A few weeks ago, I finished the third volume of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Four months ago, I noted that I had never heard of this author or the books, despite their presence in the final 21 books in the BBC’s Big Read. Turns out Lord of the Rings ended up #1, but His Dark Materials ended up third, right behind Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. And, if I’m reading the copyright correctly, the series wasn’t even finished until 2000. Maybe Pullman benefited from being fresh in people’s minds, rather than overshadowed by history?
Anyway, knock one more off the life list, with umpteen millions left to go. My mother was kind enough to give me the boxed set for Christmas. I read all three in January: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass.
The biggest surprise to me, who knew nothing of author or novels, was that these are books written for young adults. The heroes are adolescents, and the mix of fantasy and science and coming-of-age moments opens up in vivid, clear terms intended for young eyes. For all that, these are very good reads even for an adult. I preferred the first two volumes to the third, but I was turning pages late at night even for the last book. These are written for young adults in the same way that the Narnia series or Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles… which means that while they may resonate more fully with an adolescent, everyone can find something to latch on to in the story.
I don’t know if the first book, The Golden Compass, was the best read because it was the best story or because it’s the introduction to most of the characters who will carry us through the trilogy. I just know that thinking back through all three, I was most captivated by this one. Iorek Byrnison, one of the armored bears of Svalbard, is certainly my favorite soul spinning through these tales, and he’s most prominent in this first volume. Yes, I did write armored bear. That’s hardly the oddest visual in these books, but one that I enjoyed the most.
Note: throughout the books, there is a lot of talk about daemons, an incarnation, it seems, of the soul/conscience/inner voice we all have. In the books, the soul often has an animal shape: that’s your daemon. However, every time I saw that word, all I could think of was the computer science definition, which is certainly not the intended reference. If you read a list of definitions, you’ll find “One’s genius; a tutelary spirit or internal voice” somewhere in the list, and you’ll see that this is commonly a British spelling of demon. Being American, though, I was distracted by the odd use of a Unix term in the middle of a novel not written by Neal Stephenson.
Back to the to-be-read pile for what’s next…