Read Online Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon - Free Book Online Page B

zone known in the librarian trade as YA—is, as I have already suggested, itself a figuring- or working-out of the fundamental plot of His Dark Materials, which turns, and turns again, on the question of what becomes of us, of our bodies and our souls, as we enter the borderland of adolescence.
    Lyra lives in a room at Jordan College, where she has led a half-feral, largely pleasurable life as the seditious, indifferently educated ward of the college, looked after by a gruff old housekeeper and a faculty of male scholars who have no idea what to make of or do with her. Her childhood, an unbroken series of small adventures, hair-raising exploits, and minor wars among the local tribes of Oxford’s children, is evoked by Pullman in the first book’s opening chapters with verve, humor, and the special poignance of his foreknowledge, and our strong suspicion, that it is Lyra’s childhood—and indeed Childhood itself—that will prove to be the irrecoverable paradise, the Dreamtime, of his story.
    There is, of course, no Jordan among the colleges of Oxford University. Lyra’s Oxford exists in a different universe, one in which, as in our own, it is a primary center of learning andscholarship for England, Europe, and the world, has deep ecclesiastical roots, and sits astride the Thames River, on a bend known locally as the Isis. But in Lyra’s world, though it strongly resembles our own in many ways—including possessing what appears to be an identical geography—evolution and history have taken different bends. Here, during the Reformation, the Holy See was transferred from Rome to Geneva; at some point John Calvin became pope. Somehow this, and a number of other premises, most of which Pullman leaves unstated, form a syllogism whose conclusion is a world united under the rule of a powerfully repressive Church Triumphant that is itself fatally divided among warring factions of bishops and prelates banded into orders whose names are at once bland, grand, and horrible: the Consistorial Court of Discipline, the General Oblation Board (charged with preparing oblations, or offerings, whose nature is at first a source of considerable mystery). What we know as science, in particular physics, is viewed in Lyra’s world as a subject fit for philosophers and above all for theologians—the study of fundamental particles is known there as experimental theology. Its discoveries are subject to ultimate review by the Church, and painful is the reward awaiting those, like a certain Russian Dr. Rusakov, who posit the existence of phenomena that violate Church teaching.
    Lyra’s world, with its shuffled deck of underlying premises, is technologically accomplished in ways that equal and even exceed our own—helped in this regard by its willingness to view as controllable natural phenomena what our world would call magic—and in other ways strangely retarded or perverse. Electric power is widely in use, though it is known as “anbaric power” (the terms are etymologically akin, deriving from the Greek and Arabic words for amber), produced by great river-spanning dynamos and “atom-craft” plants, but guns have no ascendancy, refrigeration and the science of food preservation appear to be unknown, and computers and automobiles are little in evidence. Instead travel proceeds on foot, by boat, or by that colophon of alternate-world fiction from Ada to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the grand zeppelin liner. But for all its neo-Edwardian style, Lyra’s Oxfordshire appears largely to remain sunk in the Middle Ages—agrarian, semifeudal, reckoning its calendar by harvest and fair and by the seasonal comings and goings of a small, fierce nation of people known as Gyptians, led by their king, John Faa, whose name appears, in our world, in a well-known fifteenth-century English ballad about a gypsy king.
    While Pullman alludes to Nabokov (one of the characters in The Subtle Knife voyages to Nova Zembla), his paired Oxfords stand in a