The Amber Spyglass

now this is more like it.

this story is bigger. the world feels massive and complicated. you don’t know what everyone’s going to do before they do it. i think what impresses me the most, and what is the most welcome change from its predecessor, is that it fucking takes its time. the book manages to convey the breathless pace of a final, desperate fight for survival & freedom without feeling like it’s in a hurry. it feels very in control, very measured, and like it gives everything that happens a real chance to breathe despite the fact that so much shit is happening.

i do think lord asriel & mrs. coulter’s redemption arcs are a little too easy. and i am giving serious side-eye to the fact that the book (justifiably) harshes on mrs. show more coulter quite a bit while basically never really grappling whatsoever with the fact that lord asriel killed a fucking child. like, it just literally never comes up. so that’s… awkward.

i think it’s fucking wild that catholics get so up in arms about these books considering how fucking nothing the allegorizing in them is. like, yeah, this one does specifically mention “the swiss guard” which is the most overt reference to the fact that the church in lyra’s world is clearly a vastly more powerful version of the catholic church that maintained the overt political authority they had in the middle ages rather than having to get by with being wealthy landowners like they are today. but just. idk man, it’s still so possible to imagine someone reading this without even noticing that it’s anti-church. so getting all upset about it & demanding boycotts just comes off as the most fragile shit ever imo.

on that note, the cosmology of this world is a bit lacking for my tastes. like, i ended up agreeing with what my partner said about the second book that just having the entire conflict be between spicy atheists & spicy christians, where even seemingly powerful outsiders like the witches ultimately end up deriving all their shit from the same boring source is just a bit disappointing.

i also completely agree with him that it’s pretty annoying that pullman just had to go with a downer ending. like, i admittedly did actually get pretty genuinely emotional when lyra & will realized they were going to have to be separated. it was very well-written, and in a limited amount of time (considering the sheer amount of other shit the book had to get through, seriously this thing was massive) the book did manage to make me care quite a bit about their relationship even though i knew where things were going from the vague memories of previous reading.

what really puts this book over the top for me, though, is mary’s story in the chapter “marzipan.”

you know when a story has That Scene? the one where you could pull it out of the larger story and, standing completely on its own, it would still be just absolutely stunningly good? and if you did pull it out of the larger body it was from, that larger body would just suddenly be drastically less special? i’m thinking of, like, valerie page’s diary in v for vendetta. this is that scene for me.

the way mary told her story just made me smile so much. it’s just… it’s so intimate, and it’s so tender. it really emphasizes the literal sweetness, the playfulness that comes along with love. it’s just some truly incredible writing, i’m really not sure what else to say.

and i guess that’s kind of what it comes down to with these books. like, there are plenty of things about them i don’t like. but they’re just so damn well-written. i think i’ve reached a point in my life where i’m comfortable saying that i’d rather spend my time reading things that more directly appeal to me, but i’m still glad i revisited these to see if they held up at all, and discovered that they mostly do. show less

What Philip Pullman has done here is to write a full blown, unashamed genre novel to conclude 'His Dark Materials' (even if he'd deny it). Lord Asriel is holed up in an Adamant Tower, there are battles between zeppelins and gyrocopters, there are tiny people with poisoned spurs who ride dragonflies, there's some real science-fictional world-building with alien elephants on wheels, thought-directed flying machines and a DNA bomb. It may not be certain quite which genre it is, fantasy or science fiction, but it's definitely genre. Let no-one tell you otherwise.

In the meantime, we have all the apparatus of the previous two novels carried forward: the daemons, Dust, the Church militant and the intercision devices. Marisa Coulter plays a show more large part in this book; her motivations become clearer. Will and Lyra journey to the Land of the Dead, where things are changed.

In an afterword, Pullman says that he has taken ideas from every book he's read: certainly, whilst reading, I kept connecting the story with other ideas, facts and events that I'd come across in my life. That shows that I was never this book's intended audience; if I were 13 or 14, there would be so many new ideas in this book that I might be astonished. Instead, as an adult, I kept nodding to Philip Pullman in acknowledgement.

In classifying this novel as genre, I'm also drawing on that same experience. I can think of a number of genre novels from genre writers that cover a lot of the same ground; the difference is that many readers will not have come across these other writers, and 'literary' critics would most likely dismiss those writers as mere hacks. Well, that's their problem. As subjects for a 'young adult' novel, life and death and love and loss and getting along with other people are important themes, and this book tackles those things perfectly well. Ultimately, the book is about trying to get young people to recognise what life is like: people are sometimes neither good nor bad, stuff happens, people we love pass on, and other people we've never met turn out to be full of good things like honour and generosity and curiosity and ingenuity.

The BBC/HBO television dramatisation hasn't got as far as 'The Amber Spyglass' yet; part of me kept wondering "How are they going to tackle that?" at various points in the book. I was now irrevocably locked into visualising the characters in the book as the actors from the dramatisation; not a bad thing, though it did make me raise an eyebrow at the love between Will and Lyra because, as I said in a previous review, in the dramatisation they are played by slightly older actors and that adds a degree of sexual tension to the story that the bare words of the novel would not support. Pullman's anti-clericalism is given full play in this book: the Church are definitely the Bad Guys here, waging war and sending out an assassin. The assassin is dealt with almost off-handedly, almost by accident; this might seem like a cop-out, but it's more believable than if there had been a show-down between a professional killer and two children.

Overall, then, a worthwhile conclusion to the trilogy, but perhaps not as ground-breaking as some give it credit for. Pullman brings all his threads together and delivers a book rich in life's lessons. show less

A return to form after the somewhat disappointing middle book, Pullman's conclusion benefits from a return to the tone of the first book. I'm still less than enthralled by Will, and I wish that the love story between him and Lyra could have happened without making her so much more passive than the girl I found so charmingly irreverent in the first book. But at its best, it reminds me of Madeleine L'Engle.

The book thrives on the strength of Pullman's vision. Having crafted such an intriguing world in The Golden Compass, he manages to create other universes, each completely unique, yet thematically tied together. The same threats manifest in each universe in different ways, while the same underlying magic manages to find a distinct show more expression appropriate to the particular rules of each world.

Of course, there are nits worth picking. The conclusion was a little weak; the titular Spyglass seemed boring in contrast to the wonders of the Alethiometer and the Knife. Nevertheless, Pullman's meditations on religion, science, and the perils and wonders of growing up were more than intriguing enough to keep me interested. My biggest gripe would be that there seems to be a fourth book, which seems completely unnecessary, given how completely the author manages to tie up his plots and themes. show less

This is the last in the trilogy that I had started late last year, and my goodness did it affect me. This one seemed a bit longer than the previous two, and I suspect that’s because it manages to go around and tie up almost all the lost ends from the two previous stories. I love big, universe-ending showdowns that get into metaphysics and really explore the foundations of worldbuilding, and this had tons of it. The book spends ample time in about four or five different worlds and explores they way each of them work, and how they work together. I was surprised to find that the main antagonists of the entire series, Lyra’s parents, and then ultimately the Authority and his protege, Metatron, don’t get a huge send off or show down. show more They are all dealt with and do their part, but the book doesn’t linger on punishing them or making them “see the light” in any way. I think this was the right way to go about dealing with them, as it doesn’t dwell on the suffering they’ve caused others or encourage hatred in any way.

The rest of the book is so surprisingly sweet that I was found myself quite emotionally involved in it. I was worried that it would get creepy at some point because of the adult themes it deals with, but everything is wholesome and written in such an uplifting way. I really, really liked the conclusions to each of the character’s story arcs and was very satisfied upon finishing everything.
There are a few other books that seem to explore the world that was created here--there is much more to explore, I’m sure, but I don’t know if I’ll go back and read them. While I found the ideas really fascinating, I kind of don’t want to go back and feel like the character’s stories aren’t ended, and getting emotionally involved in a book is pretty exhausting anyway. Maybe at some point in the future, but not any time soon. show less

Final volume in the His Dark Materials trilogy, a children's fantasy trilogy built around the (Gnostic) notion of a War Against God. The fact that such a thing ever achieved a moderate success on the shelves of American booksellers strikes me as so profoundly improbable that Pullman earns points just for pulling it off; that goes double when you also consider that this book also features two heroically pair-bonded male angels and features a young girl's sexual awakening as a major plot point. But to focus on the anti-Narnian qualities on display here is to overlook the sheer strength of Pullman's prose and storytelling craft. In this volume, these strengths are most evident in Pullman's sequences of genuine terror (the passage into the show more Land of the Dead) and heart-rending tragedy (the parting of lovers). Heavy stuff, but Pullman is right to not flinch from confronting children with emotionally weighty material: it dignifies them as fully human. show less

"Random House Children's Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read."

After reading that on the title page, I knew I was in for some fun! In 2008 my book club read the first book in this trilogy, The Golden Compass, because we heard it was the atheist's answer to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe series by C. S. Lewis. Really we didn't feel there was anything too earth-shattering in The Golden Compass, but bible thumpers probably had a special book burning for The Amber Spyglass, my favorite in the series.

A few of my favorite lighter fluid moments:
Gay Angels!
A nun who leaves the church to become a scientist!
The discovery that there is no heaven, but a sad purgatory-esque land to go to when we die!

I heard show more matches striking after quotes like this one:
I used to be a nun, you see. I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn't any God at all and that physics was more interesting anyway. The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all.

Don't get me wrong; some of my favorite people are Christians. It's just nice to know that there's something out there for everyone! I, too, support the First Amendment and celebrate the right to read! show less

This book just turned into one of my favourite reads ever. Not only did it have a story that made me fly away into another world for many hours, I became great friends with the characters, and I feel broken hearted from having to be separated from them as the book ended. I was particularly impressed with everything about the death, I had never seed anyone looking at it in this way before. The way death is portrayed is unique and personal to Philip Pullman, I feel that he truly searched for a long time for what death means to him, and he found his own path. As for Pullman's religiosity, even though I am a religious person myself, it did not bother me at all, on the contrary. What he criticises is just the unhealthy an inauthentic ways of show more being spiritual, in a way that we don't think for ourselves and search for easy answers provided by power hungry institutions. I am not interested in being spiritual that way. I believe that each one of us has to find our own path, and be authentic, and Pullman found something deep and meaningful for him and put it in this book. I value his perspective on existence, which made me grow and opened new horizons for me. All in all, this book became a great friend of mine, and I feel I will re-read it from time to time. show less