Books that broke me: The Subtle Knife
Five lessons in crafting a heartbreaking literary death
Full of spoilers, FYI.
Asked for the first bits of culture that broke my heart and two spring to mind. One – Jack not fitting on the door, obviously. (Though Sentimental Garbage on why Jack had to die is worth a listen).
And two – Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.
Yes, I wept buckets during the final few chapters of the trilogy, but the truly agonising bit I’m thinking of comes earlier, in The Subtle Knife. The chapter is called Alamo Gulch. The Texan aeronaut Lee Scoresby flies his balloon above a strange land, where sinister Spectres feast on adult consciousness, and groups of accordingly orphaned children behave in the ways children do when grown-ups are absent. He carries a passenger – the shaman Stanislaus Grumman – and before long they realise they are being pursued. First by another balloon, and then, terrifyingly, by zeppelins full of soldiers.
An incredibly cinematic scene unfolds. Forces are summoned to destroy three of the zeppelins: a storm; a Spectre; a Hitchcock-worthy fury of birds. The balloon lands in a forest, but napalm rains down. The trees burn, and the men flee, and the final zeppelin follows. They reach a narrow valley – the gulch – where Scoresby urges Grumman to escape, before turning to face the thirty or forty soldiers alone.
Except not alone, because in this world humans are accompanied, always, by the animal incarnation of their soul – their dæmon. In Scoresby’s case, she is an Arctic hare named Hester.
Look, you either click with Philip Pullman’s brand of fantasy or you don’t – but even if you don’t, I think Scoresby’s last stand is a masterstroke in crafting a heartbreaking literary death. Here are five writing lessons we can take away.
1.    Make your dead person a parent figure, a crush – or both
Lee Scoresby is a deliciously Oedipal combination of father figure to His Dark Materials’ heroine, Lyra Belacqua, and hot, hot, hot. Not that Pullman does anything so crass as to describe him as such, but – you just know. He’s as steampunk as they come. He’s an aeronaut, he’s a cowboy, he’s mates with witches and armoured bears, he can play cards and shoot and fight and oh god I’m sure this all speaks to some very dodgy subconscious desires of mine but, I mean: Lee was too cool by nature to rage at fate; his manner was to raise an eyebrow and greet it laconically. Hey, the witches have a thing for him too, and we all know they set a high bar in terms of desirability.
As for his father role, it is all the more powerful precisely because he isn’t Lyra’s parent. He chooses that role. It is borne of admiration, and loyalty, and protectiveness. And in its own way this is just as compelling, just as desirable.
The point is, kill off a parent of the main character and/ or someone you’ve made your reader develop the hots for, and you’re halfway to heartbreak without even trying. In Scoresby, both happen at once.
2.    Make your dead person go on a journey
When we first meet Lee, he’s something of an every man for himself type. He takes on jobs – all kinds of jobs – diligently sends money back to his retirement account with the Wells Fargo bank, and doesn’t ask too many questions. The money, one senses, is what matters.
But by the time he dies, he’s motivated by things far larger and more complicated than a pay cheque. He’s been drawn into a war; he’s making choices about where he sees good and evil. And even as he shoots soldier after soldier, he recognises them as not embodying that evil themselves, but as ordinary men caught up in something bigger, something beyond them. He said, or thought, "Those poor men didn't have to come to this, nor did we."
And so he is both heroic and human.Â
3.    Make your death sacrificial
Oh, we’re really digging into some subconscious detritus from my C of E primary education here…but look, kill someone off in the service of a greater good, and you strike at the heart of a lot of people. There’s a particular exquisite pain in a death offered up for something larger; it simultaneously makes that death purposeful and yet pointless.
Take a look at the final words Scoresby offers to Grumman before turning to prevent the soldiers from pursuing. He asks whether aiding Grumman will help Lyra, or hinder her – knowing it will help her is all he needs.
“I love that little child like a daughter. If I'd had a child of my own, I couldn't love her more. And if you break that oath, whatever remains of me will pursue whatever remains of you, and you'll spend the rest of eternity wishing you never existed. That's how important that oath is."
4.    Make your death nailbiting
I mentioned that Alamo Gulch is a cinematic chapter, but I really don’t think I can overplay that. It’s a gorgeously-rendered set piece; a sedate flight over what one imagines to be a serene and beautiful Mediterranean type landscape, into which foreboding, and then fear, and then finally frenetic fighting are expertly introduced. From the first hazy balloon on the horizon to the final explosions of fire and smoke, it is immersive both imaginatively and emotively. The pacing is perfect. You can smell the burning forest.
As the fight begins, we learn that there are twenty-five soldiers, and that Lee has thirty bullets. Perhaps he can do this, we think. But it’s going to be tight.
And it’s the genius of Pullman’s writing that it remains agonisingly tight for every sentence that follows. Even as he feels an explosion in his shoulder; even as we learn that there is a wall of pain waiting to hit him that hasn’t arrived yet; even as Hester whispers the locations of the final soldiers to him. Finally, awfully, he remembers the flower given to him by a witch who can surely undo all of this human suffering in an instant – but of course it is too late. He summons her only to find his body.
5.    Make your death appallingly lonely – or in the arms of someone else
This is the masterstroke of Pullman’s fantasy world – that Lee can die simultaneously alone and entwined with the one he loves best of all. Hester is not his lover, she is part of him – but as his soul given shape and form and a voice, she can express an adoration which is fiercer than any I’ve read. Lee’s death, then, is at once a horrifying vision of isolation, one man defending a tiny patch of land, miles from anyone he knows or loves – and an excruciating depiction of two individuals knowing they are about to lose each other, and knowing they would not want to be anywhere else. Remember Jack on the door?
Hester was failing.
"Hester, don't you go before I do," Lee whispered.
"Lee, I couldn't abide to be anywhere away from you for a single second," she whispered back.
[…]
Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.
And that – that – is why this chapter still brings tears to my eyes years after it broke me for the first time.
How to heal heartbreak #2: The perfect martini
I could devote a whole newsletter to how best to drink your way through heartbreak. Like the good millennial I am, I’ve little time for Gen Z abstinence. If your soul is aching, the right drink can be the perfect salve.
There are many, many ways in which a martini is the right drink. It’s a flick to the forehead, a sharpening of the right thoughts and a melting of the wrong ones. It goes with everything, and it’s as good at 6pm as it is at 2am. And learning to make one means learning to make a classic cocktail, which is a nice way to feel good about yourself. Skillz and all that.
As to how. Just a few basic principles. First, everything should be icy, icy cold. Freeze your glass, freeze your booze, freeze your shaker (although ‘shaken not stirred’ is a myth. Shake your martini and you risk smashing and then melting the ice and thereby diluting your drink; stirring is gentler). So, freeze your mixing glass, really.
Second, your components should, of course, be the highest quality you can get your hands on. But the nice thing – sorry, one of the many nice things – about a classic martini is that your two ingredients – gin and vermouth – come in myriad different varieties. You really can let your own tastes sing.
Third, don’t do as I used to and assume dry is better because, I don’t know, it sounds more Bond-like. The vermouth is the thing that stops this drink being a shot. If you like martinis, the chances are you like vermouth. I’m going to suggest you try a wetter martini than you expect.
Fourth, the right garnish is a briny olive or three, or even a pickled onion. Sharpness and salt. (Martinis in Instructions for Heartbreak, the novel, are mixed in an old pickle jar, FYI).
But actually I’m kidding about the right garnish, because, just as with your liquid components, ‘right’ here is absolutely a matter of taste. And your taste matters – in the grind of heartbreak, more than ever. Remember – or recreate – who you are.Â
Photos by me, and by Stanislav Ivanitskiy on Unsplash
Oh I grieved over this! You've put words to my heartbreak - so clever!