Pullman’s Oxford

Filed Under Pullman's Oxford, Streetwise

Oxford is a literary nomad, appearing reconfigured in literature again and again. A case in point is St Barnabas in Jericho: it caught the eye of Waugh, Betjeman, Hardy (Jude watched the church’s cross sway) and, more cheerfully and murderously, it cropped up in Inspector Morse.

Click to view full size image in all it's splendour. © Bethanie Cunnick

So many future writers pass through Oxford: ‘The two great turning points in my life,’ Oscar Wilde revealed in De Profundis, ‘were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.’ There is a resonance about Oxford, something obscurely wonderful about the place, that fosters moonshine and eccentricity. In the territory of Oxford writer Philip Pullman’s imagination, his Dark Materials trilogy is ‘set partly in an alternative universe, which contains an imaginary Oxford [... but then] in Oxford, likelihood evaporates.’

Even in our ‘real’ Oxford the Martyrs’ Memorial at St Giles is said to burst into phantom fire on occasion and, between the flames, shadowy figures can be seen (no doubt hopping from foot to foot) - and sighted most recently in 1996! Temple Cowley recalls the long lost medieval house of the Knights Templar. The ghosts of the nuns of Godstow can be heard singing on May Day. And have you noticed that no blackbirds whistle near the Westgate Shopping Centre? Clearly this is because, in the eighteenth-century, one such blackbird perched on a gallows at Westgate.

Alongside our tuneful friend hung the gristly corpse of one young poisoner and, since then, no blackbird has dared to give song at Westgate! Of course, tourism loves Pullman’s Oxford. Already Oxford tours are springing up, translating Oxford. The Bodley Library in the Golden Compass is the Bodleian; Jordan College is the literary double of Exeter College. In the to-and-fro traffic of dream and reality, tourists discover that Pullman as a student lived on staircase 8 in Exeter College; Lyra’s room is on staircase 12! Like Lyra, Pullman himself was no stranger to the guttering in attempts to reach parties on the next staircase, along with his partner-in-crime, Jim Taylor. Again, an interesting fiction-life switch can be made in that a Jim Taylor is the hero of Pullman’s novel The Tin Princess. The ‘root system’ Pullman says lies under Jordan College (where Lyra discovers the catacombs of scholars’ heads, each with a coin engraved with a daemon in their bone mouths) does exist beneath many Oxford Colleges. When Lyra switches around the skulls in the Golden Compass, scholars’ ghosts lay siege to her bed. Well, what else would we expect? Exeter College itself is currently haunted by one John Crocker, a raffish, zippy dresser who cavorts about his tombside in a yellow jacket and brown trousers. (St John’s College has an archbishop who bowls his head at nosey onlookers.)

Any Pullman fan worth their salt can tell you that Lyra and Will watch a movie in Gloucester Green’s Odeon; that Will travels to other worlds and other Oxfords through a rent in the air at the Banbury Road roundabout; that Golden Compass Gobblers steal Jessie Reynolds from our very own Covered Market and the Dark Matter Research unit where iconoclastic scientist Mary Malone works is somewhere near Parks Road. Lyra is stalked by arch-enemy, the evil Sir Charles Latrom, at Pitt Rivers Museum - Latrom (plus snake daemon) lives at Limefield House, Old Headington. Filming for Pullman’s The Butterfly Tattoo has been taking place in Oxford; namely Rose Hill and Cowley Road (Tesco gets a mention). The doomed lovers meet at Worcester College and wend their way around University Parks on their first date and ‘enjoy’ a kebab together from the kebab van outside the Ashmolean. There’s even a murder in Wolvercote and the film features local bands and The Jericho Tavern.

For all romantics out there, the climax of The Amber Spyglass is in the Botanic Gardens. Lyra and Will can’t live together in the same Oxford at the same time and, in fact, will probably never meet again (gulp). So they promise to do the following: every Midsummer, at midday, each will sit on the same bench in the gardens. They won’t be able to touch or see one other as they will be in separate Oxfords, but they will know that both Oxfords have this seat in common. Rumour has it that someone placed a rose there on St Valentine’s Day. Let’s see how many of us can fit on the bench this year. Go find!

- Fiona Ross