name for himself and been 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, you know, escape into it. So for example, starting in Oxford, it's funny how Oxford plays a part in so many of these kind of fantasy worlds. So obviously C S Lewis was at Oxford, Gerard Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings at Oxford.

• 27:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  It works because Oxford feels like a fantastical place, especially to outsiders. It's got all the colleges, it's got buildings with weird names, it's got the weird rituals and traditions, the kind of honey coloured stone 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 Egyptians and all of that kind of thing. And it feels like a richly observed, immersive landscape for a child reader, I would say.

• 28:09Speaker 03

  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 lulls 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 in plausible 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

• 28:54Speaker 03

  he then maps on to 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.

• 29:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's more rooted, you think, than the world of Hogwarts?

• 29:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 29:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's well, it's less silly. I guess I don't mean silly to be a criticism.

• 29:18Speaker 03

  No, but it's conceivable that people could walk around and that like there is actually a point towards the end of the trilogy where we realise 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 Tolkien sort, unconnected 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 being disingenuous there. I think that's something he exaggerates in order to kind of drive home his, apparently drive home his 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.

• 30:01Speaker 03

  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 don't think that's entirely fair, though, because you can, this is a fantasy. It's a world full of strange beings.

• 30:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, I think it's it's wrong on two counts. 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 is 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 escapism and it's unconnected with the Oxford that Tolkien was living in when he wrote about it.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  But also ironically, given his scathing for C.S. 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 beings with, you know, there's nothing to root them in any kind of consistent, I don't know, mythos.

• 31:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  You will remember, my favorite, my favorite Narnia beast is at the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's a bull with the head of a man.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 31:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Not even a man with the head of a bull.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  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 air holding pine branches. And then you have Lee Scoresby, who's a human aeronaut.

• 31:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  From Texas.

• 31:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, from Texas. He flies around an air balloon. There's nothing magical about him, but just highlights how random it all is. He's a cowboy from the Wild West talking to a flying witch.

• 31:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, but that's the fun of it, isn't it?

• 32:00Speaker 03

  It's wonderful. I have no problem with this. I love it.

• 32:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, zeppelins, talking animals, all that stuff. And it's fine, a child never questions that because a child is arguably more sophisticated reader than an adult. So a child is basically, you know, it's fine, it's a fiction, you can put in anything. Whereas an adult will 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.

• 32:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I dressed up as her for National Book Day.

• 32:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Did you?

• 32:42Speaker 03

  Whatever it was called. Yeah.

• 32:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  What does Lyra wear? What did Lyra wear?

• 32:45Speaker 03

  Well, I wore I wore a very hot fur coat and mittens, which in the middle of Kenya was really uncomfortable.

• 32:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, my word.

• 32:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Like so many child protagonists in these kinds of adventure stories, she's an orphan. It's really important to get the child, 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 and 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 cellars and all that kind of thing.

• 33:30Speaker 03

  She's rude to figures of authority, all the good things.

• 33:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, there's an interesting contrast between her and Panter Lyman, her demon. She's more daring and reckless and 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 brake on her ambitions. You know, are you sure? Don't we, shouldn't we be careful? All that kind of thing.

• 33:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's kind of her protector and his, his name is a nod to this because it's Pan plus a lemon in Greek, and that's merciful, compassionate. And that's a bit, that contrast Lyra's kind of headstrong.

• 34:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 34:04Speaker 03

  You know, slightly rude, rebellious, danger-loving streak. This is a massive, massive part of the character. She's actually called Silver Tongue by the polar bears, when she manages to win back her friend Eurich Bernenson's throne by telling a big lie, basically.

• 34:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 34:20Speaker 03

  And. So she, and she takes great pride in this trait of hers, being able to trick people. But she's also loving and loyal and she inspires great love in others. So the witches, the bears, Lee Scoresby. But she's never older than she is, you know, it's, she's clearly a child throughout with a child's worldview, a child's interests, a child's excitement. And this naivety, you know, there are scenes, for instance, when she's curled 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 pitiable figure, actually, you know, a child with a great destiny.

• 34:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's a classic kind of children's book trick to say of the narrator or the protagonist or whatever, like Harry Potter.

• 35:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's the hero's arc, isn't it? It's classic.

• 35:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  But this is quite a unique destiny, I would say.

• 35:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  In her case.

• 35:20Speaker 03

  In her case.

• 35:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because she.

• 35:21Speaker 03

  It's bound up in the Bible, like all great destinies.

• 35:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  She is Eve.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  The second Eve.

• 35:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  Betrayal.

• 35:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, you describe it as a betrayal. I mean, it's not a conscious betrayal, is it? It's 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?

• 36:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, but we don't, we don't find out what that is till the end. And we, we don't know a lot about this prophecy either. We just know that the magisterium fears her specifically and they call her the second Eve. You know, this figure who's going to bring about some kind of vague new beginning for humanity, that she, who will commit some great act of disobedience. And. In doing so, will 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, in Jewish folklore was Adam's first wife, who was banished for not being submissive, and she subsequently viewed as a very demonic

• 36:45Speaker 03

  figure, a woman who goes around actually stealing 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 incoming.

• 36:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I think people would, even if people haven't read the book would have worked it out that basically this character, Mrs. Coulter, this incredibly glamorous woman, is Lyra's mother. To me, she's the best character in the book.

• 37:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Apart from the armored bear, Yorick Bernerson, who I really like. She was played by Nicole Kidman in the film.

• 37:14Speaker 03

  Very well, I thought.

• 37:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  You'd like, I like Ruth Wilson, actually, as the, in the TV series. I think Ruth Wilson's brilliant as her.

• 37:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you've got flesh in the game, and you're, it's not with Ruth Wilson.

• 37:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Flat, not even skin in the game, I've got flesh in the game, that's.

• 37:27Speaker 03

  She's, um, she's a big fan of the rest of history, so that does reflect very well on her, your other show.

• 37:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  What a great person, what a great person.

• 37:34Speaker 03

  The reason Mrs. Coulter is so interesting is because she's basically the arch villain of this series.

• 37:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hmm.

• 37:40Speaker 03

  But there are these moments where she can't help but betray a real love for Lyra, and this almost redeems her at certain points.

• 37:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, her daughter, exactly, her daughter.

• 37:49Speaker 03

  Lyra, her daughter, exactly.

• 37:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  And, and you know she's a baddie from the beginning, because her demon is a baddie, and he's a monkey.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  Her demon gives it away.

• 37:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he's a, he's this incredibly sort of excessively luxuriant monkey.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  He's beautiful.

• 38:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he's got really long silky fair, but in a kind of disturbing way, I think.

• 38:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, but he's got this creepy little face and these creepy little hands. And unusually, he is 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, it represents the hidden, repressed evil in Mrs. Coulter, 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, she hits it at one point. So that's a bit like, like you, you feel the pain of that slap. And particularly when it vies against her kind of upsurges of, of love for Lyra. But the monkey itself can be shockingly violent.

• 38:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Her monkey is her, I was gonna say her id, that's not quite right, but her monkey is her dark side.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  It's Mr Hyde.

• 38:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it's Mr Hyde. Her monkey is the evil within her, but there is also good. I mean, that's what makes her 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 and whatnot. And there is something quite fairy tale, I think, about her. Isn't there? That idea of the woman tempting you away with chocolates or whatever?

• 39:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely. And, but I actually think that's deeply, deeply sinister. And we know that Philip Pullman loves fairy tales and folklore. You know, he rewrote the Grimm fairy tales. And the, the kind of horror of them, the creepiness of them is massively, massively emphasized. And because of this, you know, the idea that she's this sort of beautiful fairy godmother figure.

• 39:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hmm.

• 39:53Speaker 03

  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 tempts a young Oxford urchin called Tony Macaros, Macarios, 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 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 don't you come and help me drink it? And then he's, you know, captivated and follows her.

• 40:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Do you know what, though, Tabby? Just thinking about that, that's again, I mean, I know Philip Pullman hates C.S. Lewis, but that's The White Witch and the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with Edmund and the Turkish Delight, isn't it?

• 40:42Speaker 03

  It is, it totally is. So he follows her into this locked, into this, to 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. Coulter's incredible beauty.

• 41:03Speaker 03

  And her elegance and her grace and her sophistication, it all serves as a kind of mask, hiding a manipulative, cruel and power hungry nature.

• 41:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  And this ambition of hers is crucial because it's why she gets involved with the Magisterium in the first place, who we'll get to properly 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 usurper polar bear king, who Lyra then has to have vanquished by her friend, Euric Bernison. And all the while, she's actually using this to build her own power base. And this is why she sets up the Gobblers, the General Ablation Board, you know, to kidnap children and experiment on them.

• 41:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  All right, 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 of talking. And the result of that is that we have talked for too long, as is some people, some podcasts is a massive trade secret, some podcasts have struggled to fill their allotted half hour. That is not an issue that we have on this show. After the break, all kinds of excitement, we'll be revealing who Lyra's father is, we'll be revealing why they're conducting these terrible experiments, we'll be exploring the influence of John Milton and William Blake on Philip Pullman's world.

• 42:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  And very exciting for everybody, I will be revealing what Tabby's demon is, so please don't go away.

• 43:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Lyra's father, because her mother has been revealed as this, as the sort of supervillain in some ways of the first book, Mrs. Coulter. Who is her father, Tabby?

• 43:29Speaker 03

  Well, Lyra's father turns out to be her mysterious uncle, Lord Azrael, because he had an affair with Mrs. Coulter. Before Lyra was born, Mrs. Coulter was married. He ended up murdering Mrs. Coulter's husband to protect Lyra, and then is penniless as a result and gives Lyra to the Scholars of Jordan College to be raised. And Lord Azrael 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, Azrael, it may come from Azrael, the angel of death in Jewish mysticism and Islamic folklore. He describes large, muscular, physically powerful, he has dark hair, sharp features, and a face

• 44:13Speaker 03

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

• 44:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he's quite unlikable, I would say, in this book.

• 44:57Speaker 03

  He's not easy to like, no.

• 44:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, he's something, he's maybe a... Admirable in some ways in that he has this incredible poise and self possession. And he's clearly extremely bright and visionary and ambitious and he's free thinking, which is why he ends up being imprisoned.

• 45:16Speaker 03

  He's eloquent and persuasive.

• 45:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, but there is a real coldness to him, as we discover at the end, because he is the person to whom Lyra will inadvertently betray her best friend Roger. And he is the person who will carry out this terrible act.

• 45:31Speaker 03

  He's hell bent on this mission, basically.

• 45:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and this is the devil, the devilish side of him, I suppose, that he is 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 kind of break down the barriers between the worlds. 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.

• 46:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is the act of severing a child from their demon, basically cutting out somebody's soul. And he has been up there in the north, waiting for a child to appear so that he can do it. 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. Kind of a very biblical kind of moment or a moment from a Greek myth or something.

• 46:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's Isaac and Abraham.

• 46:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 brilliantly done. And then he sees behind her, 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, the narrative building towards this climax. He conducts the experiment to sever Roger from his demon.

• 47:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  And this is what tears a hole in the universe through which he can travel between worlds. And this moment, you know, it's a, it's a bravura piece of writing, actually, because all the narrative has 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 has kind of rushed to try to rescue Roger, but she's too late. And it's as though, you know, 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 Azrael builds this bridge to another world.

• 47:58Speaker 03

  There's even romance because he reunites with Mrs. Coulter for the first time and Lyra sees them silhouetted against the northern lights, kind of tearing at one another, like embracing but separating, both bent on different tasks.

• 48:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I was rereading that scene this morning. I was really, you know, marveling at what a brilliant bit of writing those final pages of the book are.

• 48:22Speaker 03

  It really is.

• 48:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  To read that, I've never, I never read it as a child. I can only imagine how thrilling it must have been to be a child reader for the first time, getting to that point. It's devastating, emotionally 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. I mean, that's a shock.

• 48:45Speaker 03

  But it's also, you get such a strong sense that it is the death of something for Lyra, 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 the light of another world.

• 49:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  And do you know what?

• 49:02Speaker 03

  It's, it's so dramatic.

• 49:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 hackneyed 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.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  But it's important to say, to explain why it is that Lord Asriel 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 let's explain a little bit more about the Magisterium, because they are kind of the arch-villains of this world, of Lyra's universe.

• 50:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 feuding against each other, that kind of rival departments. It's actually quite well done, this. It's sort of, it's how government works.

• 50:29Speaker 03

  It's quite communist, isn't it?

• 50:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's a lot of criminology to it, but there's, 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 for simplicity's sake. 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 exercised by this thing that we've mentioned a couple of times, but never really explained, 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? Do you want to explain?

• 51:11Speaker 03

  Dust. It's also called Rosikov particles. It's kind of, it's kept mysterious and secret for most of the book. We don't really know what it is, but we learn more about it, as Lyra does. And we learn from her spying in the retiring room that it can be seen through certain kind of scientific instruments.

• 51:28Speaker 03

  Physically, it looks like a fountain of glowing particles. It's described as having as a shimmering 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 thou return unto the ground,

• 52:10Speaker 03

  for out of it was thou taken, for dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return." So that's what God says to Adam and Eve when they have fallen, when they have eaten fruit from the tree of knowledge, they have been thrown from the garden of Eden, they've committed the ultimate act of disobedience.

• 52:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  But in his verse in the Bible, there are demons and all that kind of thing.

• 52:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, so he rewrites Genesis three, where rather than Adam and Eve realising they're naked, they realise that they can see the form of their demons.

• 52:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, the eyes of both them were opened and they saw the true form of their demons.

• 52:42Speaker 03

  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, 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 Coulter say?

• 53:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Mrs Coulter says this explicitly to Lyra, she says, "Dust is something bad, something wrong, something wicked. Grownups and their demons are infected with dust, it's too late for them, but an operation on children would keep them safe from it."

• 53:14Speaker 03

  They're trying to reverse the fall, basically. They're trying to keep children innocent forever. In fact, what this cup 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...

• 53:42Speaker 03

  Tragic, genuinely tragic, kind of zombie-like waifs. They tend to die without their demons. The demon dies straight away, almost. And there's this scene where Lyra encounters a child who's been severed. This is actually the Tony Macarios that we described being tempted by Mrs. Coulter earlier on.

• 54:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's a really sad moment, isn't it?

• 54:02Speaker 03

  And she finds him cowering in a shed in the middle of the north. And because he's lost his demon, Rata, he is clinging to a frozen piece of fish desperately. And that's not comical at all. It's actually absolutely tragic. And, and, 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, you know? It's so unnatural, which means that we should, we should see any interference in this natural process as an abomination as well.

• 54:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  This is some of the stuff that obviously, you know, ultra Catholic critics didn't like about his book, is that he is, he, his target, I said his target was, 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.

• 55:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  And, and that's why, you know, the act of cutting off your, your soul or trying to distance yourself from knowledge and experience and things are bad things for him and bad things in the book.

• 55:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  And the, the character of Lord Azrael, 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 a character from Paradise Lost, namely Satan?

• 55:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, he absolutely is. 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 Dart 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 Lyra'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.

• 56:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, well, Milton's one of the Titanic figures of English literature, maybe not somebody who's as well known as Shakespeare or something, but one of the very few people to be in that league. So Milton was a 17th century poet and polemicist and civil servant, actually.

• 56:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Who was a fan of the parliamentarians in the civil war. He was actually Oliver Cromwell's secretary for foreign tongues, which is an excellent job title. He is on the sort of, he is on the, what you might call the more hardline Protestant wing of the religious divide in 17th century England. He's opposed to kings, to the divine right of kings. He's a republican. He thinks, you know, you interpret God and the Bible through your own individual conscience, rather than, you know, you don't defer to the authority.

• 57:13Speaker 03

  It's not handed down to you.

• 57:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, exactly. You don't defer to the authority of bishops and kings and so on. You know, Milton was, is a Cromwellian. Milton is somebody who serves Cromwell. And then after the Restoration, 1660, when the monarchy returns under Charles II, he's imprisoned for a little while, and then he kind of, you know, lives quietly in obscurity. He's gone blind.

• 57:36Speaker 03

  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 retells the biblical story of the fall of humanity through disobedience. But it kind of expands 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 in 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 are expelled from the Garden of Eden. And the title of this trilogy, His Dark Materials, is actually taken from Book Two of Paradise Lost.

• 58:21Speaker 03

  So it's, but all these in their pregnant causes mix confusedly and which thus must ever fight unless the almighty maker, them ordained, 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, and you know, 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.

• 58:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he well, he is a satanic character because he's Satan. I mean, he's Lucifer. I mean, that's the, that's the thing, isn't it? So Satan in, Paradise Lost, I mean, the thing that everybody always says about Paradise Lost is Milton makes Satan in some ways, the hero of the story.

• 59:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I, I think that's true.

• 59:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  The poem starts with Satan's rebellion underway. 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.

• 59:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know, we're, we're kind of with him. Um, 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-minded, you know, charismatic character who is Lucifer.

• 59:46Speaker 03

  And like this, and this is massively debated, like C S Lewis didn't read it this way at all. You know, he said that Paradise Lost was like a defense of God 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 deluge and it's all colorful 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, a heaven of hell. And like Satan, he defines himself in opposition to authority and. You know, he embodies free will. He says to Mrs. Coulter at one point, I wanted to break

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  out, Marissa, and I have. And like Satan rebelling against God, Azrael 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.

• 1:00:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  And freedom. I mean, that's massively important to him. The one thing about him, though, Tabby, the caveat is, the book ends with him committing an act of hideous cruelty to Roger. So he's not-

• 1:00:57Speaker 03

  He's not a good man.

• 1:00:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 you can possibly do. It's unforgivable, exactly. Philip Pullman does kind of forgive it. I mean, I know we're jumping ahead to subsequent books in the trilogy, but to me, that's the greatest crime of the whole trilogy.

• 1:01:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it's true. I think, 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 old fashioned rebellion.

• 1:01:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, I guess so. So we said Milton was one of the big inspirations. The other one is William Blake. And I guess the thing with William Blake is this 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 and all of those kinds of things. And even Lord Azrael thinks of dust, doesn't he, as a kind of a bad thing?

• 1:02:04Speaker 03

  He doesn't really care about dust. He kind of, he kind of says to Mrs. Coulter at one point, come with me, come with me to my other world and we'll find the source of dust and destroy it forever.

• 1:02:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  He's, he's against the people that just want to get rid of dust. But in fact, dust is-

• 1:02:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's secondary to his, to his enterprise, would you say?

• 1:02:22Speaker 03

  I think, yeah, he just doesn't, it's kind of beneath him.

• 1:02:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  But Lyra says at one point, the fact that everybody else, they're all saying it's terrible, i.e. experience, sexuality, sin, whatever, and they're clearly bad people. I mean, she's talking about her own parents. She says to her demon, pantalime, if they all say it's so terrible, then it must be good. And she's the one character who sees that experience may be a better thing than innocence, and that innocence is not something to be celebrated.

• 1:02:49Speaker 03

  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've mentioned Blake there, that's a very, very Blakean principle.

• 1:03:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, so Blake, for people who don't know, he's a romantic poet, late 18th, early 19th 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.

• 1:03:18Speaker 03

  I love him.

• 1:03:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of the monarchy, of organised religion, of social injustice, of industrialisation, 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 bind your desires. He thinks the idea of obedience is wrong.

• 1:03:51Speaker 03

  He doesn't like the church, organised religion and dogma. He famously wrote, "Priests in black gowns binding with briars my joys and desires." So repressing kind of freedom of thought. And his big thing was, he celebrated the imagination. And Pullman implies that dust is linked to imagination and creativity. So, which, which, you know, you gain a great deal of with age and experience.

• 1:04:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 as 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.

• 1:04:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love that.

• 1:04:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  And this is a formula that Philip Pullman 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 Pullman. 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 Canterbury, Rowan Williams and so on. So actually, some churchmen find Philip Pullman 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, is an agnostic, not an atheist.

• 1:05:25Speaker 03

  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, it's not as simple as, oh, Philip Pullman hates everything to do with the church, faith, belief. Not at all. There's something very actually spiritual about a lot of Pullman's writings, you know, particularly when he writes about the natural world, like there's this kind of divine panpsychism 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.

• 1:05:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 1:05:56Speaker 03

  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 nothing related to religion in that. It's much broader, I think.

• 1:06:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  So a question for you, because I know there's obviously so much here about like 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, because it is, I think, that one thing that we've 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 armored bears, being rescued by witches, falling out of hot air balloons. It's great fun. I mean, it's a really fun book, but how much of the existential debate side of it filtered through to you when you were reading it for the first time?

• 1:06:48Speaker 03

  Absolutely none of it, I would say.

• 1:06:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 1:06:51Speaker 03

  The one thing, 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 organized, clinical bulvanger, which is the place where the children being cut. And everything to do with the church was very neat and organized and ordered. A lot of the churchmen had insects as their demons or lizards or whatever.

• 1:07:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:14Speaker 03

  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 recognise. But I read it first and foremost as an adventure story. And then as I grew older, when I reread it at university and that I and I'd kind of fallen in love with Blake, that I could see all this far more clearly.

• 1:07:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  But that's why I think he's wrong about C.S. Lewis's books, actually.

• 1:07:38Speaker 03

  I agree, yeah.

• 1:07:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  You can read C.S. Lewis's books. You're not indoctrinated by Christian propaganda. I mean, it's there, of course, but most people who read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe never notice and it doesn't shape their, I mean, insofar as it does shape their worldview, it shapes it in in completely benign way and non dogmatic ways.

• 1:07:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I think that's true of this as well. That's why the critics of Philip Pullman, I think, are misguided, because I think most children would read this completely oblivious to the fact that it's an anti clerical book. I mean, it is, I think it's a very anti Catholic book, actually. But I don't think most children would ever pick up on that, frankly.

• 1:08:15Speaker 03

  No, definitely not. It's a great, it's a great story. It's a great book, has great characters.

• 1:08:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 1:08:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  So I have two thoughts for you.

• 1:08:33Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:08:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 1:08:47Speaker 03

  This is so high risk.

• 1:08:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  High risk, but it's a conversation.

• 1:08:51Speaker 03

  I feel like it's a shootout where we've both got pistols trained on each other.

• 1:08:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:55Speaker 03

  I think I'm going to talk you through my process very briefly.

• 1:08:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, let's talk about your process.

• 1:09:00Speaker 03

  Basically, I basically have been awake since like 4am going through this in my head and I landed.

• 1:09:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  You're taking this seriously.

• 1:09:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I landed at various animals on my way to the truth. So my first thought was, there's an ongoing joke between Dominic and I that whenever he does anything particularly Weasley, he is Smaug from The Hobbit.

• 1:09:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  I never do anything Weasley, just to be clear.

• 1:09:25Speaker 03

  Fine, you know, cunning, you're cunning.

• 1:09:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:27Speaker 03

  So I started with snake and then

• 1:09:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  What?

• 1:09:30Speaker 03

  And then I thought, no, that's harsh. And I moved to a papillon dog, tiny dog, but very smart. And then Antonius.

• 1:09:42Speaker 03

  And then I went from the papillon dog, look it up, it's it's truly terrifying. And then I landed on otter because they're clever and playful. They like to kind of live in burrows and sort of hunker down, but they're, you know, kind of jokesters. But I thought that wasn't quite right. No, no, that wasn't quite right. You're not that kind of cuddly. And then finally, I landed on your demon. Da da da.

• 1:10:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:06Speaker 03

  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 or fellow birds, I guess, that they form 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.

• 1:10:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, Tabby, that's nice. I'll take it. That was very nice.

• 1:10:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow.

• 1:10:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, now, now you're gonna have to rethink what you're gonna give me.

• 1:10:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. Have you ever met an opinionated raven?

• 1:11:01Speaker 03

  I actually, I actually used ChatGPT to look up the characteristics of a raven. And it said it was opinionated.

• 1:11:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  I can't believe it.

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  You don't speak bird, you don't know.

• 1:11:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, I don't, but ChatGPT 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 was.

• 1:11:25Speaker 03

  Poor, I use my own intuition.

• 1:11:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  I answered all these questions. It took me ages. And then right at the end, it said, right, we're about to unveil the spirit animal. I was like, I pressed like enter and it said, now we want you to give us a pound.

• 1:11:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I refuse to do that.

• 1:11:39Speaker 03

  That's actually right for not being a free thinker like William Blake.

• 1:11:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I refuse to do that. So I just had to use my own, um, I've actually got you down as a lynx.

• 1:11:48Speaker 03

  Seriously?

• 1:11:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:50Speaker 03

  That's epic. I love that. Wow. Yeah.

• 1:11:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  So a lynx is kind of, um, I don't know, a lynx is slightly solitary, but it's not excessively. They're kind of nocturnal, stealthy.

• 1:12:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. Smooth operator.

• 1:12:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. You've got tufted ears. I think a lynx and a raven, I think that, that.

• 1:12:11Speaker 03

  That's quite good, isn't it?

• 1:12:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  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'll take, but I mean, if I was going to be a bird. The Radio Times once compared me to an owl. They said I looked like a comfortable owl on a day trip. So raven's a definite.

• 1:12:26Speaker 03

  Enough to be an owl.

• 1:12:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, I think an owl is.

• 1:12:28Speaker 03

  Or solitary.

• 1:12:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  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?

• 1:12:37Speaker 03

  It could well be, but I, the, the master is not a playful person. Right. Anyway, we need to give this a score out of 10. So I think we should mark it out of unnecessarily malicious golden monkeys.

• 1:12:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay. That's the, that's the index we're using.

• 1:12:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:53Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:12:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'm giving eight. I'm marking it down for no good reason. Um, I was probably deducting a point for him, Philip Pullman 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 behaviour at the end of the first book.

• 1:13:18Speaker 03

  All right.

• 1:13:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Feel like Philip Pullman 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. It's like Barb in Stranger Things, who, um, you know, with a person who was dragged into the swimming pool or something and killed and people said, justice for Barb and she never reappeared.

• 1:13:36Speaker 03

  Barb. Yeah. But no one cared about Barb. Let's be honest.

• 1:13:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  I cared about Barb and I care about Roger. So there you go.

• 1:13:41Speaker 03

  I care about Roger. I don't care about Barb. I think you moved the goalposts a bit there because we're not marking the trilogy. We're marking this book alone. I am going to give it a 10. I love this world. It's changed my childhood. I love the concept of demons and dust. I love, as a child, you know, Pullman's kind of clean, readable, slightly spare prose. 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, the kind of more Blakean elements of it, but it's just a great story and I love Lyra. So, there we go.

• 1:14:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay, so we've got something very, very different. So it's absolutely no innocence next week, just loads of experience, because we'll be doing Sally Rooney's Normal People.

• 1:14:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, back to the Bible the week after that.

• 1:14:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Back to the Bible, back to Adam and Eve, actually, and Cain and Abel, with John Steinbeck's East of Eden, then one of Alan Partridge, we mentioned Alan Partridge, one of his favourite books, The How to the Baskervilles.

• 1:14:41Speaker 03

  I thought you were going to say we're going to be doing Alan Partridge's biography. Not yet.

• 1:14:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  That will come, that will come. And then Tabby's favourite book of all time, Sarah J. Maas's Romanticy, A Court of Thorns and Roses. So that's the fourth book we've got coming up.

• 1:14:58Speaker 03

  That's a lot of experience.

• 1:14:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 from me and my raven, and from Tabby and her Lynx. Goodbye.

• 1:15:25Speaker 03

  Bye.

• 1:15:35Speaker 00

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• 1:16:04Speaker 01

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• 1:16:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Kayak.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

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• 1:16:21Dominic Sandbrook?

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• 1:16:29Dominic Sandbrook?

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