Review chap 1-10
Philip Pullman said “The meaning of a story
emerges in the meeting between the words on the page and the thoughts in the
reader's mind.” The first part of The book of Dust reminded me of an
encounter with a Taiwanese lecturer who had escaped from China. According to
her, She had never been interested in politics but she had to give up her
contract bonus and run for her life, because she realized if her students
reported on her for calling herself ‘Taiwanese’ instead of ‘Chinese,’ she could
be put in jail under the charge of espionage.
The first 10 chapters of the book mainly followed
the view of a ten-year-old boy, Malcolm. He worked in the Trout, his family
pub, and ran errands for the nuns in a priory, a charity under the Church. La
Belle Sauvage was his canoe, where he and his deamon, Asta often spent time.
One day he found out a message in an acorn for which a man was murdered. Later, men from the CCD, an agency from the
Church, came to the Trout to search for certain people. Malcolm was traced by
Dr. Relf, who worked for Oakley Street, a secret organization against CCD and members
passed information through acorns. Malcolm helped Dr. Relf to pass on news he had
heard from the pub. In the meantime, a woman from CCD went to Malcolm’s elementary
school, recruiting students to report on their teachers. Malcolm got attached
to a six-month old baby, Lyra, in the priory. She was an illegitimate daughter
from Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel. It turned out that Mrs. Coulter was the head
of CCD, and she wanted Lyra for a self-serving reason. Lord Asriel was chased
by enemies but he managed to see her daughter in the priory.
The most clever invention of the book is to
put traditional theology into clear visibility. A person has three elements,
which are body, deamon and ghost. Deamon is the spiritual part of a person. If
a deamon dies, the body can not live. What’s left in a person is a ghost. Pullman
has claimed to be agnostic because he believes in democracy instead of
authority, but he passes on the church tradition through his literature so that
children can get close to theological ideas though kids are bound to be raised
in a system without God. That’s why he was knighted in 2019. It is a world
going downward with capitalism in terms of morality, but theological spirit may
save people in some ways.
Pullman used CCD to allude to the atrocity
of past church authority. Amazingly, it is not very different from modern day
brutality of authoritarian countries. With modern technology, totalitarian
countries can even clamp people tighter than ever. Reading what CCD did brought
back horrible feelings as if I were watching the news about China. Recently they
are sending people to abandoned buildings for Covid 19 quarantine, and many people
climbed walls to escape because there would be food shortage and they could
possibly die for lack of care. A man who had draped two large banners calling
for an end to China's harsh zero-Covid policy was arrested and secretly
executed. As in the book, people in China were taken away for disrespect of the
system and could not be found anymore. This book is as realistic as George
Orwell’s 1984.
Review Chapter 11-18
I used to have a wayward student, who
created all sorts of troubles, such as bullying classmates and lashing out at
teachers. I made a schedule to talk to him every week. After a few times, he told me he had tried to
commit suicide at home, and I was petrified with anxiety of his safety. Therefore,
I immediately applied for a meeting with the school psychiatrist. Surprisingly,
She was calm as if nothing was abnormal, and she asked me to pose some more
questions to the students to clarify his feelings, such as 'what emotions made
you do this?' 'is it anger, frustration, sadness,...?' 'What emotion made you take
an action inward to yourself, and what made you take it outward to others?' I
was in awe and realized that language has many layers of depth. Pullman
designed the object of Alethiometer to bring up the concept.
Following the story, Malcolm met a man with
a three-leg hyena deamon. Dr. Relf told him that the man’s name was Gerard Bonneville. He was a criminal and intended to take revenge
on Mrs. Coulter. She had testified against him and put him into jail because he
had secretly researched Dust, a matter relating to consciousness. Dr. Relf also
told Malcolm about the language of alethiometer. Malcolm tried to warn people
about the flood, but nobody took his words seriously. During the flood, Malcolm
and Alice, a co-worker at the pub, were taking Lyra in his boat to Jordan
College. In the tower of the college, Dr. Relf and other members of Oakley
Street talked about Lyra. According to the prophecy from the witches, ‘Lyra was
destined to put an end to detiny’. Bonneville had tried to get the child in
order to bargain with the Magisterium, the authority of the church, so he could
get back his laboratory.
In the book, alethiometer
can be used as a metephor of psychoanalysis. It had thirty-six symbols arranged
around the dial. When a question was asked by the gifted reader, the hand and
needles moved to respective symbols. There were more than twelve layers of
meanings below each symbol. The more precisely a question was asked, the better
fitted the answers were. The manner of asking questions was just like how a
psychiatrist works. And the process of interpretation was like ‘free
association’ of a patient under guidance during psychoanalysis sessions. Then
the psychiatrist will fetch the meanings deep into a patient’s subconsciousness.
I have read works of and about Freud, in which cases were discussed and there
was success about how subconscious feelings were known to the patients then the
symptoms that had troubled them were gone. Therefore I believe that everyone
should trace down one’s subconscious emotions and understand more about
oneself.
Freud had a very unusual habit, that is to
put down his dreams immediately after it happened in order to get a fuller
understanding about himself. In the
book, there is a small part talking about dreams. When a person dreams, the
deamon may change into a butterfly. I sometimes had very creative dreams, and
when I woke up I was amazed and wondered what a master artist had been living
in my brain. It’s a pity that I am not as diligent as Freud so I forgot most of
my breathtaking dreams.
Pullman depicted Bonneville as a complicated
character. He could be both intimidating and charming. He had been zealous
about his research on Dust, but was deprived of all his equipment. His spirit
reflected by his three-leg daemon was described as disabled, unpleasant,
scornful, defensive and also can be vulnerable. He later acted just like his
savenger deamon, trying to steal and kill in order to get back what he had
lost. Likewise, as a laughing hyena, he had to be hypocritical to pursue his
objective. Pullman was actually doing the reading through the daemon of a
person that could not easily be described according to his appearance.
Review Chapter 19-end
There were numerous occasions when I
encountered problems, occurring to me too tricky to find a solution. However,
when I cleared my head and thought about the leads, the blurred picture of the
problem became focused and the means to solve the problem stood out. It was
like how Malcolm and Alice tried to save Lyra from the priory. They first
worried about how they would recognize the baby girl among so many infants.
Then they couldn't figure out how to get her through a water tunnel.
Malcom and Alice were determined to save
Lyra, then they conquered the obstacles and succeeded. After a subsequent long
journey, they almost lost Lyra to a woman on an island. Meeting one problem
after another, they had an almost fatal encounter with Bonneville.
There are some paragraphs written like an
allegory of marriage. Before Bonneville showed up, Malcolm and Alice felt his
shadow and their relationship became rough.
When Bonneville appeared, he first threw away Alice's deamon, so Alice
had to seek her own deamon into the wood. Keeping Alice away from Malcolm gave
Bonneville a chance to do damage to her. Before Malcolm could find her, he had
to suffer from the pain of keeping away from his own deamon. It was like a man
has to distance his own emotion and to make sacrifices in order to save his
marriage.
This book is basically Malcolm's story. In
a biblical manner, he is like John that paved the road for the One, in this case,
Lyra. Pullman has used metaphors from the biblical elements, such as the flood,
the journey before Jesus was delivered, and the Baptist John that paved the
road for Jesus. The Bible is the legendary history of Israel. Then it prevails over the Christrian world,
mostly in Europe and North America. In the past decades, the relationship
between people and church has loosened or even become non-existant, but the
essence of Jesus's compassion and leniency is still the power behind our
civilization. The book is profound to me, so it evokes my memories and inspires
me to write.
