I have recently been reading a book written by Michael Chabon titled, Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing on the Borderlands. In his chapter called "On Deamons and Dust" Chabon explores the worlds of Lyra, Will, and Mary Malone. The whole chapter is fantastic and I would highly recommend the whole book. (If nothing else, the book is worth its multi-layered cover art.) Chabon makes the point that not only is Lyra herself on the borderlands between worlds, but so also is the genre that Pullman chooses to write in. And it is because The Dark Materials lies in this liminal, in-between state that his worlds and words are so powerful. Like Pullman, Chabon also writes both eloquently and clearly. Here is some of what he has to say:
"...all mystery resides there, in the margins, between life and death, childhood and adulthood, Newtonian and quantum, 'serious' and 'genre' literature. And it is from the confrontation with mystery that the truest stories have always drawn their power (67)."
"Yet epic fantasies, whether explicitly written for children or not, tend to get sequestered in thier own section of the bookstore or library, clearly labeled to protect the unsuspecting reader of naturalistic fiction from making an awkward mistake. Thus do we consign to the borderlands our most audacious retellings of what is arguably one of the two or three primal human stories: the narrative of Innocence, Experience, and, straddling the margin between them, the Fall (68)."
"Pullman has looked around at this broken universe of ours, in its naturalistic tatters, and has indicated, like Satan pointing to the place on which Pandemonium will rise, the site of our truest contemporary narratives of the Fall: in the lives, in the bodies and souls, of our children (69)."
"...it is Lyra's childhood - and indeed Childhood itself - that will prove to be the irrecoverable paradise, the Dreamtime, of his story (70)."
"[Pullman] is also, in the great tradition of unabashed concocters of stories, a highly self-conscious storyteller. By the end of The Amber Spyglass, on has come to see Pullman' s world-calving imagination, to see Imagination itself, as the ordering principle, if not of the universe itself, then of our ability to comprehend, to wander, and above all, to love it (73)."
"The bond between humand and daemon is fundamental, essential, empathic, and at times telepathic. When a daemon's human being dies, its own life ends; the daemon winks out of existence, snuffed out like a candle flame (74)."
"Under [Mrs. Coulter's] spell, and frightened by the implications of Dust's evident attraction to experience in the Blakean sense, to Fallenness - believing that Dust may be the physical manifestation of Original Sin itself - the Church leadership has authorized Mrs. Coulter to lead a northern expedition of her own, one that wills seek to determine whether Dust - Sin - can be forestalled, fended off, or eliminated entirely, by the intercision of a child before his or her daemon has 'settled' (76)."
"As Lyra's daemon comes ever closer to settling in its final form, the narrative itself grown ever more unsettled; for a single point of view is a child's point of view, but a multiple point of view is the world's. And the settling of a daemon into a single form with the onset of adulthood, Pullman tells us, represents not simply a loss of the power to change, of flexibility and fire; it also represents a gain in the power to focus, to concentrate, to understand, and, finally, to accept: a gain in wisdom (81)."
"That's the trouble with Plor, and its gloomy consigliere, Theme. They are, in many ways, the enemies of Character, of 'roundness,' insofar as our humanity and its convincing representation are constituted through contradiction, inconsistency, plurality of desire, absence of abstractable message or moral (83)."
(This seemed especially to reference the characters in Alice...)
"Lies, as Philip Pullman knows perfectly well, tell the truth; but the truth they tell may not be that, or not only that, which the liar intends. The secret story he has told is not one about the eternal battle betwen teh forces of idealist fundamentalism and materialist humanism. It is a story about the ways in which adults betray children; how children are forced to pay the price of adult greed; how they are subjected to the programs of adults, to the General Oblation Board. Each of its child protagonists has been abandoned, in different ways, by both of his parents, and while they find no shortage of willing foster parents, ultimately they are betrayed and abandoned by their own bodies, forced into the adult world of compromise and self-discipline and self-sacrifice, or 'oblation,' in a way that Pullman wants us - and may we have the grace - to understand as not only inevitable but, on balance, a good thing.
Still, we can't help experiencing it - as we experience the end of so many wonderful, messy novels - as a thinning, a loss not so much of innocence as of wildness (84)."
"...all mystery resides there, in the margins, between life and death, childhood and adulthood, Newtonian and quantum, 'serious' and 'genre' literature. And it is from the confrontation with mystery that the truest stories have always drawn their power (67)."
"Yet epic fantasies, whether explicitly written for children or not, tend to get sequestered in thier own section of the bookstore or library, clearly labeled to protect the unsuspecting reader of naturalistic fiction from making an awkward mistake. Thus do we consign to the borderlands our most audacious retellings of what is arguably one of the two or three primal human stories: the narrative of Innocence, Experience, and, straddling the margin between them, the Fall (68)."
"Pullman has looked around at this broken universe of ours, in its naturalistic tatters, and has indicated, like Satan pointing to the place on which Pandemonium will rise, the site of our truest contemporary narratives of the Fall: in the lives, in the bodies and souls, of our children (69)."
"...it is Lyra's childhood - and indeed Childhood itself - that will prove to be the irrecoverable paradise, the Dreamtime, of his story (70)."
"[Pullman] is also, in the great tradition of unabashed concocters of stories, a highly self-conscious storyteller. By the end of The Amber Spyglass, on has come to see Pullman' s world-calving imagination, to see Imagination itself, as the ordering principle, if not of the universe itself, then of our ability to comprehend, to wander, and above all, to love it (73)."
"The bond between humand and daemon is fundamental, essential, empathic, and at times telepathic. When a daemon's human being dies, its own life ends; the daemon winks out of existence, snuffed out like a candle flame (74)."
"Under [Mrs. Coulter's] spell, and frightened by the implications of Dust's evident attraction to experience in the Blakean sense, to Fallenness - believing that Dust may be the physical manifestation of Original Sin itself - the Church leadership has authorized Mrs. Coulter to lead a northern expedition of her own, one that wills seek to determine whether Dust - Sin - can be forestalled, fended off, or eliminated entirely, by the intercision of a child before his or her daemon has 'settled' (76)."
"As Lyra's daemon comes ever closer to settling in its final form, the narrative itself grown ever more unsettled; for a single point of view is a child's point of view, but a multiple point of view is the world's. And the settling of a daemon into a single form with the onset of adulthood, Pullman tells us, represents not simply a loss of the power to change, of flexibility and fire; it also represents a gain in the power to focus, to concentrate, to understand, and, finally, to accept: a gain in wisdom (81)."
"That's the trouble with Plor, and its gloomy consigliere, Theme. They are, in many ways, the enemies of Character, of 'roundness,' insofar as our humanity and its convincing representation are constituted through contradiction, inconsistency, plurality of desire, absence of abstractable message or moral (83)."
(This seemed especially to reference the characters in Alice...)
"Lies, as Philip Pullman knows perfectly well, tell the truth; but the truth they tell may not be that, or not only that, which the liar intends. The secret story he has told is not one about the eternal battle betwen teh forces of idealist fundamentalism and materialist humanism. It is a story about the ways in which adults betray children; how children are forced to pay the price of adult greed; how they are subjected to the programs of adults, to the General Oblation Board. Each of its child protagonists has been abandoned, in different ways, by both of his parents, and while they find no shortage of willing foster parents, ultimately they are betrayed and abandoned by their own bodies, forced into the adult world of compromise and self-discipline and self-sacrifice, or 'oblation,' in a way that Pullman wants us - and may we have the grace - to understand as not only inevitable but, on balance, a good thing.
Still, we can't help experiencing it - as we experience the end of so many wonderful, messy novels - as a thinning, a loss not so much of innocence as of wildness (84)."
Alice, Through the Looking Glass
Alice, Tea Party 
The Secret Garden
Peter Pan
The Wizard of Oz
