Philip Pullman's Oxford

One of my favorite series of books is Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass, titled The Northern Lights over here in the UK; The Subtle Knife; and The Amber Spyglass). Although it is a work of science fiction whihc involves traveling to other worlds, some of it takes place in the very Oxford in which I am residing, and in which Pullman himself has lived for many years. There are some very identifiable landmarks mentioned in the trilogy, and naturally, my rabid fangirl instincts were clamouring to hunt them out.
Not having brought my copies of the trilogy with me, I made many stops at Waterstone’s and Blackwell’s bookstores to look through their copies. Unfortunately for me, few names of places are given—however, there are some fairly clear directions.
My first task was to locate the spot from which Lyra, the trilogy’s heroine, first begins her sojourn in this Oxford. Here, names of streets—Broad and Cornmarket—are given, and the Bodleian Library, or, as it is named in Lyra’s Oxford, Bodley’s Library is a reference point, so I was able to place her roughly on my free tourist map. Her next step is to enter a museum, in which she sees a case edged in black-painted wood containing trepanned skulls, labelled with a card printed in spidery black writing. My first guess was that this might be the History of Science Museum, located in the old building of the Ashmolean Museum, on Broad Street, beside the Sheldonian Theatre. So, into that museum—a large, creamy, stone building surrounded by a fence on which the carved heads of past scientists are displayed (rather reminiscent of Traitor’s Gate, but surely unintentionally so)—I went.
It consisted of several levels of small (for a museum) rooms floored with ancient, time-polished wooden boards. Glass cases filled with astrolabes, globes of both Earth and her Moon, armillary spheres, compasses, sun dials, chemical jars, telescopes, microscopes, crumbling texts, mummified animal parts, darkening bones, and hundreds of other odd instruments stood throughout. In the building’s basement there was one case edged in brass containing a skull labelled with a printed card proclaiming it to exhibit evidence of trepanning. Alas, it did not match the book’s description.
I left dejected, bored by the number of armillary spheres and telescopes and the complete lack of Darwin memorabilia, not to mention the absent skulls, but armed with a stack of brochures worthy of my mother. It was from these that I unwittingly gleaned my next clue.
One of those papers was an advertisement for a museum, stating that they would be closing on the 8th of July until Spring 2009 for construction to Serve You Better. Not sure what the museum contained but interested to find out before it closed until well beyond my stay ended, I searched my map for its location. To my surprise and pleasure, I found it located beside the huge University Park, which I had already concluded to be the park towards which Lyra walks after purchasing chocolate (chocolatl, as she calls it) and an apple from the Covered Market. Happy to be able to go see the museum while still keeping an eye out for Pullman Landmarks, I headed off.
The walk was lovely. It took me out of the central part of Oxford, away from the crowding tourists and citizens, past Wadham College. I walked along a wider stone-paved sidewalk that followed a low stone wall covered in flowering plants. I felt more as though I were in a small town than a bustling city.
The museum eventually pulled up. Outside of it was an immensely tall tree, labelled a Sequoiadendron giganteum aged a little less than 200 years. After gazing at that, I trotted across the large green lawn to the museum entrance. Admission, as it seems to be for many museums in this country, was free, so I walked in. The first huge room, containing the Oxford Museum of Natural History, was broken up only by huge supporting but decorative pillars and an uncarpeted walkway circumnavigating the room and was lit by skylights. . It was full of new-looking glass cases edged in light-coloured wood. There were dinosaur skeletons, stuffed animals, and casts of fossils all over. Tables contained specimens which could be touched, if one had the desire to touch a preserved carcass. Printed information about the specimens and the museum’s and Oxford’s history were interesting, and on the whole it was a lovely museum. I wandered around for a while, then went into the next room, which contained the Pitt Rivers Museum.
The room was tall and dark, lined with regiments of glass cases edged in black-painted wood, all standing close to one another. Every case was stuffed with relics, most from cultures conquered by Great Britain at one point or another. Each artefact was labelled with a card full of spidery black handwriting. Eagerly, I wandered from case to case, searching for skulls.
I found cases containing furs, perhaps the ones Lyra sees near her case of skulls, and which are identical to the ones which the Skraalings who hold her captive in her world wear. I found an empty space in another case that might have held the sled on which she was tied. But I found no skulls.
Finally, after much searching, I did locate a skull, but it was not trepanned. Despairing, and beginning to be annoyed by the great crowds of people pushing through the narrow pathways between cases, I asked a docent. He sent me upstairs, which is not where Lyra was. Nevertheless, I looked around up there. Only one skull could I find, and it, too, was un-trepanned. I left, disheartened.
The next thing I wanted to find was the college of the scholar Lyra seeks out, who turns out to be the physicist Mary Malone. It was supposedly a building near the place Lyra saw the trepanned skulls—which, despite my inability to locate them, I was still sure were intended to be set in the Pitt Rivers Museum. I looked about, but saw nothing that fit the description from the book, so I began to head back. As I walked, I noticed a driveway leading to a relatively square brick building. The Clarendon Laboratory of Physics. I snapped pictures happily.
My final search for a landmark from The Subtle Knife was sadly unsuccessful. Supposedly Lyra spots the initials “SP” carved in a stone at the corner of Catte Street, which were made in her Oxford by her friend Simon Parslow. I searched both ends of Catte Street—which is a dead end—peering at cement roadblocks, sidewalk paving stones, corners of buildings, and the street itself. No initials came to light, although my interest in one of the road blocks caused a few American children to peer at it curiously themselves, and give up in puzzlement.
But my landmark from The Amber Spyglass was a complete success. At the end of the book, Lyra selects a bench in the Oxford Botanic Garden to have special significance for herself and the book’s other protagonist, Will Parry (I’ll say no more to avoid spoilers—those of you that have already read the book know exactly what I’m talking about). This final book I had with me in audio form, on my IPod. I listened over and over to the route Lyra takes to get to the bench. Confusingly, she and Will enter the garden by climbing the fence, not paying the admission fee and entering through the tiny gift shop. She then takes a convoluted path past the round, water-lily-covered fountain, to a pine tree planted in 1800 under which I’ve been told J.R.R. Tolkien enjoyed sitting, through one of two possible doors in a high, ivy-climbed wall, over a little wooden bridge that she seems to go out of her way to cross, to the bench, which is basically a straight shot from the main path. Because the directions seemed so irregular, I was not sure of the bench’s identity the first time I saw it. But the next time, as I sat on the bench eating my egg and cress sandwich from Sainsbury’s, a tiny bird, not much larger than a wren, coloured light grey-brown with an orange breast and creamy underbelly, which I had seen before, landed on the bench’s arm. It stayed there only a moment, then took off. I glanced at the arm, and saw scratched there, “Lyra + Will.”
I was filled with glowing pleasure. Others before me had done the same as I, and had been certain enough of the bench’s identity to graffiti it. Needless to say, I took lots of pictures—and fed the tiny, bold bird crumbs from the crust of my sandwich.