Northern Lights

It didn't actually take me this long to finish the book: I got sick and didn't read for a few days. Once I was reading it was really hard to put down, and I can't believe I didn't read it like ten years ago. Then again, I'm not sure I would've liked it ten years ago: I had a hard time appreciating world building that was Tolkien or Rowling.

Now I'm so here for this shit! Fantasy and steampunk-ish elements in the 1800s? Fuck yeah, I'm here for that. I like the dæmons (translated to "daimon" in Swedish, something that brought the chocolate daim to mind every time I read it), even though my inital reaction when Lyra's changed form was "come on, I thought they were to represent your inner soul or something, having them constantly change is show more stupid" ... only to have it revealed that only dæmons of children do this. As an adult of 26, I totally understood what the fisherguy meant when he told Lyra that at some point she would like for her dæmon to settle for a form. It worked really well.

As for the plot, wow, a lot of things went on, but I thought it was pretty nicely set up. The part with the alternate worlds were much harder for me to accept than anything else (it's a bit cake on cake, as we say in Sweden), but the concept was introduced so early, that I could buy it without any problems. And it seems to play a larger part in the coming books ...

Oh, and the bears were amazing. Loved their names as well, hehe.

Speaking of, the second book hasn't arrived yet and I haven't even ordered book three. A shame. Guess I'll have to watch the movie while waiting, though I hear it is extremely bad ... show less

i first read this in college around when the ill-fated movie adaptation was coming out. i had seen the trailers and was thirsty for more fantasy type stuff, which it turns out was literally the entire cynical motivation for making the movie because they totally lotr-ed it up. the book is actually much more a response to narnia (which itself received the lotr-ification treatment in its film adaptations), but has a much different aesthetic/genre that the movie largely ignores, but we’re not here to talk about the movie rn i’m just setting the context of my first reading.

i was in the middle of reading it when the catholic church & others started calling for boycotts, and that was back during my misguided religious phase so at that show more point i was like “well, fuck.” but i was already in the middle of the book and i was really enjoying it so i kinda shrugged it off & decided that i enjoyed it but i didn't like that the church was the bad guys, and it was ok to enjoy something i disagreed with.

obviously now the anti-church stuff is a feature for me rather than a bug, so i was interested to see how i would feel about the book now with that in mind. and uh yeah, i do love that aspect of the book, very much so, yes. but it’s also so far in the background that a reader could be forgiven for it not being one of their biggest takeaways if they’re not paying close attention? like, by the end of the book it’s pretty fucking obvious that that was the entire point, but that turn happens in literally a line of dialogue at the end of the book (which i fucking love), but it’s not difficult to see in retrospect why even at my most brainwashed (not the fun/kinky kind, the boring religious kind) i was able to shrug it off and enjoy this as a silly little adventure yarn. which btw makes it pretty fucking hilarious that the church was so fragile about it, but whatevs!

but yeah, even though i don’t think it’s actually going to change anyone’s mind, that last interaction between lyra & pantalaimon that i alluded to earlier was everything to me this time. when pan says, “if they [the church] think dust is bad, it must be good!” and i forgot that that point was made that explicit in this book. it’s possible to miss its import if you’re just caught up in the breezy adventure the rest of the book has been, but it just absolutely turns the world upside down. i fucking love it.

also, another thing that hit me on a completely different level this time was this passage:

"his hands, still clasping her head, tensed suddenly and drew her toward him in a passionate kiss. lyra thought it seemed more like cruelty than love, and looked at their dæmons, to see a strange sight: the snow leopard tense, crouching with her claws just pressing in the golden monkey’s flesh, and the monkey relaxed, blissful, swooning on the snow."

“strange sight”? idk man, sounds pretty normal to me.

other things i loved included serafina talking about feeling the starlight & moonlight on her skin. even though it wasn’t particularly foregrounded, all the witchy stuff was wonderful. i also loved iorek byrnison. as if having a magical little animal spirit that was part of yourself & you could talk to & cuddle wasn’t enough, lyra also gets a fucking armored bear king protecting her! what a lucky girl!!

and of course lyra herself was a wonderful protagonist. she’s just so fucking good. strong desire to protecc.

in the category of things i didn’t so much love was all the casual, careless racism. like, don’t get me wrong, this isn’t as bad of an offender as the aforementioned lewis or tolkien books, or a lot of its more direct influences like say the works of jules verne, but it still is rather frustrating all the same.

kinda par for the course for stuffy british adventure stories tbh, but again it’s not like outlandishly racist or anything, just… there’s an undercurrent throughout that i wouldn’t feel right not mentioning.

i also think it’s worth noting that while these books are marketed as y.a., they’re probably, uh, a bit heavy for the average kid? like, some genuinely traumatizing stuff happens!! but also idk kids are a lot more resilient than people give them credit for, i know this wouldn’t have fazed me if i had read it when i was 12, just feels worth mentioning that it gets pretty dang dark.

so yeah, if you can shrug off the fairly commonplace racism of someone who seems like he’s trying his best but is too british not to be casually racist, this is a pretty great read. i find it very easy to get sucked in. lyra is such a great protagonist who you genuinely want to be safe, and the writing style hits that really nice sweet spot where it has a lot of inherent personality that leaps off the page, but it’s also still extremely approachable, which is just the perfect recipe to make something compulsively readable. show less

Oh now this was just precious. The Golden Compass is a kids' book in the Harry Potter vein, where our child protagonist is pulled out of her everyday surroundings into a world beyond her imagination -- a world which is her birthright. Or maybe I should say Harry Potter is in the vein of The Golden Compass, since the latter predates the former, having been published in 1995. While Harry Potter's gimmick is wizardry, The Golden Compass has something more subtle and profound: it's set in an alternate universe, where, among many other differences, each child is born with a "daemon." A daemon is sort of like a witch's familiar -- a cross between a pet and a soul -- and the daemon meme going around LJ is what got me to check this book out in show more the first place. Daemons and other themes are explored in a very adult manner that invites all kinds of what-if explorations of real-world philosophies like existentialism. I actually cried a little last night because I don't have a daemon. You'll understand if you read it. Which you should, because what with the high adventure and the various subtexts and the optimistic tone, it's worth the time. And if the golden compass of the title really existed, I would make it my business to become the best golden compass reader in the universe. show less

I'm a sucker for alternate universes, and His Dark Materials has been in the To Be Read pile for a long time. I've seen the film based on this book, and also the more recent BBC dramatisation. So the plot was known to me. What I wanted to see was the sort of job Philip Pullman made out of the world-building, and also to get a feel for the controversies that accompanied the film (particularly) on its release.

I found the world-building far more detailed and intriguing than I expected. There is considerable detail shown of the world outside Pullman's England, apart from Svalbard; this is slipped effortlessly into the novel. There were a number of things that surprised me about the novel; Lyra is a far more feral child than the screen show more adaptations suggested, and I was also surprised that the novel did not strike me as exceptionally anti-religious. Indeed, we have a Catholic church firmly entrenched in Britain, albeit one with different instrumentalities - we appear to have the Magisterium instead of the Jesuits, for example. In this volume, Pullman doesn't really offer any opinion on the Church; the Magisterium and the General Oblation Board are certainly the baddies, but that's just religious politics. Anyone who believes this book to be anti-religious because it takes a dim view of religious politics has led a very sheltered life.

The setting could do with a little explanation. As an alternate reality, we assume that the story is set in the present day; but the description of the towns and cities, and the technology, suggest a setting more in line with the 1930s. (The film took the fantasy elements further and detached Pullman's world further from our own; the BBC TV adaptation back-dated the setting to something more like the 1950s.) Seeing as the Catholic Church is pre-eminent in this world, this suggests that Pullman is familiar with the Morton Hypothesis, that Catholicism has had a tendency to stifle scientific and technological advancement, and the nations of western Europe only achieved their technological advantages through embracing Protestantism.

Some reviewers have commented on the theme of child abuse in the book. It is only abuse in the terms of the novel - severing children from their daemons, the familiar spirit creatures that accompany everyone in this world - and although this is firmly in the fantasy portion of the work, by the time this is revealed Pullman has built up our understanding of the link between people (especially children) and their daemons so much that the prospect of severing that link is quite abhorrent. The explanation that Mrs Coulter, the sinister figure behind the General Oblation Board and the project to sever children from their daemons, gives Lyra is the justification for all the tortures the strong exercise on the weak "for their own good". Given that this is (or at least, was) a Young Adult book in intention, this illustration of the evils of those with power segregating people into camps and performing experiments on them is clear and no less powerful for being fictional.

Other characters - the leaders of the gyptians, the canal dwellers who spirit Lyra from London to Svalbard, for example - are exceptionally well drawn. Lord Asriel, heroic explorer and Lyra's uncle (we are told) is painted as romantic but distant to start with; accounts from the gyptians reinforce this picture. But things are seldom what they seem. Perhaps the character I personally enjoyed the most was the armoured bear, Iorek Byrnison. "Defend the right to arm bears!" says the t-shirt slogan, and Iorek is the personification (ursunification?) of this.

The gyptians have interesting antecedents. Many of them have Dutch or Greek family names, suggesting a far greater interchange between England and old Europe. The name itself is suggestive of the oral history the Roma people have for themselves. And there are descriptions of the Fens, and the North Sea beyond them, that suggest that the Dutch never assisted in the draining of the Fens in the Restoration period in this reality. The gyptians hold their meetings in a hall in the middle of the Fens, inaccessible on foot, that recalls Viking moot halls. And the North Sea (here, the 'German Sea') is described as shallow, suggesting that the frozen nature of the North lands has locked up a lot of water that in our world made Britain into an island defended by deep and turbulent seas.

So I enjoyed this greatly. But I had to acknowledge that there was little here - beyond the conceit of the daemons - that I had not seen elsewhere. The big comparison I kept making was with Keith Roberts' Pavane, an alternate reality where Elizabeth I was assassinated and the Spanish Armada succeeded in returning England to the Catholic fold. That book pre-dates Pullman's work by 25 years or so; yet I've never had the impression that Pullman has ever been part of the science fiction community. Pullman achieved his status through his work with children's literature, and the plaudits for His Dark Materials arose from there. He himself does not speak of it as fantasy, but instead says it is "stark realism". The acclaim this book and the others in the trilogy have received is very much an expression of the cultural cringe there is in the UK about science fiction and fantasy; other books with similar themes are just as deserving of praise, but don't get it because of their labels. Part of that cultural cringe is authors denying their works the fantasy or SF label. On this, Philip Pullman must be guilty as charged. But that's not going to stop me carrying on reading the series. show less

After a traumatic time with Harry Potter, I've been resisting further forays into kiddy fantasy. I've been the cat who desperately wanted the goldfish, looking at my wet paw in puzzled horror.

But then I got lured into the murky Pullman ocean by the Golden Compass film (it's not a compass, it's an alethiometer, dagnammit!) which was partly filmed in my (mainly) beloved Oxford. Though the brute of a film wasn't all it could have been, some aspects of the story intrigued me. Like Iofur Raknison, I now longed for a daemon of my own. A budgie perhaps.

My fumble into this allegory-laden adventure started well. I wanted to know about Dust and daemons and find out what on earth the mysterious Lord Asriel was up to. I liked Lyra and her youthful show more exuberance, her cheeky foot-stomping attitude. I was even creeped out by the golden monkey.

But somewhere along the line, Northern Lights lost my interest. Maybe the noble polar bears were a step to far. Maybe it was the thick bog of fancy name detail which always goes in one eye and out the other and leaves every tenth word meaningless. Perhaps I should give up reading fantasy all together and stick to Stephen Fry and Danny Wallace. Perhaps, contrary to previous musings, I ++am++ an imaginative failure.

I've been thinking about it.

Something nagged at me all the way through this book, and I've finally figured out what it was. This is a grown-up book with a child protagonist. Far more intellectually demanding than Mr Potter and his merry little wizards, this is a book that touches on the real world and the things that we all wonder about: God, sin, hope and desire. The nature of the universe. And what we get is a through-the-eyes-of-a-child nothing-really-makes-sense outlook. Well, maybe it doesn't. But stop letting the kids steal the limelight and give us grown-ups something to do? Please?

I ++liked++ Northern Lights. I read it all the way to the end and didn't skip any dull bits (there were a few - mainly the polar bears). It confirmed my suspicions that the film neglected huge chunks of good stuff. But that's all I can say. It wasn't the revelation I was hoping for. I still want a daemon though.

Apologies to any polar bears. show less

Looking for clever adventure, exciting writing, action, ideas, a book with a vision? Read Lyra's adventures.

Set in an alternative universe (complete with recognisable place names: Oxford, London, New France, New Denmark, etc) Philip Pullman's 'Northern Lights' tells the story of Lyra, an orphan & her daemon Pantalaimon. Raised by the scholars at Jordan Collage, Lyra terrorises the poor scholars and the Gyptians, and is often fighting with the other children of Oxford. When Lyra hides in the college Retiring Room, and stops her uncle, the impressive Lord Asriel, from being poisoned, she witnesses her uncle's presentation about the mysterious Dust, which unwittingly draws her into a dangerous quest to save the world.

Before being sent show more away to live with the beautiful Mrs Coulter in London to work as her personal assistant, Lyra is given the Alethiometer by the College Master - a compass like object, that measures the truth - which Lyra must learn to read, and which she believes she must take too her Uncle. Meanwhile, there are rumours about disappearing children spreading across the country. Kidnapped by 'Gobblers', the rumours suggest that these children are either being killed or sold to work as slaves in Tartar fire-mines. These kidnappings soon begin to affect Lyra's world, when the Gyptian child Billy Costa and Lyra's friend Roger disappear. But she soon forgets about this when she falls under the irresistible spell of the beautiful Mrs Coulter and her new life of shopping and make-up in London.

However, Lyra soon runs away from Mrs Coulter and London, when she begins to doubt Mrs Coulter's intentions and realises that she is somehow involved with 'The Gobblers'. After she is attacked on the streets and rescued by the Gyptians she learns that the canal-folk are planning to send a rescue party to the North, lead by their king, John Faa and the wise Farder Coram. Although, both Lord Faa and Farder Coram are originally weary of allowing Lyra to join them, her mastery of the Alethiometer means that they soon realise that she will be invaluable to them on their mission. So they begin their journey North where they enlist the help of a panserbjorne called Iorek Byrnison (a talking, armoured bear) and a Texan aeronaut (a hot air balloon pilot), Lee Scoresby, and where Lyra and her friends learn the terrible shocking truth behind 'the Gobblers' and both Lord Asriel's and Mrs Coulter's work.

Although 'Northern Lights' is unapologetically a children's book, it is much more intellectual and provocative than most other popular children's literature it is often compared to, such as Harry Potter. The book has religious and political undertones - Daemons are a visible 'soul', Pullman attacks organised religion, the characters are not black and white; you are never sure whether they are being helpful through altruism or for their own ends. It is also gruesome and violent in places, and Lyra's journey is far more perilous than most. By the time you reach its shocking conclusion you'll be rearing to learn more of Lyra's story.

'Northern Lights' provides a thrilling introduction to Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' trilogy. I read it many years ago, and it is just as captivating on revisitng.
This is often referred to as a cross-over series: an adolescent series which is so good adults do not know whether it is still meant for children. Oh well. To quote the master himself: "If horses, dogs, cats or pigeons could read, they would be welcome to read my books too." show less

I was 100% obsessed with Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass when I was growing up (far more so than Harry Potter), so you best believe that I was super stoked to find out that this gem finally got a proper illustrated treatment. The story, obviously, remains the same complex and magical tale of discovery and adventure, but having illustrations to illuminate the text softens the story somewhat. That’s not to say that Chris Wormell’s illustrations are childish, but more so that they bring a lighter sense to the story in its darker moments. Pullman doesn’t shy away from challenging themes (parental abandonment, illicit government activity, and questioning authority), so while Wormell’s pictures show the story with accuracy, show more their simple woodcut line style and rich palette keep the tone more in line with Lyra’s curiosity, the glow of Dust, and the magic of childhood adventure – regardless of the high stakes. The Grimm’s-esque fairytale inspiration for the narration is strong for all that it is set in a modern and realistic world just a breath away from ours, and Wormell’s woodcut style drawings tread the same careful line of harkening back to a childish innocence with darker undertones. I’m definitely planning on picking up the rest of this illustrated sequence to round out my bookshelf, since this is a perfect pairing! show less