Place of Belonging

You know that corny saying “Home is where the heart is”? If not… now you do. The phrase means that you belong wherever what or who you love are. Basically, “home” is a movable concept. “Home” is wherever you want it to be because home is inherently where you want to be.

Philip Pullman does not subscribe to this idea, or at least he doesn’t in the His Dark Materials trilogy. In The Amber Spyglass, he’s very clear about it. You belong to where you are from. Lord Asriel can’t possibly build his new order because he’s gathered all of these forces into a world that is not theirs. John Parry/Stanislaus Grumman’s physical condition deteriorates within just 10 years of living in a parallel world. The great tragedy of the ending is that Lyra and Will stay together because they cannot live in each others’ worlds. People don’t belong anywhere other than where they were born.

Pullman blatantly writes, “We have to build the Republic of Heaven from where we are, because for us, there is no elsewhere.”

The biggest question for me, though, is why include this? Why, in his books about a struggle between individual thought versus totalitarianism, do we get this message about… well, essentially, about where people’s places are and how they should stay there?

As an avid supporter of the idea that home is where the heart is, I have to ask: why does Pullman make a point to tell me that I don’t get to choose where I belong?