His Dark Materials Trilogy (Northern Lights, a/k/a The Golden Compass | The Subtle Knife | The Amber Spyglass )

This trilogy is marketed to younger readers, I suppose because it's a fantasy book and the protagonists are a boy and girl on the cusp of being teenagers. The themes of free will, the nature of the soul, and corruption of faith and power are rarely explored so thoroughly in any book, let alone in books for "children." Despite the more mature themes, the books are enjoyable because of strong characters, great villians, amazing alternative world building, thrilling action, and many moments that invoke real emotion. If you read this as a kid, I strongly suggest reading it as an adult.

One of Pullman's many incredible inventions here is that characters have an animal companion that represents their conscience and perhaps their soul. Not only show more does a particular animal give us a hint about a character, but the animals talk and the relationship one has with their "soul" can be tremendously affecting.

I'm not going to summarize the story except to say it starts out as a relatively simple fantasy adventure and eventually our heroes find themselves with crucial parts to play in an actual war between creation and it's creators. Along the way are magical items, wise witches, talking bear-kings, bad parents, soul-sucking specters, scientists who communicate with angels, and all manner of fantastic creatures. This is truly an incredible work of the imagination. show less

Pure brilliance. I, like Tolkien, usually despise religious allegory, especially when it's a very thinly veiled attempt to promote Christianity. Philip Pullman's 3 novels, although allegorical are not out to convert you. The message is simply this: To build the kingdom of heaven on Earth because this life is all you get. And whether you agree with that premise or not, the message is still one of goodwill which is hard to find fault with. A powerful story of why happiness and harmony in this world are more important than the dream of rewards in the next. I didn't reailse the allegory until the last book as the first two books don't make the message apparent. This book is a statement against the church as an organisation and an invitation show more to return to a life lived by the golden rule in its many incarnations. The book would have been fantastic without this message as well, however, simply because it is well written and the plot is well devised and executed. Fantastic! show less

I’ve had this on my shelf and my To-Read Queue for quite a while since I bought the Folio Society’s wonderful edition of the trilogy. My kids really liked it and had told me that I would as well. Other than that, I knew that it offended some people for the way the Christian church is portrayed in the series.
Good literature and stories make you think and moves you, sometimes out of your comfort zone. And this series definitely did that for me. Ironically, since this was originally published by Scholastic Books, the world’s largest publisher and distributor of children’s books, this book really hammered home for me how casual we can be of our children’s lives. I was really disturbed by the how the governments, the church, show more society, and many individuals in the books were willing to use their children for their own gains. It’s fiction, you say? Er, well yes, but it’s not that far off the mark in a lot of respects. We have nice phrases for it like “collateral damage” when it refers to the high cost children pay in our wars and interventions, “worth it” when it comes to their suffering in sanctions, and closer to home we let children suffer from lack of health care because their parents are unemployed or lack of food because they are born into a “have not” family.
In His Dark Materials, everyone has a daemon, whether it is external, as in Lyra’s world, or internal, as in Will’s. Is this a manifestation of a person’s soul? Or of their spirit? Not sure, but whatever it is one cannot live without it. It’s a cool concept and interestingly developed throughout the book.
The setting is in multiple worlds of the multi-verse, in which it is as if every possible outcome of an action might have happened on different worlds. So you have worlds that seem very similar except for small differences as a result of a slightly different outcome or action or development, and you have radically different worlds where life took a radically different path from ours. Usually it is difficult to move between the worlds but as the trilogy draws to a climax the portals open up with dangerous consequences as the books moves to the final conflict and resolution.
One thing that was disappointing is that I felt that Lyra’s strong female character was developed well through the first book but then she became much weaker in the second and even into the third book as Will’s character seemed to come to dominate.
I definitely will be reading this series again at some point. I admire Pullman for his imagination and guts in picking his “bad guys” at this point in time. show less

Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass) has won all manner of awards, and every one of them seemed well-deserved to me. I decided to read all three books now so they'd be fresh in my mind for the first movie, and enjoyed all three a great deal. The first, The Golden Compass, was probably my favorite of the three, but each of them is quite imaginative. Together they make one of the best fantasy series I've read; I rate them right up there with the Harry Potter canon and Tolkien's works.

Pullman has created some brilliant plot devices through which to explore some of the most contentious issues in human society and retell Milton's great epic Paradise Lost. Alternate show more universes abound in these books, where humans' souls take animal form and accompany them through life as tangible companions, armored bears rule the Arctic and a grand alliance is formed to defeat the nefarious Authority. Through it all, two young people make their way through a dizzying labyrinth of adventures and escapades as they seek to unravel the mysteries of life, faith and Dust (Pullman's term for the force that seems to resemble the Christian concept of "holy spirit").

Some evangelicals and conservative Catholics have decried these works for their portrayal of organized religion, but while Pullman's books are very anti-authoritarian and anti-dogmatic, they are also deeply spiritual and very provocative in their examination of intense theological issues. I thought of them not as anti-religious, but as a direct critique of those who claim that their interpretation of faith is the only "right" way. I found BU religion professor Donna Freitas' take on Pullman's books very compelling, and agree with her conclusion: "It is a beautiful story, and a Christian story. It is a story that could prompt believers to reflect on their faith. It is just not a story that everyone may want you to read."

Absorbing characters, polished prose, and an important message about the role of faith in our lives made these books all the more interesting to me. Highly recommended.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2007/12/books-review-his-dark-materials.html show less

I love Paradise Lost. If poems were people, then Paradise Lost would be my girlfriend. Actually it'd be about 350 years old, so presumably very dead, and hence not my girlfriend. But I'd have a kind of histo-crush on it nonetheless. So much do I love Paradise Lost that my first novel was a re-imagining of Milton's epic, set in the modern day. There were people and angels and all manner of other beasties all living in a second version of Earth. By some artifice people could travel back to the original version of Earth, albeit they couldn't really interact with it or stay there for very long.

Well, I say that was my first novel, it wasn't actually published. And when I say it wasn't published I mean it wasn't finished. Actually “never show more started” might be a more accurate way of putting it. But hey, if I'd ever written a novel, that probably would have been it. Luckily I didn't write it, since it turns out I would've been unknowingly plagiarising Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, itself a modern day version of Paradise Lost full to the brim with curious creatures and parallel worlds.

Although published as three separate works, His Dark Materials isn't so much a trilogy as it is a really long book that separates fairly naturally into three parts. This beginning-middle-end divide usually translates as a divide into interesting-boring-exciting. Or more concisely, the middle usually sucks.

Here I found the central section of the book my favourite part. The opening, Northern Lights is interesting and has some fun characters, but looking back, very little happens in its 350 pages. In contrast, the shorter second part, The Subtle Knife, is bursting with new characters, neat developments, and a frenzy of activity. Things slow down again for the final part, The Amber Spyglass. Here, despite the book's biggest events taking place, things feel somehow more low key. I was actually reminded of the premise of the first Star Wars film: events are transpiring on a galactic scale, yet the story is told from the perspective of two lowly droids. If that had carried on into the rest of the Star Wars trilogy then the effect might have been something like The Amber Spyglass. It works, in a fashion, but does mean the series ends with some slightly cheap-feeling heart string-tugging rather than with the splendour that the novel's vast events seem to call for.

All in all it's a solid and enjoyable story, and the Everyman's Library omnibus edition features a cute addition: “Lantern Slides” sections after each of the three parts giving little snatches that Pullman wrote but never incorporated into the text proper, giving extra little titbits about the plot and characters. show less

I love Paradise Lost. If poems were people, then Paradise Lost would be my girlfriend. Actually it'd be about 350 years old, so presumably very dead, and hence not my girlfriend. But I'd have a kind of histo-crush on it nonetheless. So much do I love Paradise Lost that my first novel was a re-imagining of Milton's epic, set in the modern day. There were people and angels and all manner of other beasties all living in a second version of Earth. By some artifice people could travel back to the original version of Earth, albeit they couldn't really interact with it or stay there for very long.

Well, I say that was my first novel, it wasn't actually published. And when I say it wasn't published I mean it wasn't finished. Actually “never show more started” might be a more accurate way of putting it. But hey, if I'd ever written a novel, that probably would have been it. Luckily I didn't write it, since it turns out I would've been unknowingly plagiarising Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, itself a modern day version of Paradise Lost full to the brim with curious creatures and parallel worlds.

Although published as three separate works, His Dark Materials isn't so much a trilogy as it is a really long book that separates fairly naturally into three parts. This beginning-middle-end divide usually translates as a divide into interesting-boring-exciting. Or more concisely, the middle usually sucks.

Here I found the central section of the book my favourite part. The opening, Northern Lights is interesting and has some fun characters, but looking back, very little happens in its 350 pages. In contrast, the shorter second part, The Subtle Knife, is bursting with new characters, neat developments, and a frenzy of activity. Things slow down again for the final part, The Amber Spyglass. Here, despite the book's biggest events taking place, things feel somehow more low key. I was actually reminded of the premise of the first Star Wars film: events are transpiring on a galactic scale, yet the story is told from the perspective of two lowly droids. If that had carried on into the rest of the Star Wars trilogy then the effect might have been something like The Amber Spyglass. It works, in a fashion, but does mean the series ends with some slightly cheap-feeling heart string-tugging rather than with the splendour that the novel's vast events seem to call for.

All in all it's a solid and enjoyable story, and the Everyman's Library omnibus edition features a cute addition: “Lantern Slides” sections after each of the three parts giving little snatches that Pullman wrote but never incorporated into the text proper, giving extra little titbits about the plot and characters. show less

I really wanted to love this trilogy. I loved the thought of all this ridiculous controversy with religious nutpeople. While Northern Lights showed some glimpses of everything this story could have been, the rest was just a struggle to read through. Maybe those high hopes just ruined it. Made me hate all those plot holes and that mediocre writing. Although I cannot recommend this book to anyone, I guess all this crazytalk about banning it will just attract all the more people to it, and maybe that in itself IS the best thing this book has going for it. A crappy book inviting some people to think about freedom of choice.