The Golden Compass- Part 2 (Contains Spoilers)

So let’s get into the books themselves. What is the story all about? It’s complicated. Like any good story, it is multifaceted. I can’t explain every detail of the plot; this is a blog post, not Cliff’s Notes. But here are the bare-bones basics. There will obviously be spoilers.

There are multiple worlds that exist simultaneously; I picture it kind of like the layers of an onion, one on top of the other. One of the main characters is Lyra, a girl of about 12. In her world, a person’s soul is manifested outside their body in animal form (rather than being inside a person and not physically seen). This animal manifestation is called a daemon, and in Lyra’s world a person without a daemon is not really a whole person (just as a person without a soul would not be a whole person). The Magisterium represents the church, but it is very powerful and corrupt. A group within the Magisterium is kidnapping children and attempting to separate the children from their daemons (essentially, cutting their souls away from them).

Why are they doing something so awful? Because of something called Dust. Dust represents what was generated at the fall of man, original sin. During childhood a person’s daemon can change forms, but around the age of 12-13 the daemon’s form is fixed, the child begins to attract Dust, and is fully capable of sinning. The Magisterium is trying to eliminate Dust (and therefore eliminate sin), thus the kidnappings and the experiments on children and their daemons.

Lyra has grown up as an orphan, thinking her parents are dead. Her parents are actually Mrs. Coulter (one of the women involved in the Magisterium experiments) and Lord Asriel, who opens a way into the other worlds then goes about setting up an army to bring down the Authority, who he has bitter feelings toward. The Authority, as you may have guessed, is God. Well, sort of. While the character is supposed to represent the Christian God, it is so unlike the Christian God in very basic, fundamental ways that it truly is not a parallel. But I'll get into that more in the third part of this series.

A character in the book reveals the Authority’s secret- he actually wasn’t the creator of anything. He was an angel that was formed of Dust just like all other beings, but since he was the first angel he just convinced the angels who came after him that he created them. He gave himself the title of God—but he wasn’t really. At some point he gave most of the control over heaven to an angel named Metatron (who was once Enoch from the Old Testament) and the Authority pretty much stopped doing anything. The Magisterium, of course, is unaware of this and thinks the Authority is the real thing.

A boy from another world, Will, accidentally finds an opening into another world and meets Lyra. A series of events reveals that Will is the rightful bearer of a knife that can actually cut openings into other worlds. Later, other characters reveal that the knife is essential in the battle against the Authority because it’s the only thing that can kill him (although Will and Lyra are never aware of this). Near the end of the story it is also discovered that opening other worlds with the knife has been causing Dust to leak out of the worlds (and if this continues all the Dust will be gone and people will no longer be aware or capable of really living life; they’ll be like zombies).

Okay. So after a LOT of stuff happens, Will and Lyra arrive in Lord Asriel’s world to find themselves in the midst of a great battle between Lord Asriel’s army and Metatron’s army. They find a very old angel in what is basically a crystal “cage.” He’s scared, in pain, and miserable, and the children feel sorry for him and want to help him by letting him out of the cage. So they use the knife to cut through the crystal cage. But once he's out, the wind dissolves him, and he vanishes with a sigh of relief.

I had to read the half-page passage describing the above scene two or three times before I realized that this is the “killing God” that the books are supposedly about. Yet the children did not realize who the angel was or what they had done, they were trying to help, and the “God” that is described in this book bears so little resemblance to the actual God I believe in that this so called killing-God scene was actually laughable. But again, more about that in my next post.

In the meantime, Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel have managed to kill Metatron but they have also died in the process.

One last thing. Will and Lyra are supposed to represent Adam and Eve. After the whole battle, they escape to another world and talk with a woman (Mary Malone, an ex-nun, now an atheist; she is supposed to represent the serpent) who tells them about the first time she fell in love. Will and Lyra realize they are in love. When they realize they love each other, all the Dust that has been trying to escape begins to fall on the world again, which is a good thing because it means people will continue to live in full awareness.

There's a lot more to the story than this, of course, but that's the basic plot.