Wearing a blood-red dress and crypto-fascist boots, and with eyebrows unparalleled in conveying menace, Ruth Wilson is my kind of Mrs Coulter. At the outset of the second series of BBC One’s His Dark Materials (covering most of the action of The Subtle Knife, the second book of Philip Pullman’s trilogy), Coulter dominates a meeting of the Magisterium’s invertebrate cardinals. “You know,” she says – like Mrs Thatcher confronting a cabinet of wets, all of them disappointing and male – “I look round this room and see failure.”
Only she, the former gobbler-in-chief who presided over kids’ spiritual lobotomies by severing them from their daemons, has the ruthlessness to do what is necessary. If it means torturing a witch with the scariest pair of tweezers ever seen on TV, so be it.
Cut to Katya the witch, in her cell. Unfortunately for Katya, she knows things. She knows how to cross between worlds and, possibly, the whereabouts of Coulter’s estranged daughter – our heroine, Lyra Belacqua. And so this submarine at the edge of one world and in view of the portal to another becomes a floating steampunk Abu Ghraib. “I’m trying to help you,” slimes Coulter, removing her wedding ring and placing it chillingly on a metal table next to her torture kit, “not from any generosity of spirit, but from pragmatism. Such an underappreciated quality.” Then, because Katya stays silent, Coulter deploys the tweezers subcutaneously to tear a piece of cloud-pine (here looking like a sprig of thyme), which is responsible for the witch’s special powers, from her shoulder. Like Samson after Delilah’s haircut, Katya is nothing special after Coulter’s surgery.
Blake said that Milton, in creating a captivating Lucifer, was of the devil’s party without knowing it. Similarly, Pullman has created a monster more compelling than all the virtuous flying witches, fighting bears, Indiana Jones-like aeronauts, sweet kids and philosopher-explorers that throng his novels. Certainly, Jack Thorne, one of my favourite TV writers (The Fades, currently on BBC iPlayer, is worth your time), revels in punching up Coulter as a combination of Iago and Lady Macbeth with a hint, at her most pantomimic, of Cruella de Vil. In Thorne’s hands, you never know what she might do next, although when she whispers to Father MacPhail that she plans to murder the Magisterium’s flabby, boozy supremo, Cardinal Sturrock, in a Machiavellian coup, nobody is surprised.
We are now in uncharted waters. The 2007 Nicole Kidman-Daniel Craig film adaptation of the first book of the trilogy was deemed, after performing badly at the US box office, to warrant no sequels. It was also called The Golden Compass, presumably because “Two tickets for The Alethiometer, please” is hard to say. The BBC, by contrast, is seeing the epic drama through from the opening glass of tokay to the concluding moment, when Lyra’s daemon mutates into a pine marten. This gives the director, Tom Hooper, free rein to imagine what Pullman’s worlds look like, and most of what he imagines works well. Cittàgazze, for instance, the city where Lyra flees and meets Will, who is also on the run from grownups to this other world, becomes a CGI mash-up of a Tuscan hill town and Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy.
When I interviewed Pullman, he said the film version had been too “twiddly”. Less is often more. Someone should have told that to the composer here, whose lush, melodic score became the musical equivalent of the boy who cried wolf, making us doubt that the next dramatic moment was quite as significant as the music was suggesting. It is a shame, because the two leads, Dafne Keen as Lyra and Amir Wilson as Will, are such good actors they don’t need aural swoons to convey dramatic tension.
Thorne has taken some liberties in the adaptation. Why is it Queen Ruta Skadi rather than Serafina Pekkala who slays Katya to prevent her telling all to Coulter? Then there is the discombobulating moment when Will produces a smartphone to take a picture of the Tower of the Angels in Cittàgazze. Smartphones, purists will say, were not in the book. It is not clear yet whether it will pay dramatic dividends, but I admire Thorne’s writing and trust him to make something of this seeming anachronism. Even so, questions remain. My phone scarcely works beyond the M25, so how can Will get a signal in this alternative reality? How does he plan to charge it? Can’t wait to see how that plays out.
