How about Lyra’s parents sacrificing themselves to kill the Big Bad? How is that NOT victory through self-sacrifice - yea, even martyrdom?
It doesn’t change the fact that Mrs. Coulter is a bitch and Lord Asriel the son of one.
That’s what annoyed me the most about the series. Asriel murdered Lyra’s friend at the end of book one, and not only did he never pay for his crime (and no, his death doesn’t count), it was never even brought up. As for Mrs. Coulter, she had her big epiphany and all, but her guilt was all about being a bad mother - nothing about those pesky human experiments.
Damn skippy. As I think I said in an old thread someone else linked to upthread (and which I, being I, am too lazy to link to now), I was dying for Asriel to talk about Lyra as he did in front of Iorek Byrnsion, so Iorek could rip his arms off.
Another thing that bugs me about HDM is that, like Lord of the Rings, it IS genuinely too short. It’s the third book that really goes off the rails, and I have thought ever since reading it for the first time that its problems were bascially problems of pacing. If The Amber Spyglass had been divided into two books rather than three–and if he had taken (or been allowed to take) the time to write it properly, it would rank higher in my estimation.
And just so I don’t go an entire post without mentioning Professor Lewis, I’ll add that, even though he didn’t begin Con with the intent of writing a seven-book series, he was right on target in deciding how long each indivdual volume and the entire series should be. I cannot say the same of Pullman, obviously.
I agree with your summation of both series, Skald. I’m one of the adults who reread CoN for the nostalgia factor, but also for their place in the development of fantasy literature and the fact that they’re darn good stories. Although I’m not really a fan of The Last Battle: too preachy and depressing.
I read HDM about a year ago and I kept thinking I was too old for the series because its flaws kept jumping out at me. I loved The Golden Compass because of Lyra’s world. It was interesting. It was a fascinating divergence from our own world. He should have kept the whole series there. I was unbelievably disappointed when I picked up The Subtle Knife and found it set in our world plus a world so boring even the characters didn’t want to live there. And then The Amber Spyglass was just…inconsistent is the best word, for all the reasons described above. (I did like how Lyra and Will killed God, though. It was so casual. “Who’s this old guy?” “I dunno.” poof)
A lot of my problems with the last two books came from Will as well. He was so bloody dull and he made Lyra dull too. As for the mulefas, I spent more time trying to figure out how their feet worked than I spent paying attention to their role in the plot.
When I reread CoN, it’s not strictly for the nostalgia. Dawn Treader is a wonderfully amusing read; Magician’s Nephew was a great comfort to me during my mother’s final illness; and Silver Chair (which I didn’t like as a child) has surprising depth to it.
I’ve never read Pullman & don’t really care to, but I have read a bit of Lewis, & I’m with Thudlow here. Lewis makes a lot of arguments for Xtianity. Some are hugely attractive if not outright compelling. Some fall pathetically flat. I can appreciate his argument & still say I’m not convinced of monotheism. I suppose if I were a Christian, I might appreciate that his argument for the Trinity is uninspired (in more ways than one) but still substantially agree with it. (Personally, I found the fact that Jack of all people was utterly unconvincing to me of the Trinity a supporting argument for its nonexistence, but that’s not strictly logical…)
It’s hard to compare - I read CoN as a child, and it’s impossible for me to read them again for the first time as an adult. Too much of my reading of them now is colored by previous readings.
I read “Golden Compass” as an adult and hated it so much, I didn’t even want to read the other two books. That so many people think the follow ups were worse than the first doesn’t inspire me to ever try them again.
Outside of the underlying themes; Pullman’s world sucks. I wanted to go to Narnia, hang out with the Pevensies (if not be Queen Lucy) and the other assorted humans and non-human characters running around the story. Lyra, on the other hand, is a horrid character of a child whom I wanted to die or at least wander out of the book, never to be read again (not even remotely realistic. The kids I knew when I was a kid or was around as an adult through some of my volunteer work were nowhere near as awful as she was). And the world they were trapped in was awful. In Pullman’s universe, no one could change or grow or hope. People become fixed and set in their ways at puberty. And that’s it. You may as well stop right there because who you are at 14 is who you are until death, and no one can escape their fate. That isn’t somewhere I want to live or be. Also his imagined institutions were stupid (school, church, government, the extent in which they crossed over, all stupid). They were organized, controlled, and commissioned in ways that didn’t work logically or even illogically but in the recognizable way that humans sometimes work illogically. That he spent so much energy arguing against such a dumbass world was annoying, he built a straw man and burned it. Um, good for him? Plus, it was inconsistent, which annoys me. IIRC, the way the “compass” worked changed at least 3 times in that first book. I don’t mean that the characters understanding of it changed, or that different circumstances made it behave in different ways. But that as a plot device, it did exactly what the author needed it to do at various times and those things were in contradiction with each other. And instead of rewriting so that it could become a coherent whole, he just left it there. And it wasn’t just the compass, it was a couple of other things in the book that magically got new powers that were inconsistent with their old ones because Pullman had again written himself into a corner.
Maybe if I read CoN for the first time as an adult, I’d have the same disdain/hatred for it. But I don’t think so. Back to the underlying themes - Pullman is arguing against something while Lewis is arguing for. I think that might set the tone for how they wrote the books and how I respond to them.
While daemons are one of my favorite ideas ever, I find the farther in time I get from having read HDM the more unpleasant my memories of the books are.
At the same time, the older I get, the less Narnia appeals. But if you told me I had to take either Narnia or HDM with me to a deserted island, I’d choose Narnia. The thought of rereading HDM is just incredibly unappealing.
Can you be more specific, for those who, like me, haven’t read the book in several years?
It occurs to me that the daemon-free will thing is not so clear cut as some people think. Take Lee Scoresby: his rabbit demon does not seem at all suitable for a warrior or a aeronut…and yet there it is.
I don’t think that daemons necessarily represent what a role assigned to a person so much as they are expressions of that persons personality in basic ways–perhaps in ways that are repressed.
I still think HDM is good in many places, just not in aggregate. But its flaw to me is that the universe it creates is so incredibly depressing. Narnia, Middle-earth, Oz, Earthsea–those are all joyous places, places you’d want to visit even if you could not stay. Fall into any of the Earths accessible via the subtle knife, and your first thought is to find a window out.
The thing about the alethiometer is that it is the most truest and dangerous sort of magic: that is, it is a supernatural force dependent on the whim of supernatural forces who have their own agenda. The alethiometer works because the fallen angels are supplying information to Lyra through it, and of course they have their own agenda. That is why it stops working so easily for Lyra once the quest is over: they know longer need her, and thus withdraw their “grace.”
When I write “truest & ost dangerous,” by the way, I do so to differentiate the alethiometer from the subtle knife. The latter is more an artifact of engineering than of enchantment: it works as it does because of the laws of physics, not because of the intervention of any sapient entity.
I assume that’s explained in later books - because as it happens in the first book, it merely comes across as bad writing.
I was mostly explaining how I read the alethiometer’s workings.
No explanation is given in Northern Lights/The Golden Compass, except that Dust is involved in its workigns. In the second book of the series, The Amber Spyglass, Lyra meets a scientist from “our” world who is investigating dark matter (which is what Dust is) and it’s clear that the fallen angels are both the products of Dust and the means by which the alethiometer garners its information; they are influencing Lyra to further their own agenda (although Pullman never puts it quite that way), which is why she can “instinctively” read the alethiometer when others must study for decades to gain a fraction of her speed and skill. At the end of the third book, after the quest is done, Lyra’s ability to so easily read the compass disappears, and she is told that she will have to study for many years to recreate it and that she will likely never regain her earlier facility. The word “grace” is specifically used.
You’re right that Pullman is inconsistent. I don’t think he thought his world through as thoroughly as he might have, because, frankly, the alethiometer, if it’s used intelligently under the conditions he sets, is a horrible device to have in a story. I mean, hell–if I had such a device, and Lyra’s talent at using it, and were on such a quest as she understakes in Northern Lights, I’d be using it first thing in the morning, EVERY morning, and regularly throughout the day, just to say “Is there anything dangerous about to happen in the next few hours?” and 'what is the best question I can ask you?" Not to mention “Is Lord Asriel my father?” Since Pullman can’t have her doing that, he turns her into an idiot.
That said, I cheered when she told her off father at the end of the first book. It was the healthiest thing she ever did.
Oddly, I had a cleric in D&D (who specialized in Divinations) do exactly that- cast a Divination spell every morning right after prayers. The DM learned to run with it and used it to guide us into cool adventureing hooks, etc.
Also, Uncle Andrew & Jadis in Magician’s Nephew both make a great send-up of hubris. (Since my current delusions of self-importance are such that I am currently turning into a weird mishmash of Robespierre & Attila, I think it’s time I reread it.)
The Silver Chair, ah yes. The Emerald Witch really creeped me out as a kid. That one got under my skin in a special way. At the time, I was looking for allegorical meaning under the misapprehension that the stories were really subtle allegories (after all, wasn’t the first one the Gospel, sorta?) & that was–interesting.
In thinking about the books and the worlds, I realized that the only other books where a little distance has created a real revulsion for me is Thomas Covenant. I’m just generally icked out (to use a scientific term) by the Covenant books, though I enjoyed them while reading them. To return to them now would be impossible.
I think it is at least partly to do with what you’re saying about the nature of the worlds. I’m not keen on gloom and despair, and there’s a level of underlying cruelty and horror that both Donaldson and Pullman seem able, and willing, to channel.
I never made it past Lord Foul’s Bane. The only way I’d ever consider that book again is if two girls in bed read it to me.
See, I don’t have a problem with Donaldson in that regard. Too many fundamentally decent secondary characters.
Now China Mievelle, OTOH…