I thought this trilogy was quite good. I have no problems with the contoversey, I see nothing wrong with questioning rules or things that are assumed to be irrefutable. People should actually read things before jumping on the religious band wagon, these books are about so much more. Free thought and speech are not a crime. ( )

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 ( )

A world that draws you in emotionally and imaginatively and doesn't let go, leaving you with a profound sense of loss when the last page is finally turned. Stunning ( )

These books definitely have some SLOW points but as a whole they are very very good. It didn't seem entirely necessary for the series to end the way it did. It seemed a bit forced. Very subversive, that's a good thing! ( )

Made famous by the new movie adaptation of The Golden Compass these are the story of Lyra; a girl who has grown up in a London university; getting her education in bits and pieces from renowned professors. When Lyra�s uncle goes missing; she sets out on a journey into the arctic to find him and bring him home while trying to solve a large number of kidnapping cases. Fantasy and history collide in this interesting and controversial series.In my opinion; this book isn't worth the time it took to print it. But many others disagree. They tell me it gets better later in the series but I can't get through these books! ( )

really nice books, not a great work of literature but a fun light read. Characters are enjoyable as are the places. The story is imaginative and original, something everyone should read. ( )

Much better than the movie. Well written with love-able characters. At times it made me cry. ( )

This was a truly amazing story. I'm actually giving it a 4.75 instead of a 5. It was getting a strong 5 until the ending. It wasn't a horrible ending but it could have been better. I cried if that tells you something. : / ( )

I discovered Philip Pullman's trilogy through the movie, "The Golden Compass." And once I picked them up, I couldn't set them down until I finished all three. A young people's trilogy, Pullman deals with ecological disasters, and the abuse of religion. And how love conquers everything. Doesn't that sound boring? It certainly is not. Pullman won all sorts of awards for that series, especially the last book, "The Amber Spyglass." ( )

I read this omnibus of books by Pullman despite having no prior interest in the series, bought it at a whim at the used bookstore. The first book I was kinda iffy on, it was okay, clearly an intro to the series. Things really hit the fan and get going in the second and wrap up in the third. Well, overall I was satisfied with the story, as demonizing as it is not necessarily of religion but of an oppressive church. It's a good scifi-meet-fantasy alternate history for the adult and the young reader. ( )

- 3 books that praise scholarship and study, knowledge and wisdom, curiosity and an open mind. The power of the church is squashed, and soul, spirit and body find freedom from ignorance and death. (Books 1 and 2 kick ass way better than the dull 3.)

"There are two great powers...and they've been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit." The Subtle Knife p .282 ( )

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, v. 49 (April 1996) p. 277.

These books are really interesting so I love them ( )

Engaging trilogy about Lyra a wild child who investigates the abduction of children and the phenomenon of dark matter in the north. This involves traveling to parallel worlds and finding an assistant. together they mange to solve the mystery of dark matter and the threats to their worlds. ( )

Great epic trilogy! Wonderful for Harry Potter lovers looking for a bit more mature material. ( )

I loved the BBC CD version. I found it harder to read. ( )

Fabulous stories with fantasy and adventure. These books are much more complicated and difficult to read than Harry Potter, but should appeal to a similar audience and enjoyed if enough support is provided. ( )

After seeing “The Golden Compass” movie I just had to read the books that were the source for this wonderful movie. A friend had said to me a couple of years ago, when they started filming the movie, that these were her favorite books, and now I really had to read them. Another thing that attracted me to this trilogy (consisting of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass) is the contrast between C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia (which feature a heavy pro-Christian imagery) and this trilogy (which is pretty anti-religion/church).

As said before, this book contains all three books in one hefty volume. The first book, The Golden Compass, features Lyra Belacqua’s journey to the north to save her friend. She lives in a paralel universe, whose world reminds us of our own (she lives in Oxford for example) but is very different too. The most important difference is the fact that people in her world have a daemon, a companion animal that is part of that person. With children the animals can change (from bird to dog to cat to moth), with adults the animals are settled in a form that gives away the character of the person (dogs belong to servants for example). Anyway, the big issue is Dust, a form of energy that according to the ‘church’ has to do with original sin.

Not to give to much of the story away, but Lyra has many adventures in many strange lands where she meets nice and nasty people. One of the paralel worlds she visits is ours, and Pullman explains many mysteries of our own world in this story. The descriptions of the worlds, people and objects are very detailled and fantastic. The ideas in the book might be a bit far fetched, but hey, that’s why it’s fantasy. It is pretty anti-church, but then again, it is mostly anti-church in the way the church is handled, faith in and of itself isn’t condemned.

I loved the book and the stories, even though sometimes I did have the feeling that too many bad things were happening to Lyra and her friend Will. It does have a semi-happy ending, and for all the fantastic lands and ideas I give the book thumbs up! ( )

This book was pleasantly subversive, with characters I found myself really rooting for and against, as appropriate. I found myself wondering whether the main characters were going the right way, or whether it would be revealed that they were totally wrong about everything and messing the whole place up. That said, I made a bad choice in reading this book after the movie came out, when so many other people were reading it and discussing it. I think it might have been a five-star book if I hadn't run into spoilers, which really robbed me of a lot of enjoyment of it. ( )

After hearing about all the controversy surrounding the much-hyped movie "The Golden Compass", I made the conscious decision to read the books and decide for myself whether the hubbub that I had been hearing about was really all it seemed. Shortly afterward, I picked up a volume with all three books in one and set to reading it almost immediately.

The volume itself is lovely. It’s paperback, making it a reasonable weight to tote around when necessary. Its cover is a lovely shade of blue, and on the front, artwork of a little girl on a very large polar bear’s back. I like polar bears, so that’s a plus one right there. (Just because you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover doesn’t mean I can’t be predisposed to enjoying it because of a polar bear, come on!) Of course, the cover itself, the back cover in particular, did nothing to really prep me for the story at hand, nor excite me or make me worried about what was to come once I actually delved into its pages:

"Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, the first book in the His Dark Materials trilogy, changed the face of fantasy publishing with its stunning originality. The complete trilogy went on to become a bestseller in dozens of countries around the world, critically acclaimed and showered with prizes. Together, these novels –The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass– are renowned for their beautiful storytelling, epic scope and dearly loved characters."

That’s the first paragraph. Are you hooked on the plot yet? Do any of the characters intrigue you yet? Yeah, me either.

"Captivating children and adults alike, it is a tale born of witch clans and armored bears, shining angels and magical devices, haunted otherworlds and the shocking destinies of Lyra and Will, two children at the center of a more-than-mortal battle. This edition presents Philip Pullman’s entire His Dark Materials trilogy in a single volume–a celebration of this astonishing work, now a beloved classic."

By far, this has got to be the most useless back-of-book summary that I have ever read. It gives little of the plot and names a grand total of two of the characters. Obviously one can expect witches, angels, bears, magical devices - whatever those might be, some place haunted and destinies of two characters which might just be shocking. That’s what the book tells me, so I must prepare myself to be shocked, right? There could have been much better use of this space to tout the book’s merits by telling about the book, not by spewing superlatives and overwrought praise.

Small gripes about poor packaging, which in the scheme of things is not all that important. I found the back summary laughable, however well-meaning it was. Onward, noting of course that from here there will be spoilers.

The novels took me longer than planned, and I can’t place just why. Were it a case of it not being as interesting to me, I’d have picked up another book and set this trilogy aside for awhile. However, I plugged away at it, and read large chunks, but might have gone two or three days in between reading. I still haven’t been able to place just why. I cannot blame it on the writing - I quite enjoyed Pullman’s style. He wrote about the normalities of Lyra’s world (often referred to as Lyra’s Oxford to differentiate later from the Oxford that Will and other characters from that area know) without explicitly stating, “This is X and this is why. People just do it this way, because that’s how it is done.” It seems that the rights and wrongs of that world come naturally through storytelling, through the occasional thought of a character or an action which comes as a surprise to a character. I really liked how that was done. Additionally, Lyra’s Oxford is incredibly interesting in the inclusion of dæmons, witches, armoured polar bears which talk, and the allusion to magic in addition to the very widespread influence of a church very much like the Catholic church of “our” world. The character Lyra is, quite obviously, the main focus of the story but the story is not told entirely from her point of view, which is something I enjoyed immensely. It’s a rich world of fantasy, and it’s full of things which lend themselves to roleplay - something which, of course, is important to me. The first book sets up Lyra’s world nicely, which makes it all the more interesting when one gets to The Subtle Knife and gets to learn about, well many other worlds. The first world we encounter is Will’s world, which is far closer to the world that we’re used to. Secrecy and treachery abound, and the same censorship that Lyra’s Oxford suffers from in terms of “Dust,” or “dark matter” or “sraf” or whatever you want to call it exists there, too. Dust is by far the largest part of this plot three-book plot. We are also introduced to the once-beautiful city of Cittàgazze, from which adults must flee due to somewhat mystical beings called Spectres. These beings feast on the Dust and attack the adults as a result. Adults are more affected by this Dust than children, you see. That’s the main controversy over it. The church, at least in Lyra’s Oxford, thinks it is Original Sin, and therefore must be eradicated before children reach puberty and their dæmons settle, which is the point at which children become young adults and those same young adults become “infested” with the Dust. Convoluted plottage, at best, but it was thrilling to read.

The plot goes on that there is a destiny about Lyra. Whether Will figures into it officially or not is difficult to say, but Lyra is the one about whom the prophecy is most specifically spoken. The religious aspects of the book, while apparent, don’t seem to take it over, and by the middle of The Subtle Knife, I was wondering where the controversy was going to come in. The church in the novels, in any of the universes, is corrupt and overbearing. It has political aims and priorities which far overshadow the general ideas of the religion itself. Through the story of The Amber Spyglass, this is clear - it is not the religion which is at fault, nor the faith or beliefs: it is the corruption riddling the whole organization from the top man (er, angel) on down.

In the end, and this is a HUGE spoiler for the plot, so don’t read the rest of this paragraph if you don’t want to be spoiled, Lyra and Will, as the representations of what I can only call Re-Eve and Will as Re-Adam, join together in love. Whether this is sexual love or merely the beauty of love itself is left ambiguous, but as the characters are twelve and thirteen at this time, I’m choosing to believe that the love is innocent and pure, involving kisses and true, unabashed affection and nothing further than that. This is my personal choice and is not based on signs in the novel that might direct either way. My brain just can’t handle thirteen-year-olds having sex, you see. At any rate, the recurrence of the Adam and Eve situation turns out to be not sinful, but beautiful. There is no shame in it, and from it comes Dust. The church got something right in that regard, that the dust was a result of Adam and Eve in Eden. However the story played out from there it is difficult to say, but that’s something better left to the church to sort out on its own.

The long and the short of it is that Dust comes to people once they reach the age of awareness. Lyra and Will became aware of themselves as people, of each other, of the world as they came of age and fell in love in the land of the Mulefa. The end of the story is a source of debate over at HisDarkMaterials.org, where I have fallen in to the forum with delightful ease. Some find the ending, where Will and Lyra must ultimately separate and go to their separate worlds, else risk an early death of one or the other of them - people can’t survive for too long away from their own world, you see. The ending can be considered the absolute end, where Will and Lyra may never see each other again and will never co-mingle until the two of them rejoin as particles of Dust in the land of the Mulefa after they come through the Land of the Dead. I’m being very vague here in terms of what these places are, and this is for a reason - I can’t give the whole plot away. It not only would take too long but would be unfair to anyone who hasn’t read the novels and is reading on this far anyway. At any rate, I choose to view it more hopefully: they are apart for now, but from the things that an angel told them before they had to part for good, I believe that they will be able to rejoin one another somehow in the future. They must first complete their tasks in their respective worlds first, aiming to build up the Republic of Heaven (as opposed to the Kingdom) and making the world a better, more positive place. It is insinuated that someday one or both will learn a way that they can travel to see each other without creating rifts in the fabric of the worlds and without creating Spectres as a result (which come about each time the subtle knife is used to cut a way into another world). The ending need not be sad, and I do believe that they will be together again someday. Not to mention, young hearts do mend and while their love may never die, the pain will slowly ease away.

Now, about this controversy. I’ve heard all sorts of things about how Philip Pullman wants to “kill God in the minds of children,” and how he is quoted as saying that his books are about killing God. I don’t see that really in the novels. To a degree, yes, but in the circumstances of the novel, it is completely blown out of proportion. His novels are not about not believing in God, nor are they about the final and irreversible banishment of the church. His novels are about hope, love, honesty, and being true to the better qualities that every person can embody. He does not at any time blaspheme against the church itself unless a retelling of the story of Adam and Eve can be considered blasphemy. The public statements of church officials particularly in the United States but with additional representatives around the world are sensationalist and most of them are unfounded. It is the same way with this as it is with the Harry Potter novels. One person in good position to get his or her word heard by many others with similar beliefs defames the series and voila! Suddenly there are boycotts and book burnings. Respecting the right of the individual to decide for himself, I wish these people actually would decide for themselves rather than letting a mass forwarded email decide for them. This is the kind of ignorance which the church in the novels was trying to achieve, and the very same ignorance which can deny people from reading very interesting stories, as a result of some unfounded rumors and quotes taken out of context.

The long and the short of this is that I find the controversy ridiculous, and quite enjoyed the novels. They’ll be staying on my shelf for some time to come. ( )

I listened to the entire trilogy by the Full Cast Audio. It was one of the best things I've ever listened to and ranked right up there with Lord of the Rings as an epic story.