Edited by Scott Westerfeld - Teen Libris

Pants on Fire 9
Lyra meets on her quest who she can trust to tell her the complete truth;
to not withhold anything. It isn’t a person, it’s a bear. Iorek Byrnison is
the panserbjørn who Lyra releases from servitude and who is her champion,
the bear in shining armor who saves her on more than one occasion.
Bears can’t lie. And that’s their most effective weapon against humans,
more important than their six-inch, dagger-sharp claws, their vicious
teeth, or their huge paws, capable of crushing a skull with a single blow.
It’s precisely because they lack the human art of lying that they are
human beings’ deadliest enemy. People cannot trick bears. “‘We see
tricks and deceit as plain as arms and legs,’” Iorek tells Lyra. “‘We can
see in a way humans have forgotten’” (TGC 199).
Yet Lyra is such a skillful liar that she defeats the usurper bear king,
Iofur, with lies. He yearns to be human, and in imitating humans he has
lost his native bear-ness. Lyra promises to give him the one thing that
sets humans apart from all other creatures-she offers him a dæmon:
herself. Using the alethiometer, she discovers truths about the bear so
that she can lie to him. She pulls the fur over his eyes. Is this Pullman’s
message? To lie is to be human? Lies can be bad, but used against evil
they’re okay?
Even now that she’s the holder of the truth, lying is still an integral
part of Lyra’s strategy. It’s a familiar weapon that she pulls out and uses
with consummate skill, as other heroes might use a wooden stake, a
lightsaber, or a summoning charm. Lyra never uses a conventional
weapon. She doesn’t need one. She has that uniquely human weapon.
Lies. She’s inherited the skill from her parents, just as a mythological
hero might inherit a flaming sword or a magic ring. Lyra is the offspring
of powerful representatives of opposing forces. Her father is a scientist
and a heretic. Her mother is a zealous defender of the Church. Just as
Aragorn’s sword is forged from the shards of his failed father’s broken
blade, Lyra’s skill at lying is forged from her parents’ flaws, pieced
together to create a weapon to be used for good.
By the end of The Golden Compass, Lyra has complete control over the
alethiometer. She leaves Oxford. She thumbs her nose at the Church by
walking off into the distance and into heresy-into another world.
Eventually, Lyra finds her way to a world that is both familiar and
unfamiliar to her. We know it well; it’s our world. There are no
alethiometers here, but I know for a fact that people in our world have