See, I assumed that the mysteries and contradictions of the first book would be resolved in the rest of the trilogy, which made me even more anxious to keep reading. So much for that.
By the end, pretty much everyone and everything is annoying.
I’ve been a fan of HDM for several years. I had heard good things about The Golden Compass and picked it up as a possible gift for a neice. I started reading and found it so engrossing that I inhaled the first volume in a day or two, then rushed out to buy the rest. Fortunately, this was just after the last volume had been published. I would have been very distressed to have had to wait several months for one of the sequels.
I have to admit that I found the conclusion in The Amber Spyglass somewhat confusing, but I just assumed that I wasn’t getting all the meaning and symbolism. Having been so enthralled by the first two volumes, I couldn’t believe that Pullman could be at fault, so the problem must lie in myself. It wasn’t until a friend of mine (who, coincidentally, has written some well-received multi-volume novels himself) made some of the same criticisms of TAM that have been expressed here that I realized that the problem might not be entirely on my side.
Although we’ve been (rightly) looking at some of the shortfalls of the work, I would like to take a minute to praise Pullman, not bury him. What I loved about the whole work was the creation of an alternate world that was believable: familiar at one level, while also strange and wonderful, but in ways that seem to make sense.
The daemons, for instance, seem to me a brilliant (and AFAIK wholly original) concept: an external aspect of your personality that must remain constantly with you, or you suffer and die.
The allusions to Milton and other literary classics provided a depth and subtlety that most popular fiction lacks. I actually re-read Paradise Lost between my first two readings of HDM to better catch the references and parallels.
The characters were well-drawn and interesting, and their emotional journey was absorbing. I found the final parting scene between Lyra and Will to be perfectly heartbreaking, but beautiful nonetheless.
And all of this was set in a story that can only be described as a page-turner. Especially in the first two volumes, the action grabs you by the scruff of the neck and just doesn’t let go. It never plods, and the first time through you never know where it will take you next.
Presumably, none of this comes as news to anyone here, but I just thought I should toss in a few positive notes about the book.
Harry Potter was just getting big at about the time I read HDM, and I had read the first two or three HP books. I find HP far too derivative of earlier writers (Roald Dahl, for instance) and popular culture in general, whereas Pullman is much more original in his conception of a magical world, and much broader in his vision and scope than Rowling. In short, IMO, Pullman makes Rowling look like a formulaic hack.
Can anyone recommend any of Pullman’s other works? I’m slightly abashed to admit that I haven’t read anything else of his.
Oh, and BTW, the movie of The Golden Compass is in pre-production, with Nicole Kidman as Pullman’s choice for Mrs. Coulter.
Sounds like I will be in the minority, but I didn’t really like these books. On the positive side, I thought Pullman’s descriptions of a quasi-Victorian/quasi-scifi world were excellent and original. But the concept of killing children by painfully ripping away their souls remains the most purely evil thing I’ve ever heard of, and I am not entertained by evil in general or tortured children in particular. I think this may have been less disturbing to people who don’t actually believe in the concept of an eternal soul (including perhaps Pullman himself?), but it’s extremely horrifying to those of us who do. So I had the same sort of resentment of Pullman that I had of Ellis after trying to read American Psycho – which was that my mind, emotions, and life were in no way improved by the introduction to my psyche of such disturbing imagery.
I also thought the end of the third book was a bit of a cop-out – the “no matter where we go, we’ll always be together” schmatziness between Will and Lyra – well, no, you won’t, not if the philosopical aethism underlying the rest of the books is the reality of that created universe.
And in the interest of full disclosure, I am a practicing Christian. But I was not uncomfortable with Pullman’s creation of an evil God, because the created deity Pullman painted bore no resemblance to the deity I worship, and therefore IMO could not reasonably be taken as an attack upon that deity, even if Pullman intended it to be one. As a Christian, I was made much more uncomfortable by the idea of subjecting innocent children to a true death of the soul. I read the whole series and think I kept a pretty open mind throughout, but I would not read them again. And I do not consider them children’s books at all.
No. I am an atheist, but as I mentioned above, this gave me nightmares.
I’ve heard this sort of criticism before, and I just don’t get it. I mean, OF COURSE villains do horrible things; that’s why we call them “villains.” None of the characters we’re meant to sympathize or identify with in volumes I or II acts as if the excision process is anything other than the blackest, vilest evil. And I don’t think that Pullman, atheist though he may be, meant to present excision as anything short of monstrous.
(Which still leaves me unable to explain the radical shift in the presentation of Mrs. Coulter in volume iii… except to say that her love for Lyra was still ultimately selfish. Her affection for Lyra was like a little girl’s love for a favorite doll. She wanted to make Lyra into a little version of herself, and she was extraordinarily jealous of her; she’d never have been able to let Lyra love Will. But she was perfectly willing to abuse Lyra in service of molding her into Marisa 2.0, and she was incapable of understanding why Lyra or anyone else would object to that; and she had no capacity to love anyone else to even the minor extent that she loved Lyra.
I have to reboot; more later.
SKALD –
You really don’t get this?
Villany and horror, like so much else in life, are both a continuum and a subjective point of view. Different people will find different things horrifying, and have different set-points at which the distaste/disturbance they feel outweighs whatever else they are receiving from a work of art or craft. There are several reasons I can think of why people would expose themselves to the truly horrifying or, as you put it, monstrous: (1) They don’t find it monstrous at all; (2) they find the entertainment value makes up for the monstrousness; or (3) they find that the work has such other value (as art or historical document or whatever) that the monstrousness either cannot be excised from it, or should be tolerated in it, or both. Personally, I was deeply disturbed by Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, but I felt it was an important work of literature by an important author, and so I tolerated the very graphic violence the author felt was necessary to convey the message in his book. I was deeply disturbed by We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, but I felt a sort of moral obligation to listen to the testimony from Rwanda, no matter how awful it might be.
I didn’t feel the same way about HDM. I felt no moral obligation to read the books, and, after having dutifully read the whole series, I didn’t find them compelling enough or well-written enough to outweigh what I personally considered a singularly horrible premise. Your mileage may vary, which is obviously the point, but I don’t think my POV is either unusual or difficult to understand.
I’ve been lurking, but I thought I’d toss in my vague two cents. I found a lot of the concepts in HDM really interesting- I love the panzerbjorn, the daemons, the golden compass- but as a whole I didn’t really like the series. The first one was pretty good, although very disturbing and the moral ambiguity of the characters made it difficult for me to empathise with any of them. I really wanted to slap Lyra most of the way through the series. She was annoying and bitchy, not sympathetic. As Jodi says, the excision scenes and the tortured children were utterly horrifying. I don’t have a problem with evil portrayed in fiction- I just need some good to balance it out, and Lyra isn’t really good.
I liked The Subtle Knife less- the story just didn’t hang together very well for me, and the science fictiony elements of the different planes somehow didn’t mesh with the fantasy setting/Victorian pseudoscience feel of Compass.
In the third one I thought the whatchamacallums with the wheels, and the whole amber spyglass thing, were just silly and didn’t work. And, upon thinking back, I have no really clear memories of what exactly Dust turned out to be (creativity? angels? innocence?) or why Asriel wanted to mount an attack on Heaven. I found Mrs. Coulter and Asriel’s loyalty switching out of character- they never cared about Lyra before, so why try to save her?
The bit about the joyous release of Lee’s atoms was heavyhandedly preachy in the way Pullman despises in the Narnia books.
The ending was unsatisfying. It was obvious that they were supposed to be Adam and Eve, but what exactly happened? Why didn’t their falling in love/getting it on (ick, Lyra’s 13) seem at all momentous? The final separation was a letdown. It felt incomplete.
I generally re-read children’s fantasy a lot, and I haven’t picked up any of HDM in more than two years, and I only read it once.
Apologies in advance for the rambling nature of this post. I’m trying to answer multiple posters in a single post.
Commie. 
I ADORE Lyra. She struck me as being very much like a real child–which often involves being annoying. Lyra’s duplicity, her irresponsibility, her over-abundance on fantasy were all symptoms of being twelve years old and, for the most part, of having no full-time parental figure to guide and teach her. She reminds me of my youngest niece. I can forgive her her recklessness, even though it leads to Roger’s death, because it’s the recklessness of inexperience and the perceived invulnerability of childhood. And she learns her lesson; contributing to Roger’s death, when she had put so much effort into trying to save him, does change her in an enormous way; she never again believes that she can accomplish anything simply by will.
Jodi, I may have misunderstood you; in fact I’m pretty sure I did. I took you to man that you thought no work of fiction should include horrid things at all – that you thought nothing more dangerous than Curious George getting lost in the park (but the Man in the Yellow Hat being around the whole time) should ever happen. Clearly you didn’t, and though I don’t share your particular view of that scene in GC, I can understand it. I myself have walked out of a few movies that were needlessly squicky for me, so I can see your discomfort.
Also we share a little common ground. I think Pullman meant to show Mrs. Coulter as being unspeakably vile, despite her beauty and charm, by the fact that she not merely countenances but actually originates the excision. But he undercuts himself by trying to make her sympathetic iin AS, which, as people keep saying, is a confused, under-edited jumble of a book. No one–not even the intrusive omniscient narrator–ever CALLS Mrs. Coulter on the utter vileness of her work with the General Oblation Board, just as no one ever calls Asriel on his murder of Roger.
We’ve said before that AS really needed to be split into two volumes, because too much was unexplained. One thing that would have been nice would have been for Lyra & Will to actually be confronted with Asriel and Coulter, and for Lyra to tell others the story of Roger’s murder. I can’t see the Gallivespians remaining quite so adoring of Asriel once they were told of it … because I can’t see Asriel denying that he had committed the crime. If the Gallivespians or one of Asriel’s other lieutenants had broken with Asriel because of his and Coulter’s sociopathy – if someone had pointed out that he was no better than Metatron, just on a smaller scale–that would have gone a long way toward rehabilitating the book for me.
I can’t see this working well. I can’t see a Hollywood production having the nerve to show Roger’s murder, or the true vileness of this fictional church.
It occurs to me that the multiverse of HDM is a Gnostic one. The Authority is in fact a Demiurge–not quite in the sense as described in that link, but definitely an imposter (as is acknowledged in Pullman’s text). This is another problem with Pullman’s world-creation, fascinating and ambitious as it is. By conflating the Protestant and Catholic churches (the last Pope on Lyra’s world is John Calvin) and by going so far afield from a theology any Christian would espose, he creates too obvious a straw-man. He’d have done better to make the Church of Lyra’s world more similar to the real-world Catholic Church, because as written he gives anyone who reads it an easy out. “Well, of course the church in Lyra’s Oxford is evil. 'Taint my church, though, so who cares.”
You know, it occurs to me that I may be coming off as a Pullman hater in this thread, and I most definitely am not. He’s bloody brilliant, and as a subcreator, he’s my model as a writer nearly as much as Tolkien is. I’m perfectly comfortable with saying that Pullman is a giant in his field. I just wish he’d taken an extra year or two with AS, and that his editor had been firmer. He really needed the likes of Nan Talese.
He lost me there too. This was the point where Will and Lyra stopped acting like children. Both of them had too much awareness of the passage of time and the necessity of being fair to future lovers to be plausible 12-year-olds. I can see them understanding why it was necessary to be separated from each other; well, I can see Will understanding it, anyway; Lyra was so much younger than he (in maturity if not actual age). But I can’t see Lyra, in particular, understanding that they would have to be careful not to unduly hurt the persons they ended up marrying in the future. I think it more likely that Lyra would insist on staying with Will, and that Will and Mary Malone would have to force it upon her. Of course, for that to work there would have to be someone from Lyra’s world with them. Another job for Iorek.
A couple of things occur to me here. First, what vexes me about the excision is that there’s insufficient payback to the General Oblation Board for it. If Lee Serafina Pekkala, say, had vocalized the vileness of their actions–after beating the holy crap out of them, of course–I’d have been happier.
Second: It’s off-topic, but it seems to me that in some ways, the murder of a conscious, sentient being who DOESN’T have an immortal soul is, in fact, worse than the murder of one who does. Manny makes this point in Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, which he protests a plan to kill the living computer Mike. If Mike has no soul, then destroying his body and mind sends him to oblivioon rather than merely changing his metaphysical location.
Aaaannndddd I’m with this post.
At the risk of going off on a tangent, because I’m not sure how relevant it is to HDM, I can think of several other reasons people might expose themselves to the truly horrifying: (4) catharsis; (5) a desire to desensitize oneself to, or fortify oneself against, the monstrous; (6) a belief that the world (or parts of it) really is horrible and we should face up to it; or (7) a desire to see good triumph over evil, which is more satisfying the more evil is seen to be. Or maybe this is relevant to HDM after all; maybe part of the problem is that Pullman doesn’t show us a convincing enough Good to defeat his horror.
I loved the first two books and read them a few times each when they were first published. I wasn’t a huge fan of the Spectres, but mostly they were great books. (I have always read everything by Pullman and still do.) I am quite a devout Christian, but Pullman’s militant atheism doesn’t generally bug me unless he lets it get in the way of the story.
I was so disappointed by The amber spyglass that I have not read the trilogy since. It just sits there on my shelf, like a toothache. The other two had problems, but were overall just wonderful–the third one ruined it for me. Some of the problems, from the top of my head in no particular order:
–Lyra goes from being a real character to a shadow of her former self. She becomes a vehicle for Pullman’s agenda.
–I feel that the agenda warps the story; it takes over and he forces the story to bend to serve it. It’s very heavy-handed, far more so than Narnia ever was.
–Mrs Coulter, one of the most frightening villains ever (second only to her terrifying monkey), gets warped too.
–The end is stupid, IMO. He tries really hard to romanticize the wonderful fate of becoming atoms, but it doesn’t ring true. (I don’t mind the eternal separation of Will and Lyra, though–although it does give the lie to certain of his statements about the wrongness of physical self-sacrifice.)
I recently read a collection of essays: Navigating the Golden Compass: Religion, Science and Daemonology in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, edited by Yeffeth. Some of the essays are very interesting and good, and I was happy because two of them articulated my thoughts so well. Others are lame. But I would recommend picking up the book and seeing what you think. Should be at the library.
OK, well, he doesn’t write fantasy as a rule. He likes adventurous historical fiction and telling you that you should be a socialist and an atheist. Here is a list of the most famous titles:
The Sally Lockhart trilogy is probably his most well-known work pre-HDM. It consists of:
*The ruby in the smoke
The shadow in the north
The tiger in the well
*and a fourth spin-off, The tin princess.
These books are set in Victorian England, and involve lots of adventure, conspiracy, political maneuvering, and some preaching for socialism on the side. Although I am annoyed by some elements that are IMO too obviously anachronistic, they are good yarns, rather in the tradition of The prisoner of Zenda, and my favorite is the fourth one. And also the scene where someone falls through a cellar hole into a bricked-over medieval plague pit (the sort of thing that only happens in London). These are teen-level books.
He has also written several books for older children in the last few years, which are often scary and exciting historical adventures:
Clockwork: good read, a Germanic-style fairy tale (like Hoffman and so on).
Count Karlstein: actually one of his first novels, reprinted–set in Switzerland in the early 1800’s, the evil Count has promised to sacrifice his niece to the Demon Huntsman, so they have to escape and adventure ensues.
I was a rat!: this is a good one. The mishaps and adventures of Roger, who appears one day at the cobbler’s door, saying only, “I was a rat.” He is indeed ratty in his habits…
Spring-heeled Jack: another old one. Victorian adventure!
The firework-maker’s daughter: your basic tale of a girl who wants to be something exciting instead of doing girl stuff. She wants to make fireworks and sets out on adventure to prove herself.
Hope that helps. Enjoy!
It’s really in The Subtle Knife that the diminuation of Lyra begins. She goes from being this brave (albeit reckless) imaginative, charmingly impudent heroine to Will’s sidekick. As much as I love Will, I hated seeing her diminished so, though she was never really just a shadow of her Compass self, in my opinion.
Oh, I agree with you about The subtle knife, but I loved Will and so didn’t mind so much. Neither of them gets to be as real in the last one. I do think that Will’s characterization in the second book is one of the great things about the trilogy, though.
I still think Pullman is a brilliant writer though. His prose is exquisite, his dialogue is beautifully crafted, and some of the scenes in the books are completely indelible - too many to mention, but anything with Iorek Byrnison {especially his scenes with Will}, the death of Lee Scoresby, Lyra’s rescue of Tony Makarios and Iorek’s chiding of the Gyptians for their cowardice, Mary Malone telling how she lost her faith…
I think that’s why the horrifying parts are really horrifying - they’re meant to be, and Pullman can really put it across just how evil the General Oblation Board is. This isn’t just some abstract Dark Lord in a spiky helmet seeking to conquer the world on general principle; these people - ordinary people - are clinically torturing and mutilating children, and they believe that what they’re doing is right. Pullman can pull off evil in a way that Lewis and Tolkien couldn’t: the only fantasy writer to touch him for this is Mervyn Peake.
If only, if only he’d had an editor who’d made him take his time to rewrite and expand the books so that they meshed together better, they would have been untouchable as a series: as it is, the verdict is brilliant but flawed.
I haven’t read Pullman, though after reading this thread I just might. Anyway, something Lewis can definitely do is creepy if not evil. There’s a scene in one of the Narnia books where the characters are travelling through some kind of large hall with creepy statues, or something like that at least. I remember it being very unsettling.
There’s a scene in his unfinished story The Dark Tower where it describes some kind of throne. It was one of the creepiest descriptions I’ve ever read. Same for his characterization of Satan in Perelandra.
Well, I’m a big fan of Lewis, but Pullman’s golden monkey is one of the scariest most terrifying things around, ever. shudder
That would be The Magician’s Nephew, where Polly and Digory visit the ruined city of Charn, and walk past a tableau of all the previous rulers, who begin as looking friendly and kind and slowly progress from proud to haughty to cruel. culminating in Jadis, later to become The White Witch. That’s not a bad scene, for Lewis.
More Pullman nitpicks: how did Mrs Coulter manipulate the Spectres into doing her bidding? OK, she’s smart, she’s beautiful, she’s ruthless, and she’s able to bend most people to her will, but she doesn’t have any particular powers beyond her treacherous wiles: the Spectres are just mindless incorporeal horrors who drift around eating ripe souls - they can’t be spoken to, let alone bargained with. Come to that, how did Mary Malone and Father Gomez waltz through the world of Cittagazze untouched - did they also have magic knives which enabled them to cut holes in the plot?
- Fully developed, sympathetic main characters.
I know there are those who will disagree, but I found the main character to be rather flat, and what little effort was put into character development made her very unlikable, and not very childlike to boot (sort of like Ender, another most decidedly unchildlike child character. At least Ender had other redeeming characteristics). Annoying isn’t enough to make a child character realistic. I disagree with dangermom: she didn’t become a vehicle for Pullman’s views, she was from page 1 and it was clear that’s what her purpose always was.
“A wizard did it.”
In Mary Malone’s case, I think it was implicit that the rebel angels were assisting her, though this could have and should have been better explained. As for Mrs. Coulter, her ability to command the Spectres vexes me as well, though not quite for the same reason it irks you: I can see saying that she is preternaturally persuasive, but in that case NO ONE should be able to keep her captive.
::growling:: Hey! She has a name, you know!
I didn’t say that Lyra Silvertongue was realistic because she was annoying; I said that part of her being realistic WAS her being so annoying… and she wasn’t always. I still say there was more good in Lyra than bad.