So, I finally got around to reading Philip Pullmann’s celebrated “The Golden Compass,” and did enjoy it. It was a little odd reading a book that was clearly intended for a pretty young audience for the first time in many years, but it was carefully written and a story that would surely have struck powerfully had I read it as a kid. Both “Watership Down” and “Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH” strike me as similar in ways to Pullmann’s book and each of those books were profound reading experiences for me at, what, ten?

Anyway, I put the book down last night to start reading the April 19th issue of the New Yorker and came across Alec Wilkinson’s “The Ice Balloon,” a recounting of “S. A. Andrée’s ill-fated attempt to fly over the North Pole with two companions in a hydrogen balloon in 1897.”

Huh, I thought, there’s a balloon in the Arctic in “The Golden Compass.”

Then, in the article, Wilkinson notes that the balloon’s base of operations was a felt-lined hangar in Svalbard, Norway.

Svalbard is the location of the kingdom of Pullmann’s intelligent, talking polar bears, and the locale of the finale of the book. It seems clear enough to me that Pullmann was looking to Andreé as he chose certain images for his book. It was fascinating, and unsettling, to come across the likely source of these images while consuming them at the same time in their reified form.