I've been meaning to post about this for a couple months. I read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy for the third time, at the beginning of the year, then thought about the books a lot, then had conversations with friends at work, and thought some more and meant to blather here about them, but there was television and apathy and so I didn't get around to that until now. Starting with The Golden Compass:
The problem with reading something more than once is that you can start looking too closely at how a book is put together. This is a problem with The Golden Compass because in some ways it's very formulaic. The structure almost feels as if Pullman married a novel writer's manual to The Golden Bough. You don't mind, though, because Pullman's tricks are so awesome: villains who want to steal kids' souls, in a world in which you can see your soul in the form of a tiny cuddly animal; a heroine whose special skill is telling lies really enthusiastically; plus, almost gratuitously, there's a really scary talking bear. Of course there is. Even reading this stuff a third time, I found myself having that reaction Quentin Tarantino is promising us from Grindhouse: a mix of disbelief, horror and delight: "That one bear just ate the other bear's heart. And this is a kids' book. Awesome!"
Iorek Byrnison, as a character, is actually almost too good: he doesn't throw the novel off balance, quite, although at some points he does run away with the story (at one point literally), but his infrequent appearances in the sequels are kind of a problem. Even though he maybe doesn't belong in them, you wish he was there, because everything's better with a talking bear that kills people.
At some point, I'm going to have to talk at length about gender and parents in His Dark Materials. Sorry. Here, though, I want to note that both Mrs Coulter and Lord Asriel come really close to doing the same thing to Lyra -- at different points in the novel, each one is faced with an opportunity to separate Lyra from her daemon, Pantalaimon, and each one sort of rejects that opportunity.
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