42 pages • 1 hour read
Philip PullmanThe Subtle Knife
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Cat and the Hornbeam Trees”
A boy named Will has spent most of his childhood caring for his mother, who regularly experiences paranoia and confusion. He knows very little about his father, a man named John Parry who his mother says is an explorer. Will has never met him, but he envisions himself finding John and adventuring to exotic places with him.
In the months before the book’s opening scene, two men have come to Will’s house several times to ask about John, and have broken in to rummage through the house, obviously searching for something. Although Will’s mother has never told him who they are, he knows they are looking for a green writing case that contains letters, presumably from John.
One day, after his mother’s symptoms have steadily been getting worse, Will decides he needs to find his father. He takes his mother to his piano teacher Mrs. Cooper, who is confused but agrees to let her stay in a spare room. He returns home to find the writing case. Suddenly, the men come into the house and begin heading up the stairs. Will finds the case just in time and runs into the hall to confront the men. Startled, one of them stumbles on Will’s cat Moxie, falls down the stairs, and dies.
Will runs from the house in fear and panic. He hides in a neighbor’s yard until rush hour when he will be harder to spot. He then hitchhikes to Oxford, 40 miles away, where he hopes to find information about his father. He arrives late in the evening and hides in a movie theater until midnight, then starts walking up the road out of the city. On the edge of town, he finds something astounding: A cat who has run out of a nearby garden suddenly vanishes, and Will realizes that under a nearby bush there is a hole to another world. Without hesitation, he crawls through the hole and finds himself in a deserted beachside city.
After exploring the town and swimming in the ocean, Will enters an inviting looking café to find something to eat and a place to sleep. There, he meets Lyra Silvertounge, who has also found herself in the mysterious city without knowing exactly how she got there. At first she is scared of Will, but after he cooks omelets and shows her how to open a can of soda, they begin to see that neither means the other harm. Lyra is from a different world than Will, but one with many similarities to his, including the English language. Her world also has an Oxford, which Lyra is trying to locate. Will agrees that after he sleeps, he will take her to the hole where she can find his world’s version of the city.
The most noticeable difference between Will’s version of reality and Lyra’s is that Lyra’s people each have a “daemon,” a portion of their being that exists as an animal companion. Since Lyra is young, her daemon, Pantalaimon, has not settled into a final form. He shapeshifts between various small animals.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Among the Witches”
Serafina Pekkala, a witch queen, flies through the fog with her daemon Kaisa, a snow goose. They are in search of other witches who were blown miles out to sea after an experiment on the island of Svalbard. They find a tern daemon who tells them his witch master has been captured. Soon, they spot a ship through the thick fog below. Serafina identifies the vessel as belonging to the villainous Mrs. Marisa Coulter.
Like all witches, Serafina is able to conceal herself on the vessel by making the sailors believe she belongs there. She boards the ship and begins to explore. She finds a young witch being tortured by Mrs. Coulter and the leaders of the Magistrate, the major religion. Mrs. Coulter, like Serafina, is looking for Lyra, and believes the witch has information about where she is. Prior to the events on Svalbard, Serafina had been allied with Mrs. Coulter. After seeing evil “child cutting” experiments firsthand, she refuses to help. Serafina enters the torture chamber, still concealed, and realizes she must kill the young witch to release her from her agony and prevent Mrs. Coulter from gaining information from her. Serafina suddenly becomes visible, stabs the witch, and fights her way off of the ship.
She flies to her homeland, a series of caves on a northern shoreline where other witches from her clan are already gathered. The witches decide they need to band together to fight Coulter, figure out her plans, and stop her and the Magistrate. They hold a meeting presided over by Serafina as well as Ruta Skadi, a bold and somewhat ruthless Latvian witch queen. They are also joined by Lee Scoresby, a balloon pilot from Texas who is a friend of Lyra and one of Serafina’s allies. After a long, democratic discussion, Lee declares that he will find Stanislaus Grumman, an infamous explorer who has been declared dead but who Lee believes is still alive. Ruta will find Lord Asriel, who was responsible for the Svalbard explosion that formed gateways into parallel worlds. Meanwhile Serafina and the rest of the witches will search for Lyra.
Chapter 3 Summary: “A Children’s World”
Will and Lyra wake up in their new world and find themselves still alone.
Will and Lyra discuss electricity and amber. Will discovers that electricity is called “anbaric” in Lyra’s world, and that the petrified sap Will calls “amber” is what she calls “electrum.”
They eat more leftover food and head out to explore the deserted streets, where they eventually find another pair of children, Paolo and Angelica. The siblings tell them they are in Cittàgazze. Paolo begins to talk about their older brother Tullio, but Angelica shushes him. They explain that the citizens deserted the town during a recent storm and hid in the local hills. When the storm cleared, the adults realized that the city was full of “Specters,” beings that suck life out of adults but are invisible and harmless to children. Angelica and Paolo are surprised to hear that Lyra and Will have never heard of Specters; they seem to be a regular occurrence in all the local towns. The children love when they appear because it gives them the chance to have the city to themselves.
Will and Lyra leave the siblings to continue on their journey to Oxford. Before they go, Will insists that Lyra take a bath and find some clean clothes because she is too dirty to blend in in his world. He also explains that he will not help her in Oxford; he will show her the gate but then she is on her own. Lyra agrees and together they locate the street where Will first entered Cittàgazze. Lyra steps through first and is promptly hit by a car, something she has never seen before. Will follows and helps her up, happy that no one saw them appear out of nowhere.
They walk toward the city center. Lyra quickly realizes that this Oxford is similar to her own city in some ways, but also very different. She watches in amazement as Will takes money from an ATM and cars and buses zoom all around her. She is horrified to discover that Jordan College, the Oxford college where she grew up, does not exist in this world. Other things are remarkably similar, though, such as her friend’s initials carved on a specific stone pillar, something she had watched him do in her own world several years earlier.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Trepanning”
Lyra and Will go their separate ways once they reach the center of Oxford. He makes his way to a phone booth to call a lawyer who manages a mysterious fund from which Will regularly receives money from his father. Will hopes that the lawyer can tell him about his dad, but the man refuses to give up any information over the phone except to say that his father disappeared.
Will thinks that visiting the lawyer’s office is too risky. Instead, he goes to the library, and then to the Institute of Archaeology. He pretends to be working on a school project about the Arctic expedition from which Mr. Perry never returned. He finds many articles about the subject, but no real leads to suggest what happened to the party. They appear to have vanished into thin air. Will becomes concerned when an archaeologist mentions that another person came looking for similar information a few days earlier and describes a man who matches the description of one of the people who came to Will’s house.
Meanwhile, Lyra wanders around the city trying to find a quiet place to use her alethiometer, a truth-telling compass that she regularly consults for advice. She finds some solace in a crowded museum, where she is drawn to a display of ancient skulls. Several of the skulls have holes in them and placards describing “trepanning,” an ancient practice in which holes were bored into the heads of living people. The alethiometer tells her that the skulls are much older than the labels say they are, and that the trepanned skulls are surrounded with “Dust,” a mysterious elementary particle that Lyra hopes to learn about.
Elsewhere in the museum, Lyra finds a display of Arctic sleds with accompanying photographs. She is shocked to realize that she knows the men in the photos and has ridden on one of the sleds. She begins to wonder if this Oxford is really a different world than her own, or if something else is going on. Unbeknownst to Lyra, a strange man has been watching her in the museum. Eventually, he approaches her and asks if she would like to come with him to learn more about the skulls. She is tempted, but senses danger and retreats into a park where she asks the alethiometer where she can learn about “Dust.”
The device leads her to a rundown physics lab where a stressed researcher, Mary Malone, is working. Lyra breathlessly explains everything about the skulls, the Dust, and the different version of Oxford where she is from. To her surprise, Dr. Malone seems to understand, and is astounded that a young girl has so much information about her own niche research subject. She says that the lab is about to be closed down, but that her team has discovered that dark matter, her own world’s mysterious elementary particle, has some relationship to human consciousness. People can communicate with it using a computer known as the Cave.
Lyra shows Dr. Malone the alethiometer and posits that it works in a similar way to the Cave. She persuades the scientists to let her try the computer and is able to create complex symbols on the screen and interpret them much in the same way she does her truth device. She tells Dr. Malone that to save her project, she needs to improve the Cave so that it can be read in the same way as the alethiometer. Malone asks Lyra to come back the next day.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
These chapters introduce the primary characters and settings for The Subtle Knife. The novel begins immediately after the finale of the previous His Dark Materials Book, The Golden Compass. While The Golden Compass takes place entirely in Lyra Belecqua’s world, The Subtle Knife introduces a form of inter-dimensional travel, in which characters can travel to parallel worlds by passing through “windows” between them. Will Parry acts as a surrogate for the reader, as his world appears to be no different from the real, human world.
By developing Will and Lyra’s friendship, Pullman is able to explore the similarities and differences between their two versions of Earth. This technique is apparent in scenes such as Will and Lyra’s discussion about electricity and amber, when Will discovers that in Lyra’s world, electricity is called “anbaric,” and that the petrified sap Will calls “amber” is what Lyra calls “electrum.” Electrum is the Latin word for amber, which has static electric properties. Anbar means amber in Arabic. These terms and others like it—“atomcraft” and “experimental theology” as alternate terms for physics, for example—show that Lyra and Will’s worlds have a highly parallel linguistic history, with slightly different patterns of language development and exchange.
Another notable difference between Lyra and Will’s worlds is the way technology has developed. Cars, computers, movie theaters, and canned soda are modern conveniences that do not exist in Lyra’s world. However, Lyra does not live in a less technologically developed reality. She is accustomed to advanced tools like the altheiometer, and the scholars in her world are asking many of the same questions as those in Will’s. Dust/dark matter appears to be much better understood in Lyra’s world than in Will’s, and people there have learned to manipulate it, often unknowingly, to achieve things that people in Will’s world could only dream of, without the need for internal combustion engines or digital technology.
The land of Cittàgazze contrasts with both Will and Lyra’s worlds. In the opening chapters, the city and the world beyond are largely a mystery, but Pullman offers several clues to the world’s overall importance. He introduces the “Specters,” shadowy creatures only seen by adults who seem to suck the souls out of anyone over the age of puberty. Cittàgazze appears to be a wealthy port town, but the Specters have rendered it empty apart from a band of children.
Lyra and the physicist Mary Malone immediately bond due to their shared interest in Dust/dark matter. Pullman uses the trepanned skulls, first encountered in the museum, as an avenue through which to explore theoretical physics, archaeology, and shamanism. When Lyra mentions the excess Dust/dark matter around the trepanned skulls, Mary immediately knows that they are both interested in the same questions. The scenes in Mary’s office give the reader an understanding of Lyra’s true abilities; she is able to communicate with the Dust on the computer immediately, just as she is naturally able to read the altheiometer. This scene also gives the reader another window into the different ways that Technology, Culture, and Science have developed differently between Lyra’s Oxford and Mary’s.
Related Titles
By Philip Pullman
