OUATITN: Wrote me a Review

[Max]

Most of you won't know who I am, but I used to be a regular on these boards. Anyway, I've written a review of the book for a student magazine and thought someone might be interested (the editorial theme of this particular issue of the magazine is Power so the interest of the review is skewed a little in that direction):


Once Upon a Time in the North by Philip Pullman is a prequel to the His Dark Materials trilogy, telling the tale of how exactly Texan aeronaut Lee Scoresby and armoured bear Iorek Byrnison established their unlikely allegiance. This new, more or less self-contained story swaps organised religion, the bugbear-cum-bogey-monster of the trilogy, for an even more transparently veiled political allegory.
Perhaps inspired by Scoresby’s Texan derivation, the story features a demagogic politician rising blithely to power by pandering to the fears and prejudices of the populace of an Arctic island
community: talking bears here fill the role of Muslims (/Jews/gays/etc). He is backed by an ominously armed and jackbooted oil corporation, and the aggressive election campaign coincides with the discovery of oil. In an amusing twist on the simplistic goodies v. baddies formula, the opponents of this Bush-Administration-in-miniature are no less likely heroes than Customs and Revenues officials.

As one customs officer helpfully explains: “there is a struggle going on throughout the northern lands,” – or, say, Iraq – “of which this little island is a microcosm” – of which this story is an allegory – “On the one hand there are the properly constituted civil institutions such as the Customs and Revenue Board, and on the other the uncontrolled power of the large private companies, such as Larsen Manganese, which are dominating more and more of public life, though they are not subject to any form of democratic sanction.” Well.

Naturally, our plucky protagonists thwart Larsen Manganese’s dastardly scheme. They are picking on a belligerently alcoholic ship captain whose cargo of oil-drilling samples they’re attempting to take possession of through fabricated legal pretexts – a plot rather surreally reminiscent of a certain government toppling a certain dictator on the pretext of finding WMD, not commandeering oil, honest, etc.

If my tone is wry, it’s because the politics of all this serves rather simply as the narrative vehicle for an ultimately very traditional Manichean story, with the reactionary right-wing politician and the private corporations clearly aligned as pre-packaged, fully-formed bad guys with no room for critical interaction, and no function within the narrative beyond ‘vehicle’. Frankly, though, this is probably fair enough.

As far as straightforward story-telling goes, it must be doing something right, because I read the hundred pages in one go despite the absence of any essay/supervision-related compulsion. The ‘Second Act’, however, is dominated by one of those ‘action sequences’ that always seem to me entirely out of place in literary fiction. Paragraph upon paragraph describing the layout of pillars and fish-oil barrels in a warehouse and the character’s navigation thereof – am I really supposed to be imaginatively engaging with all this, as though answering an IQ question on spatial visualisation? If not, why describe it so painstakingly? This kind of scenario works excellently in, say, a videogame, where I can see my surroundings and control the action, but read passively on the page it’s tedious and opaque. This is redeemed, however, by the occasional descriptions of fear, anger and pain – Pullman, as eminently evident in HDM, is a magnificent author of sensation and emotion.

His Dark Materials was a philosophical fantasy epic with a rich seam of ambitious intertextuality (Milton, Blake etc), and he has always seemed faintly embarrassed in interviews by the fact that 95% of his fans are only interested in the canonical zoology of his ‘daemons’, animal manifestations of a person’s ‘spirit’. Hence it is no surprise that Once Upon a Time in the North refuses to be fan-fodder in any sense beyond the mere fact of its status as a prequel. Protagonist Lee Scoresby is convincing as the youthful freewheeler who will become the worldly-wise gunslinger of HDM (it is set thirty-five years previously), but the bear Iorek Byrnison has very little presence besides a running joke on his unpronounceable name (YOR-ick BEER-ni-son, apparently), and, daemons aside, that’s where the fan service ends, as far as the story proper goes.

Like Lyra’s Oxford, a mini-sequel to the trilogy, Once Upon a Time features ‘ephemera’, a self-consciously postmodern incorporation of literary artefacts into and around the text. It’s rather an odd assortment: on the one hand there’s an appropriately re-skinned Snakes & Ladders game folded into the back cover, with pop-out cardboard playing pieces and everything; on the other hand there’s a page from “THE “SHIPPING WORLD” YEARBOOK”, which fascinatingly informs us that in Novorissisk, Russia, “The Rly. Co. Exacts from steamers 10 copecs per net reg. Ton for the use of its piers”. Even the one grand gesture to fans that concludes this miscellaneous material contains a bit of information calculated to bemuse fans, and serves largely as a piece of postmodern puppetmastery, obliging the reader to retrospectively rethink the story as a whole.

Once Upon a Time in the North is a good little read, but I admit I may be biased given my extravagant, er, emotional engagement with a certain scene involving Scoresby in the original trilogy. This story doesn’t pack anything like that emotional punch, and, intellectually, the themes of power here are a rather superficial and unequivocal broadside of contemporary indignation, as opposed to HDM’s mystic-mythic epic of ‘Free Will’ and ‘The Authority’ driven by a spiritually fervent humanism, preaching (rather ironically) personal enfranchisement from indoctrination in all its forms. This is just a story, set within an almost incidental parable about power, but it’s a good one, and well told.