Summary
In the middle of the night, Lord Asriel’s servant wakes Lyra up. He is jittering with nervousness and can hardly communicate. He struggles to tell Lyra that his master packed some instruments and batteries into a sledge and made off toward the North in a mad fury. The servant adds that Lord Asriel took Roger with him. In a moment of revelation, Lyra realizes that the item she needed to bring her father was not the alethiometer, but rather a human child. Piecing together bits of information that she has gathered along the way, Lyra understands that the energy needed to produce a bridge to other worlds can be obtained by separating a child from his or her dæmon.
Lyra rushes to catch up with her father in an effort to save Roger. She feels that she has betrayed him. She wakes up Iorek, who is asleep outside the house, and asks him to take her in the direction of her father’s sledge tracks. The armed panserbjørn guards accompany them. When they are just barely able to see Lord Asriel on the horizon, an army of witches attacks them. Mrs. Coulter’s zeppelin, armed with machine guns, backs up the witches. While Iorek’s guards hold off the double enemy at their backs, Iorek peels off with Lyra to catch up with Lord Asriel and Roger.
The tracks lead up a mountain. Lyra notes that the aurora is brighter and more dramatic than she has ever seen it before. Riding on Iorek’s back, she enters a semi-dream state. She imagines herself climbing a mountain and leaving the whole world behind her. Suddenly, Iorek stops. Lord Asriel’s tracks have crossed a bridge made of snow that cannot support a bear’s weight. Lyra asks Iorek to send her regards to Lee Scoresby and to tell Serafina Pekkala what has happened. She crosses the bridge, which collapses just as Lyra makes it to the other side of the gully. She waves goodbye to Iorek who turns back to join his troops in battle.
Lyra briefly falls into despair, overwhelmed by the immensity of her task and the cruelty of her parents. However, Pantalaimon’s comforting embrace quickly brings her back to her senses and she pushes forward. Pantalaimon becomes an owl and with his strong owl vision he sees Roger struggling against Lord Asriel in the distance. Knowing she is close, Lyra becomes encouraged and picks up speed.
Lyra finally arrives to the place where Lord Asriel is holding Roger captive. She sees Lord Asriel setting up an arrangement of batteries and wires. A witch swoops out of the sky, and Lyra sees that the witch has carried a wire up into the aurora for Lord Asriel. Lord Asriel connects the ends of two wires, and the lights of the aurora briefly disappear. As he makes another adjustment in his electrical rig, the lights of the aurora reappear, far more intensely than Lyra has ever seen.
Meanwhile, Roger is unable to flee because Lord Asriel’s snow-leopard dæmon is holding Roger’s dæmon in its mouth. Pantalaimon attacks the snow leopard and frees Roger’s dæmon. The two children try to run away. As they run the snow gives out from under them and they almost fall to their deaths in the frozen sea below. But they are caught on a rock just a short way below the peak they fell from.
Above, however, Lord Asriel’s dæmon once again catches Roger’s dæmon in her jaws. Lord Asriel touches a wire to the child’s dæmon, and the intercision is complete. Severed from his dæmon, Roger promptly dies in Lyra’s arms. The energy released from the intercision opens up the sky, and the distant city that Lyra has seen in the aurora is now physically connected to Lyra’s world.
Mrs. Coulter appears and Lyra keeps herself hidden. Mrs. Coulter approaches Lord Asriel, and Lyra witnesses her parents together for the first time in her life. Lyra’s mother is afraid that the Church will come to destroy the bridge that Lord Asriel has built, but Lord Asriel is certain that not even the Church is powerful enough to do so. Lord Asriel tries to convince his ex-lover to join him in the other world that he has built a bridge to. While Mrs. Coulter seems to consider the possibility, it is clear that she feels more motivated to do so by her passion for Lord Asriel than by her desire to join his mission. She decides to stay in her world. Lord Asriel, on the other hand, clearly has only one motivation: to find the source of Dust and destroy it once and for all. Any other sentimental considerations are unimportant to him. Mrs. Coulter weeps as she walks away, while Lord Asriel is unaffected by his separation from Mrs. Coulter. He walks across the bridge.
Lyra, having witnessed her parents’ embrace and separation, discusses the situation with Pantalaimon. She is devastated that her best friend has perished in such a cruel and painful manner. Pantalaimon, however, is more interested in the historic events unfolding before their eyes. He brings Lyra’s attention to the parallel universe that is now just a short walk away from them. He suggests to Lyra the possibility that if all of the evil adults in their lives are afraid of Dust, and intent on destroying it, then Dust must actually be a “good thing.” Humbled by everything that is happening around them, they decide to follow Lyra’s father across the bridge. They hope to find the source of Dust before Lord Asriel does. They are certain that when they find it they will know what to do. The Golden Compass concludes with Lyra and Pantalaimon crossing the bridge into another world.
Analysis
In this section, Lyra finally discovers the true purpose of her journey to the North. Lyra originally set out to save Roger from intercision. But in a painful instance of situational irony, Lyra accidentally brings her best friend to be intercised by her own father. In two short chapters, Pullman turns Lord Asriel from a mysterious protagonist into a hateful antagonist.
The chase from Lord Asriel’s house to the bridge of snow represents the end of Lyra’s journey accompanied by others. She has learned everything she could from all of her mentors and companions. Now it is time for Lyra to cross the gulley herself. Of course, as the gulley collapses, she has no possibility of returning. Lyra is now completely on her own, and there is no turning back. The dream-state she enters while riding on Iorek’s back foreshadows that when Lord Asriel builds the “bridge to the stars,” Lyra will cross it with him, leaving behind everything she knows, forever.
After the snow bridge collapses behind Lyra, Lyra herself collapses into a sort of existential angst. She wishes this were not her destiny and questions why adults must treat children so cruelly. Pantalaimon has no answers and can only comfort Lyra by embracing her. It is only once Lyra literally has no choice but to move forward that she finally allows herself to feel hopelessness. In this moment, Lyra finally allows herself the questions that have been building up inside of her throughout her journey. After a brief moment of hopelessness, she brushes herself off and moves onward.
Lyra and Pantalaimon feel naive for taking for granted what the adults have told them about Dust. They decide that Dust must be a good thing. However, as Lord Asriel prepares to build his bridge, the aurora briefly disappears, leaving Lyra in darkness. In the absence of the aurora’s energy, Lyra feels the physical presence of Dust for the first time. She describes how “the air seemed to be full of dark intentions, like the forms of thoughts not yet born.” This description of Dust could confirm the Church’s belief that it is the physical form of Original Sin. However, Pullman leaves this question unanswered in The Golden Compass.
The tension of the story continues to rise until Lord Asriel completes his “bridge to the stars.” However, Pullman does not try to tie up the loose ends in The Golden Compass. Rather, because it is the first novel in a trilogy, he brings the book to a close during a moment of great tension. Lyra follows her father into the other world and the reader is left to wonder what will happen.
