{"id":471,"date":"2011-08-08T06:00:29","date_gmt":"2011-08-08T13:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/?p=471"},"modified":"2011-08-07T23:00:59","modified_gmt":"2011-08-08T06:00:59","slug":"mark-reads-the-amber-spyglass-chapter-16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/2011\/08\/mark-reads-the-amber-spyglass-chapter-16\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Reads ‘The Amber Spyglass’: Chapter 16"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the sixteenth chapter of The Amber Spyglass<\/em>, Lord Asriel is the biggest douchebag ever, and Mrs. Coulter might redeem herself? Oh, and shit is so real that it is impossible to tell how real shit has gotten. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to read The Amber Spyglass<\/em>.<\/p>\n

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE INTENTION CRAFT<\/strong><\/p>\n

Before I begin, look at this week’s wonderful banner! A subtle change from the week before, but different nonetheless. The banner is actually cropped from this full image<\/a>, which is might gorgeous if you ask me.<\/p>\n

If you’ve been wondering why the banners change every week, this is actually clue #4 (and the final clue) in the contest I’m running with BridgeToTheStars.net<\/a>. There’s a changing anagram<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0hidden in each of the four banners located here<\/a>, and if you can locate and decipher them, you have until August 21 to submit them to BTTS and win a copy of The Amber Spyglass<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0signed by Philip Pullman. UM AWESOME.<\/p>\n

Additionally, you are invited to join other fellow His Dark Materials<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0fans to discuss all of the wonderful spoilers for this week’s review<\/a> over in the forum at BridgeToTheStars. I’ll join you all once I finish the book because HOLY COW SPOILERS.<\/p>\n

Shall we?<\/p>\n

HOLY SHIT I CANNOT PROCESS ALL OF THIS INFORMATION AT ONCE.<\/p>\n

This is one of the longest chapters in all of The Amber Spyglass<\/em>, and good god, Pullman lays it on thick. Most significant of all is that we are given a chapter that is largely from Mrs. Coulter’s point of view and, while I’m now closer than ever to believing she may actually care about her daughter, I STILL CAN’T TELL WHERE SHE STANDS. hoooowwwww is the even possible MY BRAIN HURTS.<\/p>\n

Even right from the get go, I can’t think of a reason why Mrs. Coulter would fake her reaction to being imprisoned by Lord Asriel. Her screams that open the chapter don’t seem fake in the slightest. She truly believed she was keeping Lyra safe in her own way, and Lord Asriel contributed to her being taken away.<\/p>\n

Can we just talk about what an awful person Lord Asriel is? I don’t care what war he’s fighting. He’s terrible:<\/p>\n

“Lyra? Frankly, I don’t care,” he said, his voice quiet and hoarse. “The wretched child should have stayed where she was put, and done what she was told. I can’t waste any more time or resources on her; if she refuses to be helped, let her deal with the consequences.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
DOES IOREK HAVE THE POWER TO OPEN UP THE EARTH SO IT CAN EAT LORD ASRIEL?<\/strong>\u00c2\u00a0No, I don’t care, FUCK YOU LORD ASRIEL. You murdered her best friend<\/em>. “Refuses to be helped”? Oh, I wish I could smack characters through the pages of this book, because I would knock you right the fuck off your little chair.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0And then have Iorek Byrnison eat your heart out LITERALLY<\/em>.<\/p>\n
I mean, don’t get me wrong. A part of me is totally fascinated that Pullman took the trope of the mysterious father figure and completely toppled it, especially since it appears he used that same trope with Will, but never revealed anything damaging about that character. I mean, he was harsh to Lyra in The Golden Compass<\/em>, but until the end, I totally expected that Lyra would slowly earn his respect and they’d fight the Magisterium ~together~. Now, we’ve reached the final book of this trilogy, and I utterly despise him. And as much as I do dislike him, I am interested to see how he’ll factor into the final battle against Authority. He’s intriguing to me because he’s a terrible person who appears<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0to be on the right moral side. How will these two factors be rectified?<\/p>\n
What makes me think that I’ve gotten Mrs. Coulter a bit wrong in this book is how genuine<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0her defense of Lyra is. It serves her no purpose that I can see at all, though it is entirely possible that, yet again, I’ve simply been fooled by Mrs. Coulter’s charms. But she’s….not all that charming in chapter sixteen. She’s furious, angry, unrestrained in her terror, and openly honest about how much she values the daughter she mistakenly never parented herself. I found it kind of revolting that this<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0is what Lord Asriel finds most insulting about Lyra’s affect on her mother:<\/p>\n
“Well, I admit: the child must have some gift I’ve never seen myself. But if all it does is turn you into a doting mother, it’s a pretty thing, drab, puny little gift.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
That is like…thinly-veiled misogyny, as far as I’m concerned. I consider any possible conversion of Mrs. Coulter into a “doting mother” to be a success<\/em>, especially given how she’s treated Lyra in the past. It seems to me that the very concept of such a thing is abhorrent to Lord Asriel, but I’m not at all surprised by it. Why wouldn’t<\/em> a man so self-centered as him think this way? I mean, just after this, he taunts Mrs. Coulter with the idea of being humiliated and gagged and any sort of possible respect I had for him is pretty much absent. Dude, you are a complete asshole what are you doing<\/em>.<\/p>\n
The vast portion of sixteen hinges on dialogue, and I love when an author can make long stretches of talking be so gripping and engrossing. It helps that most of what we’re given is a form of exposition, which could have been tedious, but I’m glad that so many questions are just outright answered instead of just hinted at. (Not that there aren’t those, but you get what I mean.) And I think it helps even more that after all of this talking, there’s the Intention Craft to deal with. Which we will, in a bit.<\/p>\n
There’s a lot of updating to get Lord Asriel up to speed on what Lyra and Will are doing, which is now a bizarre thing to read, given that we now know how much Lord Asriel truly does not care about either of these kids. He has a general idea that he needs Will and the knife, but they’re nothing but disposable pawns to him. Including his daughter. I can’t even believe I’m typing<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0that. Lord Asriel is the Lord Douche. There. I said it.<\/p>\n
Mrs. Coulter, on the other hand, continues to be frank and honest. For once<\/em>. She flat out tells Lord Asriel who in the Magisterium has an alethiometer, how quick the man is, and about how long they have until Lyra and Will are located. We know for a fact that she is not lying or using her charm to tell Lord Asriel a half-truth. Yet the entire dynamic between these two adults is simply strange<\/em>. They trade half-masked insults at one another; Asriel refuses to avoid constantly mentioning that Mrs. Coulter is never to be trusted; Mrs. Coulter herself mocks Asriel’s fake nobility and attempts to silence her. While there’s a part of me that can’t believe these two could ever stand each other for more than five minutes, let alone enough time to conceive a child<\/em>, I also feel Iorek’s words to Lyra suddenly have a new parallel: These two deserve each other. I’m more sympathetic to Mrs. Coulter, but these are both people who use others, manipulate them, have a little taste for courtesy and honor, and who are desperate to do whatever they want, no matter the consequences. They are perfect<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0in that sense, though it might be hard to see that amidst all of the revulsion in their words.<\/p>\n
I never thought we’d reach a point in this trilogy where Mrs. Coulter would offer to be a spy, but the cat’s out of the bag. Hell, I couldn’t think of a better person, to be honest. Who else can trick others in the way she can? But she lays out a different reason for wanting to do it, instead of a desire to stay alive, which is what I expected. She tells Lord Asriel (in what feels like a rebuke of his insult earlier about her being a mother) that she will turn against the Church because they want to murder Lyra.<\/p>\n
Yes, I realize that it has taken Mrs. Coulter experiencing something like this to finally have a change of heart, and there’s a whole history of being oppressive and awful behind her. If you’ll recall, I didn’t really believe her “change” earlier in the book because she never spelled out what she’d done wrong while supporting the Magisterium. As she begins to explain to the party watching her how she knew she needed to set herself against the Church once she found out who Lyra was (the second Eve, WHICH I STILL DON’T UNDERSTAND), she pauses briefly, and I can only imagine what is going on in her head. They don’t believe, she must be thinking. Why give up decades of allegiance to a church for a daughter I’ve never loved?<\/p>\n
This<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0is why:<\/p>\n
“I have been the worst mother in the world. I let my only child be taken away from me when she was a tiny infant, because I didn’t care about her; I was concerned only with my own advancement. I didn’t think of her for years, and if I did, it was only to regret the embarrassment of her birth.<\/p>\n
“But then the Church began to take an interest in Dust and in children, and something stirred in my heart, and I remembered that I was a mother and Lyra was…my<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0child.<\/p>\n
“And because there was a threat, I saved her from it. Three times now I’ve stepped in to pluck her out of danger.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Yet it wasn’t even until she saw the Church’s determination in murdering her own child that Mrs. Coulter finally decided it was time for her to stop. It’s not lost on me that Mrs. Coulter herself has contributed to the deaths of (probably) hundreds of children through her work at Bolvangar. Yet it took the Church making it personal for her to switch her allegiance. It’s hard for me to necessarily feel pity for Mrs. Coulter when she describes the joy she felt when she finally got to be affectionate with Lyra, albeit it while she was asleep, because I can’t ignore her past. Hell, she is<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0her past, and it’s going to be hard for me (and others) to separate the two. I don’t always think that’s a fair thing to ascribe to someone, but this woman’s actions are so intensely heinous and detrimental to the story, so it’s not as easy to simply put them aside and say, “OH, EVERYTHING’S FINE NOW.”<\/p>\n
Lord Asriel believes she’s lying, though. I’m not ready to say that Mrs. Coulter is clearly on the right said, acting purely out of interest of saving Lyra, but I’m also not at all ready to be on Lord Asriel’s side either. Mrs. Coulter has a lot of work to do before anyone (including myself) is ready to give her their trust. I suppose there’s just a part of me that wants<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0what she is saying to be true. I don’t want this all to be an elaborate hoax.<\/p>\n
For all of the dialogue and emotion we get, I was pleasantly surprised that the second half of chapter sixteen is almost entirely visual, with long passages without a single line of dialogue. Pullman gives us a detailed, engrossing, and overwhelming look at the fortress that Lord Asriel has constructed, something I’d been desperate to learn more about. I certainly don’t understand the logistics of how anyone can fight the Authority or angels or any of this, but I’m now getting it in my head that whatever battle is coming upon us (AND YOU BETTER NOT CONVENIENTLY SKIP OVER IT, PULLMAN) is going to be absolutely ridiculous<\/em>. Lord Asriel leads the entire party, including Mrs. Coulter, to see something called the “intention craft.” Which…god, I kind of hate that name? I mean, that’s what it is<\/em>. But it’s just so silly to me! It’s a good thing it’s amazing, <\/em>but I’m getting way ahead of myself.<\/p>\n
On the way to see this craft, Pullman finally confirms something I suspected a while ago: that the Authority is in every<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0universe, and that some being or creature is at odds with the authority, oppressed by the Authority’s servants. In this case, Mrs. Coulter finds out that in the Gallivespian universe, the human believers in the Authority actively try to exterminate the Gallivespians, considering them “diabolic.” It stands to reason that Lord Asriel was able to find countless races or cultures or species that felt the same way, explaining why there is such a varied group here at the fortress. (How did he contact them without the subtle knife? I don’t understand that.)<\/p>\n
It’s no surprise to us that God is not who he says he is, so I forgot that not that many people know the Authority is not<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0the creator, merely an angel who deemed himself to be “God.” It’s another sign that a lot of how Mrs. Coulter reacts appears to be genuine and real. She seems believably shocked to learn this, but that’s when Pullman finally tells us why <\/em>Lord Asriel has chosen this world, this place, and this war to fight.<\/p>\n
“He led us here because this world is empty. Empty of conscious life, that is. We are not colonists, Mrs. Coulter. We haven’t come to conquer, but to build.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
WHAT THE HOLY HELL<\/strong>. How can a world be empty<\/em>? Even Citt\u00c3\u00a1gazze has some life in it, so how could this one be devoid of everything? And what the hell<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0are they going to build here?<\/p>\n
“Mrs. Coulter, I am a king, but it’s my proudest task to join Lord Asriel in setting up a world where there are no kingdoms at all. No kings, no bishops, no priests. The Kingdom of Heaven has been known by that name since the Authority first set himself above the rest of the angels. And we want no part of it. This world is different. We intend to be free citizens of the Republic of Heaven.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
WHAT?!?!?!?!?!!? THEY ARE GOING TO REBUILD A WORLD WITHOUT GOD\u00c2\u00a0i can barely stand this<\/em><\/strong>. Oh, this is just so terribly<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0exciting. They are building a fortress for defensive<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0purposes. So the battle won’t be in the Kingdom of Heaven; these are just preparations for an inevitable invasion. (I think? I mean, they could still be launching some sort of offensive attack.) And it seems they’re sparing no expense to develop weapons and fortifications that are inconceivable in any other context. As the party makes their way to the armory, it’s clear to me that Lord Asriel is commanding the production of weapons in sizes I didn’t even think were possible. There are hammers being used here “the sizes of houses.” HOUSES. Sheets of iron the size of tree trunks<\/em>. I don’t even know what they’re trying<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0to build of that size, but we do finally learn what the name of this chapter means.<\/p>\n
Again, there’s no real basis for me to visualize this craft, so I’d love any examples of fan art to help me out. In my head, it sort of looks like an insect with a cockpit, basically. But this absurd, mysterious machine seems to be Lord Asriel’s greatest weapon. He climbs inside of it to demonstrate it for everyone, and Mrs. Coulter watches as it moves impossibly: it seems to disappear, then reappear in another location, moving in ways that defy any knowledge of physics, making no sound at all. When enemy ships and a raiding party are lured into the mountain base by decoys, Asriel gets the chance to demonstrate what the intention craft can do: a light flashes, and almost instantaneously, a shell explodes. In just a matter of minutes, the intention craft destroys every<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0part of the raiding party. Soundlessly.<\/p>\n
And it’s here that Mrs. Coulter is inspired by the display to give Lord Asriel a final manipulation before the end of the chapter, one that exploits his pride and his desire to show off. So she asks him to explain how this machine work. When he replies that your intentions control it, I actually laughed out loud. REALLY<\/em>. And then he shows Mrs. Coulter that it is controlled by your d\u00c3\u00a6mon\u00c2\u00a0as well<\/em>. So it is LITERALLY A CRAFT OF INTENTIONS<\/em>. How do you even THINK of something like that??? It’s interesting to me that it’s yet another thing used by Asriel that has to do with the link between a d\u00c3\u00a6mon and a human, and I’m sure it’s a part of the larger theme of this trilogy concerning human knowledge. For now…I’m pretty content just saying this is really awesome<\/em>.<\/p>\n
Oh, right. Mrs. Coulter.<\/p>\n
And she pushed hard, so that he fell out of the machine.<\/p>\n
In the same moment she slipped the helmet on her head, and the golden monkey snatched up the leather handle.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
OH MY GOD WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!?!?! <\/em>For a second, I started to get upset, worried that this whole chapter was a ploy by Mrs. Coulter to escape, that everything she had said was a lie. But Pullman almost immediately switches over to Lord Asriel’s perspective, and he essentially knew all along that this was bound to happen. He stops King Ogunwe from pursuit or sending anyone after her, knowing that she really is<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0going to go after Lyra. Sending Lord Roke instead, he properly guesses that Mrs. Coulter is going to deceive the Church, spy on them for Lord Asriel and lead them straight to Lyra’s location.<\/p>\n
They laughed, and moved back into the workshops, where a later, more advanced model of the intention craft was awaiting their inspection.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
WHY DOES THIS SEEM SO SINISTER. oh god this book<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the sixteenth chapter of The Amber Spyglass, Lord Asriel is the biggest douchebag ever, and Mrs. Coulter might redeem herself? Oh, and shit is so real that it is impossible to tell how real shit has gotten. Intrigued? Then … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,79],"tags":[23,81,62,61,80],"class_list":["post-471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-his-dark-materials","category-the-amber-spyglass","tag-mark-reads","tag-mark-reads-the-amber-spyglass","tag-philip-pullman","tag-religion","tag-the-amber-spyglass-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}