The worst thing about film versions of beloved works of fantasy like ‘‘The Lord of the Rings’’ or the Harry Potter series is that, once you’ve seen them, the movie pushes your versions of the book’s landscapes and characters subtly — or roughly — aside. The directors’ Mordor and Minas Tirith, their Hogwarts and Azkaban, get mixed up with yours, and you can never really get yours back unsullied.
Now fans of Philip Pullman’s ‘‘The Golden Compass,’’ the first volume in his three-part ‘‘His Dark Materials’’ series, face the same dilemma. Should they give up the images they’ve happily absorbed from Pullman’s masterful books and see the film version, which opens Friday?
For all of its considerable literary merits, ‘‘The Golden Compass’’ seems made for the movies. The plot is tight and beautifully paced, with none of the digressions that rendered Tolkien’s masterpiece and Rowling’s juggernaut a challenge to screenwriters. Pullman has a remarkable gift for evoking detailed, sharp-edged images of the landscapes — and worlds — he invents. His visual cues should prove easy for the filmmakers to follow. And (like Tolkien), he is a master of dialogue, with perfect pitch for the individual speaking styles of a wide range of characters.
Pullman’s children sound like chilx dren. His ‘‘gyptians’’ — somewhat akin to gypsies, but with houseboats — have a touching, earthy manner all their own. Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig) an English aristocrat whose modest plan is to overthrow organized religion in all the worlds that exist, speaks with brutal, irresistible assurance. What are the speech patterns of talking polar bears who make their own armor out of meteorites? Or of Serafina, a beautiful, 400-year-old witch who flies through the Arctic night on a cloud-pine branch? Pullman gets both right.
With material like this, the film version of ‘‘The Golden Compass’’ has a good chance of satisfying people who haven’t read the book. While Pullman’s imagined universe is richly realized and complex, it won’t make the same demands on the uninitiated as Tolkien’s ‘‘The Lord of the Rings.’’ It’s true that the poems of John Milton and William Blake, not to mention a dose of particle physics, are key elements in Pullman’s vision. But he only takes what he needs for the flavor of his story. ‘‘Read like a butterfly, write like a bee,’’ is his motto, one he more than lives up to.
Still, if you haven’t read ‘‘The Golden Compass,’’ knowing a few things may help.
Multiple worlds: The story opens in an Oxford University that is not quite our Oxford, in an England that blends medieval, Dickensian, and Edwardian qualities, along with certain modern technologies. The Catholic Church is all-powerful, controlling society through a web of competing organizations. Beyond England, we find Muscovites and Tartars in north Asia, Skraelings in North America, and the above-mentioned armored bears on the ice-bound island of Svalbard, north of Scandinavia.
But Pullman is not inventing an alternative history. We learn instead that some ‘‘experimental theologians’’ have proposed a controversial theory of infinite parallel universes, proceeding side by side in thin layers. Every time an event could have two outcomes in a world, a world with each outcome goes forward from there. Thus the Oxford of ‘‘The Golden Compass’’ is just a layer or two away from our world, with its Oxford.
Daemons: In the opening scene of ‘‘The Golden Compass,’’ Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards), an 11-year-old girl who doesn’t know who her parents are and who is a ward of Jordan College at Oxford, is exploring the Retiring Room, a place forbidden to women, not to mention children, and reserved for the senior scholars of her college. Although she is by herself, she is not alone. A daemon, a companion spirit in animal form, goes with her everywhere. Because she is a child, her daemon, named Pantalaimon, can take any shape — as small as a beetle or as large as a lion. Once a child begins to enter adulthood, his or her daemon will settle in one form for life.
Dust: Lord Asriel (who turns out to be Lyra’s father) is intensely researching a cosmic substance known as Dust, which settles on adults but not children. So, it turns out, is the General Oblation Board, one of the many competing branches of the Church. The General Oblation Board happens to be run by Lyra’s mother, the beautiful Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman). As the great conflict of ‘‘His Dark Materials’’ builds, the forces of good and evil are divided over whether Dust is the source of human spirituality or the cause of original sin.
Gobblers: Someone is stealing children in Lyra’s world, where homeless young people roam the streets and society is sharply divided between social classes. The word on the street is that the ‘‘Gobblers’’ are stealing the children. Lyra discovers the whole truth after Mrs. Coulter visits Jordan College and takes her to London as her assistant. Lyra learns that she directs the General Oblation Board’s program of abducting children and transporting them to an experimental station in northern Scandinavia, where they are severed from their daemons (and suffer horribly). The board believes that without their daemons, the children won’t attract Dust as adults and won’t become sinful.
The Alethiometer: Coined from Greek words for ‘‘truth’’ and ‘‘measure,’’ the alethiometer, or golden compass, is a gorgeously crafted hand-held device with three delicate needles and dozens of little pictures around its dial. It can answer questions about past, present, and future events and reveal the actions and intentions of friends and enemies alike. Only a few exist, and for most people learning to decode the alethiometer’s symbols takes years of study. The master of Jordan College entrusts one to Lyra, who quickly masters it by instinct.
This is just a sampling of the inventions that thickly populate ‘‘The Golden Compass.’’ While the book’s main character is a child, this is not entirely a book for children. The greatest challenge for director Chris Weitz and his cast, which also includes Ian McKellen, as the voice of the heroic armored bear Iorek Byrnison, will be to sustain the book’s intoxicating mix of charming invention and deep seriousness. While it is a story with its fair share of chases, battles, explosions, and marvelous devices upon which to lavish special effects, it’s the quality of the interactions between characters — how they talk to each other and what they say — that makes it great. The film will succeed if it captures some of that human warmth. If Lyra’s daemon Pantalaimon sounds right the first time he speaks, perhaps all will be well.
