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The Golden Compass; A great follow up to Harry Potter. Oct 27, 2001 (700 of 843 found this helpful)
After finishing the 4th Harry Potter book I moped around for a few days lamenting the fact that the next installment isn't due for publication for quite some time. Luckily, a friend of mine suggested the Dark Materials series by Phillip Pullman. Five pages in to The Golden Compass I was hooked. With a "Potter like" fervor I ripped through the first book in two very long nights. After which I was useless at work, but just as satisfied as when I first discovered the work of J.K. Rowlings. A great read!
A note to parents: The world that Pullman conjurs is a bit darker than Harry Potter's. There is more violence and some very frightening situations. I'd say 11 and up would be a good age for these books.
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Going, going, gone Sep 7, 2005 (629 of 840 found this helpful)
I'd like to offer a bit of dissent from all the raves concerning the Dark Materials trilogy.
Let's begin at the beginning. *The Golden Compass* is a work of true genius, sparkling with inventiveness and carrying the reader on through its essentially absurd plot (do you *really* believe that any eleven-year-old girl, no matter how precocious, could accomplish all those things?) with fine panache and an unflagging sense of wonder. Don't stop to think, just sit back and enjoy the ride. Lyra, the girl from the parallel universe, is out to save her father from the captivity of armored polar bears and at the same time free her friends from the diabolical experiments of the fiendish Mrs. Coulter. What could be better?
Book Two, *The Subtle Knife*, jars us a bit by switching the viewpoint to our own world, where Will, a young lad about Lyra's age, also sets out on a quest to find his lost father. Will is another full-fledged superkid, able to accomplish tasks that would daunt even Odysseus as he meets Lyra, interacts with all manner of bizarre beings and hops from world to world with tireless stamina.
Alas, Will is never quite as convincing as Lyra, perhaps because he's so thoroughly grounded in our own mundane world, perhaps because his beyond-adult courage, wisdom, endurance and innate nobility are so utterly over-the-top (far eclipsing even Lyra's astonishing talents) that they begin to test the boundaries of our suspension of disbelief. Even James Bond was never this resourceful, and certainly never so remarkably articulate. There are some things that just don't wash, even in a fantasy. But all the same, there's action aplenty, and if you're not in too critical a frame of mind, *The Subtle Knife* makes for an enjoyable read.
But by Book Three, *The Amber Spyglass*, Pullman's characters and storylines begin to explode in all directions, leaving us to wonder just which of the many players we're supposed to be rooting for -- and why. Multiple plotlines are fine, if they're kept within reason, but when the device is overdone, the reader becomes like a passenger on a fast-moving train, trying to look at all the passing landmarks but unable to concentrate on any of them long enough to really appreciate them. Maybe it's simple authorial zeal; but then again, maybe it's to keep the reader from looking closely enough to spot the ever-multiplying logical inconsistencies.
Very quickly, the author's astonishing inventiveness begins to betray him as new concepts, magical gadgetry and otherworldly beings are piled on in such relentless layers that we very quickly reach the saturation point at which anything is possible and therefore nothing can any longer be surprising. Worse, many of them seem to have been invented as mere devices for hauling the characters in and out of the latest alarming predicament. Does the Intention Craft, to name just one, really have any purpose in the storyline other than to give Mrs. Coulter a way to escape from Lord Asriel's fortress?
But most unforgivable of all, *The Amber Spyglass* is less of a novel than a thinly-fictionalized religious -- or should I say anti-religious? -- screed disguised as a fantasy novel. For Lord Asriel's intention is nothing less than to slay God himself and leave the multiverse the exclusive property of its wise inhabitants. This is somewhat complicated by the fact that God turns out to be nothing more than a drooling, withered, senile angel who gratefully evaporates when the two juvenile protagonists release him from his crystal life-support coffin, but Lord Asriel is undaunted. After all, there's still God's Regent to contend with, a lustful angel with a name ("Metatron") that would hardly be out of place on a Japanese giant robot.
Of course with no God, there's always the thorny question of life after death, but militant atheist Pullman has an answer to that one, too. There is n
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A grand metaphysical journey with convincing characters and details Sep 6, 2006 (402 of 523 found this helpful)
I just finished reading this grand trilogy to my kids, aged 8, 10, and 12. My wife ended up sitting in on almost the entire series, and all of us were riveted from Oxford to the World of the Dead and back again. These books are incredibly ambitious: they set out to stitch together a religio-political history of the multiverse with deep, informed reference to physics, religious history, adolescent psychology, Nietzschean heroism, etc. etc. etc. The result, as I read it, is one of the most compelling indictments of church and state ever written for a broad audience. Author Philip Pullman concludes, without didactic hamfistedness, that the first purpose of churches and governments is self-perpetuation through maintaining the ignorance of their adherents and citizens. The greatest wisdom and joy, in Pullman's worlds, comes of full, mortal, bodily engagement with the physical world per se: with domestic comforts, food, sex, art, aesthetic involvement, work well done, craft, cleverness, etc. The well-earned consciousness of a human adult, earned through Blakean experience, is the crowning moment of all creation. Antithetical to this wisdom and consciousness is dogmatic narowness, asceticism, monasticism, self-denial, narrowness of experience.
That this idea is dramatized through the adventure stories of children is remarkable. One could do worse than to say that the weakness of fictional biography is its narrowness, its dependence on the particular, the local, the kind of detail that is very difficult to universalize or even generalize. And the weakness of allegory is its didactic tendency, its broad-stroke enmity to personal meaningfulness except in the most abstract terms. What Pullman has done is to weave a sharp, poignantly-rendered, intimate set of psychological dramas into grand, almost scriptural allegory. As though Charles Dickens were setting Tiny Tim against the backdrop of the Old Testament. In this way, which should not be attempted by lesser writers, the touchingly naive and personal actions of a 12-year-old girl take on universal importance. Every minor petulance, every petty preference, every whim shakes creation. In this setting, in which cataclysm feels immanent and everything hangs in pre-apocalyptic balance, our little heroin's encounter with God himself feels simply a natural step in the narrative. How Pullman pulls this off, I don't know. By all rights this should be embarrassing, overblown stuff, but it isn't. It is emotionally raw, heartbreaking, and lovely. Just like life.
I highly recommend these books for children with good vocabulary and their fixed-Daemon authority figures.
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Intelligent, challenging Children's literature Jul 11, 2002 (263 of 363 found this helpful)
These books are what the very best of Children's literature does. They are entertaining and fanciful, yet they simultaneously challenge and educate both the mind and heart. Like hot soup when you are sick, they are "Good and Good for You."
"His Dark Materials" are a great counter-point to the mindless fun of Harry Potter and friends. Pullman's writing is educated and insightful, his characters are real and multi-faceted. The series is packed with adventure, ideas, beliefs, fantasy, talking armored bears, Texas Balloonists, animals, gypsies, and just about everything else. The tone of the series is serious, and as dark as the name implies.
"Chronicles of Narnia;" "Prydain Chronicles;" "The Hobbit;" "Harry Potter;" "The Time Quartet;" "Wind in the Willows;" and now..."His Dark Materials." Philip Pullman, welcome to the club.
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His Dark Purposes May 1, 2006 (241 of 373 found this helpful)
Fascinating book inappropriately marketed to children.
Pro:
Philip Pullman shows glimmers of brilliance as a writer. His characters are engaging, his worlds are vivid, his prose is delightful at times, and he occasionally produces lush and beautifully drawn descriptive paragraphs. His "science" is goofy but inventive, and without it his story couldn't work. He also demonstrates a good understanding of what appeals to an adolescent reader. I enjoyed the first volume, though my interest plateaued in the second volume and dropped like a stone in the third.
Con:
Philip Pullman is one of a growing group of authors who market their own controversial adult ideas and themes as juvenile fiction/fantasy. While I affirm his right to have, and to express his view of the world, Mr. Pullman's method of garnering an uncritical and captive audience for his message is despicable. Pullman is a skillful and sometimes powerful writer who understands his audience well; sadly he uses that skill and knowledge to entice, seduce, and manipulate the immature reader.
Here is a summary of how the Pullman method works:
The Golden Compass is a compelling action adventure of a young, smart, defiant, and spirited pre-adolescent (12-year old) girl. There are dark characters, ugly episodes and wicked happenings in this volume, but spunky Lyra is up to the challenge. And, she has cool friends (noble gypsies and armored bears, among others) to help her.
In The Subtle Knife we meet Lyra's male counterpart Will. By the end of this also dark and rather convoluted part of the story we like Will a lot, too. And we hate the bad guys, although sometimes it's hard to tell just who the bad guys are. Will finds himself possessing a knife that only he can use; a knife that allows him to open windows into other, sometimes parallel, worlds.
Now that Mr. Pullman has set his stage (and the child has a significant investment in the story), he force-feeds the unsuspecting reader his world view in The Amber Spyglass. Yes, there is some foreshadowing of what's coming in the first volumes, but until we get to the third volume we keep hoping that these are literary red herrings thrown in just to keep us off balance. Alas, no such luck.
In short order Mr. Pullman informs us that:
- The God of Judaism and Christianity is a fake, a liar, a dictatorial despot, a draconian authoritarian intent on making everybody miserable. Mr. Pullman's definition of "god, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father the Almighty" is that he is the source of everything that's wrong with the world.
- The church is run by self-serving, power-hungry dupes and mercenaries who ensure God's tyranny is carried out. Everyone else of faith is a discounted as a closed-minded simpleton who wouldn't know what to do without being told.
- The health of this world and all of Pullman's "billions and billions" of other worlds is dependent on invisible, sentient dust, reminiscent of the Mitichlorians behind The Force of Star Wars lore. This dust is the product of man's gaining wisdom, a "natural" process that Pullman places in direct opposition to man's knowledge of God.
- The "good guys" in this world are the secular naturalists, the amoral, the animals, the witches, and the rebellious angels who have set out to help overthrow and destroy God, and
- Elite, self-actualized young men and women of character (like the reader, of course) possess the power to destroy God, and should destroy God because, after all, it's the right thing to do. With the assurance of Lyra's and Will's feelings that if we do destroy God then all will be well with the world and we will be happy.
Harry Potter, meet Bertrand Russell and Ayn Rand. And don't forget Jean Genet, for flavor.
Along the way Pullman gives lectures on:
- The moral