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Dreaming Of Spires Essay, Research Paper

Dreaming of spiresA couple of years ago I finished the last in a trilogy of novels [The Amber Spyglass, part three of His Dark Materials] set partly in an alternative universe, which contains an imaginary Oxford. Imaginary, because the story is a fantasy; but perhaps a great deal of Oxford is imaginary anyway. In Oxford, likelihood evaporates. At about the time the book was published, the Fellows of All Souls announced that they had just spent an evening parading around their college following a wooden duck on a stick. That was obviously a very sensible thing to do, and I wish I had thought of it first. However, it is better to ease your readers in without startling them too much, so the fellows of Jordan College, in my imaginary Oxford, eat dinner in Hall and then retire elsewhere to drink coffee, almost as if it were real life; and that is the point at which the story begins. Jordan College occupies the same physical space in Lyra’s Oxford (Lyra is the young heroine of my story) as Exeter College occupies in real life, though rather more of it. Exeter was where I was an undergraduate many years ago, and I did not see why I should not make my college the grandest of all. Jordan, where Lyra grows up, has developed in a haphazard, piecemeal way, and for all its wealth some part of it is always about to fall down and is consequently covered in scaffolding; it has an air of jumbled and squalid grandeur. And furthermore, “What was above ground was only a small fraction of the whole. Like some enormous fungus whose root-system extended over acres, Jordan (finding itself jostling for space above ground with St Michael’s College on one side, Gabriel College on the other, and Bodley’s Library behind) had begun, sometime in the Middle Ages, to spread below the surface. Tunnels, shafts, vaults, cellars, staircases had so hollowed out the earth below Jordan and for some yards around it that there was almost as much air below ground as above; Jordan College stood on a sort of froth of stone.” I don’t know whether that is true of Exeter, but I can locate the origin of that bit of fantasy. When I was up (1965-68) I had a group of idle friends who occupied their time and mine betting on horses, getting drunk, and sprawling about telling creepy tales. One of the stories we frightened ourselves with concerned the Bodleian Library, which, we assured one another, had been intended to be Hitler’s Chancellery when he had conquered Britain. Beneath the library, apparently, the stacks extended for untold miles in every direction, and each of the levels, named with letters of the alphabet, was more secret than the one above. The lowest, Level L, was profoundly sinister. It was occupied by a race of sub-human creatures, the secret of whose existence was only divulged to the vice-chancellor on his accession. However, there were forgotten shafts and lost passages through every part of the ground between the Clarendon Building and Palmer’s Tower in Exeter College, and sometimes the creatures got out. You could hear them howling and scrabbling if you pressed your ear to the cellar wall under staircase 9. I did, and you can. When she’s not exploring underground, Lyra spends a good deal of time on the college roof, spitting plum-stones on the heads of passing scholars or hooting like an owl outside a window where a tutorial is going on. That, too, is based on something I remember from Exeter. In my second year I occupied the rooms at the top of staircase 8, next to the lodge tower, and a friend, Jim Taylor, discovered that you could get out of the window and crawl along a very useful gutter behind the parapet. From there you could climb in through another window further along. I gave Lyra a better head for heights than I have, but I did the gutter crawl a number of times, usually when there was a party on the next staircase. One of the pleasures of writing fiction is that you can sit at your desk and just make up what you are too lazy to go and find out. But sometimes I do stir myself to look for things, and when I find something interesting but irrelevant to my immediate purpose, I save it up for a later book, and invent a context to fit it. In the Retiring Room at Jordan, for example, after the dinner that takes place in the first chapter, “The Master lit the spirit-lamp under the little silver chafing-dish and heated some butter before cutting open half a dozen poppy-heads and tossing them in. Poppy was always served after a Feast: it clarified the mind and stimulated the tongue, and made for rich conversation. It was traditional for the Master to cook it himself.” Heaven forfend that the rector of Exeter should feel obliged to serve opium after dinner, but this is an alternative universe, after all. I lifted that dainty detail from the diary of an English lady living in India before the Mutiny, which I’d come across 10 years before while I was looking for something else entirely. I knew I could use it somewhere. The way a novelist “researches” – this one, anyway – is quite different from the coherent, focused, disciplined sort of reading which I imagine you need to do if you want an academic career. Despite my three years at Oxford, I never mastered that sort of grown-up reading: I couldn’t do it then, and I don’t do it now. Instead, intrigued by this patch of colour or that scent, beguiled by a pretty shape or blown sideways by a wayward breeze, I flit from book to book, subject to subject, place to place; and it is only later, in solitude and silence, that I begin the laborious process of changing it all into something else. Read like a butterfly, write like a bee. Fantasy, of course, allows you to change things into other things as much as you like. The part of Oxford known as Jericho (whose name, by the way, suggested that of Jordan) is, in real life, thoroughly respectable: terraces of small Victorian houses built for

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