My favourite trilogy. These are excellent books. The worlds Pullman describes are just amazing, I couldn't stop reading! Filled me with mixed emotions, especially the ending. ( )

I'm working on reading the rest of these.

One of my best friends absolutely loves the His Dark Materials trilogy and used to mention it or suggest it to me quite often. I always had a lot of other things to read, so I never quite got around to it until November 2007. I forget why exactly I decided to go ahead and purchase it, except that I had some extra book money that month and film for the first book, The Golden Compass, was due to come out, and so the books were pretty much everywhere.

When I sat down to read it, I was expecting something like the Narnia series, since I'd always heard comparisons between the two, only a little more steampunk and less Tolkien-esque fantasy. Happily, His Dark Materials isn't much like The Chronicles of Narnia at all, except that they're both fantasy YA series with a heavy theme of religion. Also, despite the size of the two collections being about equal, HDM was a much quicker read. I guess that's most likely because stuff actually happens in the books and the main characters are actually interesting.

But though I greatly prefer HDM to Narnia, I'm not all that crazy about it. It's a good series, and the overall message is pretty good, being one about scepticism and not blindly following authority just because they're authority, but I felt that it went on a little too long and got a little too diactic towards the end - precisely the problems I have with Narnia, actually.

It's a very cool universe that Pullman created, and the series is a fun read and definitely worth a read, but it just wasn't the kind of book that I like to read. Maybe if it were a few hundred pages shorter and with fewer diversions from Lyra's point of view, I would have liked it much more. ( )

Reactionary Christians irritate me. I’m convinced that there’s a certain breed of believers that live to protest whatever pop culture serves up. These militant believers target everything from Harry Potter to My Little Pony. This desire to protest has even spawned a new income stream for aspiring authors. Although I have no firm evidence, I’m pretty sure that the number of books sold to that “debunk” The Da Vinci Code exceeds the number of DVDs sold!

I say all this to let you know what my attitude was like when I started reading The Golden Compass. I figured it was just another good story that a few Christians decided to get angry about for no good reason. I was quite surprised to find something genuinely subversive about the story. Unlike the Harry Potter Books, which assume a basic common worldview, His Dark Materials turns our culture’s Judao-Christian foundation on its head.

Given the profound differences between the two series, it’s somewhat ironic that Rowling has received more attention than Pullman from Christians. Pullman was right:

"I’m kind of relying on Harry Potter to deflect all that [religious backlash], actually. I was quite happy for Harry Potter to get all the attention so I could creep in underneath all of it." (Powell’s Books Interview)

Spoiler Alert:

In His Dark Materials, there are multiple worlds that a few people can travel between. The church (a.k.a. “The Authority”) is a controlling and wicked force in every world. Common also to each world is “dust”, that substance which the church considers original sin. Dust is everywhere, but starts surrounding sentient beings at puberty. Adam and Eve’s sin is assumed to be sexual awakening coupled with their pursuit of knowledge.

One of the surprising turns for me was the notion of afterlife. The “world of the dead” is nothing more than a holding world where the deceased go when they lose their souls. One of the most triumphant scenes in The Amber Spyglass is the freeing of these soulless dead people to dissolve and become the stuff of the universe again.

Positive:

I’ve read a lot of fantasy, and was happy to find something so original. Most fantasy works assume a dualistic worldview and play out an end-time scenario. Good and evil are usually equally matched forces, until good manages to eek out an against-all-odds win. (Incidentally, the brilliance of the Narnia books is their genuinely Christian worldview: good and evil are not equal. Instead, the dualism is properly located between Creator and creation.)

Negative:

1. It’s too easy to demonize the church. A lot of wicked things have been done in the name of Christ. However, let’s keep this in perspective. Any group of people, whether religious or not, have the capacity to act wickedly.
2. The pathos-laden escape from the world of the dead was quite unsatisfying. Pullman removed the hope of eternal life from readers and replaced it with nothingness (albeit nothingness slathered with a thick helping of poetic charm). His description here is surprisingly close to the Hindu (and Buddhist) concept of Nirvana. Letting our atoms separate and return to the universe which brought them together isn’t a very exciting prospect for me.
3. When you finish reading these books, it’s easy to think that God is an selfish autocrat who wants to keep people away from sex and knowledge (in fact, I believe that is the point). Although parts of the church throughout history may have taught that, the Christian Canon is emphatically pro-sex and pro-knowledge.

I’m glad I read these books. I found myself shouting at Pullman through some sections, but I was rarely bored. However, I would only recommend it to children who are old enough to understand what’s going on behind the story and are willing to think critically–which, after all, is just what Pullman is proposing. ( )

Breakin it down
story 8/10
characters 8/10
addictiveness 8/10
readability 7/10
Big total
8 outta 10 ( )