A curious thought struck me while I was taking a shower this morning. It had to do with a dropped plotline in Phillip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy of books.
The two primary characters in the book, Will and Lyra eventually fall in love, but due to complications of their unfolding story the love has to be left unrequited right at the very beginning. As I followed the characters and got caught up in their story I felt a rather deep sympathy for their misfortune.
One thing that I noticed was a possible dropping of a story thread as the author wrote the third and final book. In the third book the two children elect to raze the land of the dead. In order to cross a stylized river Styx they have to leave a portion of their manifold existences behind. In this book series a human being is born with a physical body, a body of higher wisdom called a demon, either expressed as a sense or an external animal companion, as well as a personal spirit of death. Everyone carries all three components throughout their lives with them, and everyone denies the existence of their death until their death claims them at the end of their lives. In order to cross the river both Lyra and Will have to leave their deaths behind, as well as their demons.
This started me thinking about what the act of leaving your death behind meant. In the book it’s not even covered again, it’s just dropped by the wayside and it’s actually not a problem for the unfolding story. I think it could have been one of those things that the author springs on his characters at the very end which would have made their unrequited love even more poignant. What if when Lyra and Will left their deaths and their demons at the shore of the river Styx that when they passed through the slice in existence that lead back to the world of the living that only their demons were recovered? That means that their deaths are completely lost. It is hard enough to live a natural life without your love, but what if both Lyra and Will were incapable of dying? They would grow old, get ever more infirm, and still carry the torch for each others love throughout their now accidentally immortal lives. No matter how many accidents they suffer, no matter how much they bleed or what injuries they suffer, they will never actually die. That their act of razing the land of the dead came with an unintended and unknown-at-the-time sacrifice. That Will and Lyra would not only be in love with each other, but never able to enjoy that love, and that they would be the only two people in the world, in any of the Universes who could not actually die. The payment for releasing souls trapped in the land of the dead is to never find peace themselves but forever live in a strange shadowy permanent existence. That would be the most tragic thing in all of literature, far worse than King Lear losing Cordelia, by far.
What do you all think? Leave a comment!