THE

  IMAGINATION

  CHAMBER

  Selected works by Philip Pullman

  HIS DARK MATERIALS

  Northern Lights

  The Subtle Knife

  The Amber Spyglass

  THE BOOK OF DUST

  La Belle Sauvage

  The Secret Commonwealth

  – Book three coming soon –

  HIS DARK MATERIALS COMPANION BOOKS

  Lyra’s Oxford

  Once Upon a Time in the North

  Serpentine

  The Collectors

  NON-FICTION

  Dæmon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling

  THE

  IMAGINATION

  CHAMBER

  COSMIC RAYS FROM

  LYRA’S UNIVERSE

  PHILIP

  PULLMAN

  To all the teachers who actually taught

  me something – prominent among them,

  Miss Enid Jones of Ysgol Ardudwy.

  Contents

  Cover

  Selected works by Philip Pullman

  Dedication

  The Imagination Chamber

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  THE IMAGINATION CHAMBER

  Many readers will know, and Lyra knows, what is meant by the term cloud chamber. If you can get hold of some dry ice and a few household bits and pieces, you can make one without too much difficulty. It makes visible something we’re normally unable to see: the passage of charged particles, or cosmic rays, which cause the saturated vapour in the chamber to condense around them and leave little trails of light. Millions, billions, of particles like those pass through us every day, and we have no idea it’s happening.

  They seem to me very much like ideas. When I write a story, it feels as if I don’t make things up so much as discover them. By long practice, or habit, or luck, or something, my mind has become accustomed to working like a cloud chamber, in which minute particles charged with story can find something to condense around them and make them visible for a fleeting moment. I think something like this happens to all of us when we daydream. This is a metaphor, of course, like the Dust that occupies the attention of many characters in Lyra’s world. Some metaphors, though, are good tools for thinking with, and I found that this one was a fruitful way of describing various short pieces I had written some time ago, and others I’ve written since: little trails of vapour condensing around a particle charged with story. When I first wrote them I called them “lantern slides”, because of their nature as little separate pictures from a bigger story, but I think the metaphor of charged particles in a cloud chamber is an even better image.

  The question of what these particles are, and where they come from, is what Lyra herself is investigating in the final part of The Book of Dust, which I’m writing at the moment. I don’t know quite what she’ll discover, but you’ll hear about it when she does.

  As for the saturated vapour in the cloud chamber, without which the particles wouldn’t become visible at all, there’s only one thing that could be, and I share it with every reader: it’s the imagination. Here are some cosmic rays from the imagination chamber.

  Philip Pullman

  MRS COULTER in the cave, watching Will, speculating; Will watching her, speculating. Their words like chess pieces, placed with great care, each carrying an invisible nimbus of implication and possibility and threat. Each of them afterwards felt as if they had barely escaped with their life.

  DESPITE her natural Jordan College patriotism, Lyra had to admit that there was one department where it failed to shine in comparison with Gabriel, or Durham, or Cardinal’s, and that was gardening. The Fellow’s Garden at Jordan was a darkish rectangle shadowed for most of the day by the buildings around it, and Mr Harbord, the head gardener, had fixed ideas about what he wanted to flourish there. Flowers of sombre hue and regular habit were approved; those that climbed and wandered were extirpated without mercy. On the other side of Broad Street, however, Durham College, to Lyra’s great admiration, actually had a maze to which tourists were admitted for sixpence. There was a plan for sale in the lodge, but that cost a guinea. Lyra and Roger paid their sixpences to go in several times and made a plan of their own, which they intended to copy and sell in large quantities for only five shillings, undercutting the official one and making a fortune; but one glance at it was enough to show the most parsimonious visitor that they’d be better off without it, and besides, the Durham porters took a dim view of the enterprise and chased them away.

  ON the beach, the alethiometer suddenly inert in Lyra’s hands, as if it had abandoned her.

  LYRA hanging about the Castle Mill boatyard. Each gyptian family had their particular patterns for decorating their boats, based on simple floral designs but becoming more and more complex and fanciful. Lyra watching old Piet van Poppel touching up his boat one day and laboriously copying the rose-and-lily pattern he was using, and then back in her room trying to paint it on her second-best dress before realizing that it would be better embroidered. And very soon after, having pricked her fingers countless times and snapped the threads and lost all patience with the task, throwing it away in disgust, and having to explain its absence to Mrs Lonsdale.

  A DÆMON is not an animal, of course; a dæmon is a person. A real cat, face to face with a dæmon in cat form, would not be puzzled for a moment. She would see a human being.

  J ORDAN COLLEGE, like a great clockwork mechanism with every part connected ultimately to every other, and all slowly and heavily ticking despite the fur of dust on every cog, the curtains of cobweb draped in every corner, the mouse-dirt, the insect-husks, the leaf-skeletons blown in every time the wind was in the east… Rituals and habits whose origins no one could remember, but which no one wanted to disturb. The great wheels and the small, the pins and the levers all performing their functions despite the wheezing and the creaking and the groaning of ancient timber. Sometimes the individual parts (a servant or a Scholar) forgot precisely what their function was in relation to the whole, but never that the whole had a function; and it was enough to do again what you had done yesterday, and every day before that, and trust to custom.

  LEE SCORESBY, attracted north by the money being made in the gold rush and making none, but acquiring a balloon by chance in a card game. He was the lover of a witch from the Karelia region, briefly, but she was killed in battle – “She spoiled me for women younger’n three hundred” – but he had plenty of lovers all the same.

  MALCOLM’S spangled ring, the scotoma, hardly ever signalled an approaching headache. It appeared, and grew larger, and after twenty minutes or so it drifted beyond the edge of his frame of vision, leaving him feeling strange and disconnected from the world, as if he was coming out of a dream. Then that feeling subsided too and he was back to normal.

  Only twice was the spangled ring followed by the head-splitting pain and nausea of a fully developed migraine. After it was over he felt scoured by a great force of nature, washed clean and emptied, weakened, but mystified; as if a tide from an unknown sea, imperceptible to anyone but him, had risen around him and all but swept him away, only to recede leaving a shore strewn with broken planks, torn nets with never-before-discovered creatures tangled in them, shells and jewels and corals and fragments of unimaginably ancient machinery.

  He couldn’t tell whether this was evidence of another world, or an example of the incomparable richness of this one.

  ASRIEL among the bears: “Iofur Raknison, I’m going to be entirely frank with you,” followed by a string of confident and overbearing lies – had he noticed the bear king’s doll-dæmon, the clue that he was unbearlike enough to be tricked? Or was it just luck? – but he knew the bears well enough. He was very like his daughter.

  MRS COULTER selected her lovers for their power and influence, but it did no harm if they were good-looking. Did she ever become fond of a lover? Not once. She could not keep her servants, either.

  MR TAPHOUSE said one day as he ran his hand over a freshly-planed length of oak: “Feel that, boy, feel how old that is.” Malcolm tried, but all he could actually feel was the glassy smoothness of the bare surface. So he imagined it: acorn, sapling, mature tree, a mighty canopy in the summer and a gaunt skeleton in winter. From then on whenever Malcolm had a piece of oak in his hands, or walnut, or even simple honest pine, he liked to think of the tree it had been. He liked to feel the immense age of it, visible in the growth rings, and the past of it, and the future too, as he thought of the acorns and walnuts and pine cones. He imagined it. He pretended he could see it. From somewhere he remembered the expression “the mind’s eye”. He imagined it, and thus he came to see it, every time, until it became second nature.

  “I’m your second nature,” said Asta.

  “That’s all right,” he said, “it’s probably

  you doing it too.”

  “Bound to be,” she said.

  LYRA had a crush on Dick Orchard, the older boy who could spit further than anyone else. She would hang about the Covered Market gazing at him hopelessly, and cover her pillow with clumsy kisses, just to see what it felt like.

  EDWARD LONSDALE, who married Alice, had the sweetest nature and the smoothest skin she had ever encountered in anyone, man or woman. The words that kept coming back to her as she lay beside him on their first night together were beautiful, lovely, exquisite, angel. She knew what a cliché was, and didn’t care; her luck in loving him was more important than fine language. She wasn� �t pretty herself, and she could never quite believe that he loved her, though he swore he did, by the moon and stars. She felt her entire nature being transformed by his generosity in accepting the adoration she felt for him. And such a short time later, a scaffolding clamp gave way and he fell to his death from St Giles’s church tower. The old Alice would have been bitter and savage, her passion turned to venom; this new Alice, lost, almost broken, almost helpless, found that she also loved the little child she and Malcolm had taken through the flood. The kisses she bestowed on the sleeping Lyra were kisses of gratitude too.

  EVERY year the Domestic Bursar at Jordan would send for Lyra – or have her tracked down and caught – and have a photogram taken. Lyra submitted indifferently, and scowled at the camera; it was just one of the things that happened. It didn’t occur to her to ask where the pictures went. As a matter of fact they all went to Lord Asriel, but he would never have let her know.

  BENNY the pastry cook at Jordan, whose dæmon was male, sitting in the warm cabin with his cousins the Costa family and listening to the story of how Lyra hijacked their boat, and their demand that someone discipline the brat. Their indignation was too much to bear without laughing. In return he told them about how she rescued a starling from the kitchen cat, only for it to die anyway, and of how she plucked and gutted it clumsily and smuggled it into the great ovens, hoping to retrieve it when it was cooked. But the chef sent her packing, and in the bustle the starling was sent to table with the rest of the feast, and was eaten with relish by the Master. The truth came out when the doctor had to be summoned to deal with the poor man’s suffering. Lyra was unrepentant.

  “It wasn’t for him,” she said. “He’s obviously got a delicate stomach. I could have eaten it.” She was banned from the kitchens for a term.

  “Seems to me we got off lightly,” said Tony Costa.

  SERAFINA PEKKALA on her cloud-pine would find a still field of air at night and listen to the silence. Like the air itself, which was never quite still, the silence was full of little currents and turbulence, of patches of density and pockets of attenuation, all shot through with darts and drifts of whispering that were made of silence themselves. It was as different from the silence of a closed room as fresh spring water is from stale. Later, Serafina realized that she was listening to Dust.

  JOHN PARRY and the turquoise ring: how did he get hold of it? You could tell a story about the ring, and everything that had happened to it since it left Lee Scoresby’s mother’s finger; and you could tell a story about Lee himself, and recount his entire history from boyhood to the moment he sat beside the little hut on the flooded banks of the Yenisei, and saw the shaman’s fist open to disclose the well-loved thing that he’d turned and turned round and round his mother’s finger so long ago. The storylines diverge, and move a very long way apart, and come together, and something happens when they touch. That something would lead Lee to his death, but what happened to the ring? It must still be around, somewhere.

  ALL the time in Cittàgazze, the sense of how different a place this could have been if it hadn’t been corrupted; how easy it would have been not to make the knife, if they’d seen the consequences. A world of teeming plenty, of beautiful seas and temperate weather, of prosperity and peace – and still they wanted more.

  WILL and his mother, visiting an elderly-seeming couple in a large house, and getting a cold welcome. He was puzzled: he was too young to understand the conversation, the murmuring voices, his mother’s tears. Later, all he remembered was the contempt on the older woman’s face, the feeling that these two regarded his beloved mother as dirt, and his savage resolution never to let her be exposed to that brutality again. He was six. He would have killed them if he could. Very much later, he realized they were his father’s parents.

  LYRA lying awake on the cold rocks, pretending to be asleep, while Will whispered to her dæmon. How often did she think of that in the days that followed!

  THE window in Alaska. Natural that the people of the area, if they knew about it at all, would regard it as a doorway to the spirit world; and natural that the other windows into our world should be hard to find, and often neglected. People don’t like the uncanny, and rather than look fully at something disturbing, they’ll avoid it altogether. That house that no one seems to live in for long, that corner of a field that the farmer never quite manages to plough, that broken wall that’s always going to be repaired, but never is… There is such a place on Cader Idris in north Wales, and another in a hotel bedroom in Glasgow.

  MARY had thought the mulefa had no history, but that was because the history she’d been taught in school was about politics, the clash of nation states, the rise and fall of empires. In her time among the mulefa she learned about a different kind of history. They had forgotten nothing they’d ever known, and such things as the story of the great storm of fifteen thousand years before, or the discovery of the cord-fibre plant, or the week-long ride of the one survivor of the south shore earthquake nursing his broken wheel as he had to cross country to keep out of the floods, were all the subject of lengthy and complex recital, embroidered and counterpointed by the teller and the listeners jointly. Mary was not with them for long enough to discover whether they had any concept of fiction – or whether, indeed, those tales were remembered or invented.

  SIR CHARLES LATROM every morning applying two drops of a floral oil to the centre of a large silk handkerchief, which he then bundled and tucked as it were carelessly into his top pocket. He couldn’t have named the oil: he’d stolen it from a bazaar in Damascus, but the Damascus of another world where the flowers were bred for the flesh-like exuberance of their scent. As it developed through the day, the fragrance of the oil rotted like a medlar; Sir Charles would lean his head to the left and sniff appreciatively, perhaps too frankly for the comfort of most companions.

  CITTÀGAZZE under the moonlight, deserted and silent and open: the colonnades drenched in soft shadow, the Casino gardens so perfectly clipped and swept, the gravel paths… Every house lit, every door open to the warm night. It was the first place where Will had ever felt entirely safe and entirely welcome and entirely at home. Lonely, yes, at first, but he lived in that condition like a fish in water. He would never know how inconceivably strange he appeared, at first, to Lyra.

  KENDAL MINT CAKE, and the delicate, fastidious curiosity of Balthamos as he nibbled the edge of it. For the rest of his life, the taste of sugared peppermint brought that picture back to Will’s mind, and he was there again beside the smoky little fire with the stream splashing in the darkness nearby.

  WHEN Lyra was very young, she sometimes asked about her mother. She was a great lady, they told her, beautiful and kind and gracious. She was Dutch, someone said, but someone else told her that of course she was English. She had died when Lyra was a little baby, in a mountain-climbing accident together with her husband, Lyra’s father, Lord Belacqua. No; it was when their yacht went down in a hurricane. No; they had both died in the great epidemic when Lyra was two.

  There were no pictures of either of them, but in the Buttery there was an engraving of a bearded man planting a flag at the top of a snowy mountain, which she had decided was a portrait of her father; and in the Ashmolean Museum a painting of a very pretty young woman in a white ballgown with a necklace of sapphires, whom Lyra had adopted as her mother.

  A beautiful blue cat-dæmon was gazing up at her. When Lyra was nine or ten she went there on her own, often, and sat in front of the picture, whispering to her.

 

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