His Dark Materials: The Subtle Knife

After possibly going over some heads with the first book in this series, Pullman came back with a much more direct adventure story. Though the story of The Subtle Knife does become a high-flying Church-bashing crusade once again toward the end, it is for the most part a fairly straightforward (and of course quite well-written) children’s book, give or take a degree of violence and gore to which some younger audiences may not be as drawn.

Overall, I did not appreciate this book much less than I appreciated its predecessor in this series. There were some points in which the subtle craft that was so delicately woven throughout The Golden Compass seemed to have been forgotten in favour of a much more obvious sort of exposition. And also, there was no sexy polar bear to crush on. Though I would have been happy without it, the parallels that were drawn between our world and Lyra’s helped to clarify precisely what the author intended to mean in the first book, and gave some indication of what we readers might expect in the third.

My final verdict on the matter is that while this book is not quite as wonderful as the first in the series, this is still a marvelous trilogy and I’m glad that it has been written out.

His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass

Was Philip Pullman really never inclined to be a mathematician?

Plot and character development aside — which were quite well-executed — Pullman seems to keep true to his philosophies. Obnoxiously moralistic stories are certainly not my cup of tea, and The Golden Compass manages to avoid this trap. A book that strikes a balance between an unwavering sense of “right and wrong” and a delightfully subtle delivery is a rare find. (At no point in this story did I feel the author’s sense of self-righteousness drilled into my head. In fact, it was precisely this kind of thing that seemed to contribute to most of the primary antagonist’s abhorrability.)

This book was a great read. But so was Harry Potter, right? What makes this one different from the run-of-the-mill above average fantasy adventure novel is Pullman’s light mathematical touch. Perhaps more central to my enjoyment of this story than its slick execution (plot-wise) is this simultaneously well-structured and creative force that courses through the entire story. It’s hard to deconstruct this novel and find any faults in its logic. Sure, there wasn’t anything in there that was particularly breath-taking, mathematically speaking, but then, it’s a popular fantasy novel; I wouldn’t expect there to be. There was just a very delicate something-or-other that I took for a private appreciation, on Philip Pullman’s part, of the intricacies of logic and probability.

In short, The Golden Compass (or Northern Lights, if you’re not in the US) is a soft and elegant tapestry, interweaving logic, structure, passion, and philosophy. I’d recommend it to anybody who appreciates such things.