Now that I’ve had a bit more time to write, you might guess that I’ve also had a bit more time to read. I have, and that has allowed me to finally finish His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman. This one has been on my “in progress” list for a while, so I’m glad to finally move on to reading something else. Though one might want to dedicate a post to each book of the trilogy, I’m only going to be writing this one post covering all three books. There will be minor spoilers below, so read at your own risk.
I’ll start with The Golden Compass – this is definitely the book that drew me to the series, and the one that I’ve heard about from the most people. I’m a sucker for fantasy settings, and this appeared to be well-developed and something worth spending some time in.
And it is – The Golden Compass delivers on a fantasy adventure that is generally pretty good and has a number of novel fantasy elements that made it unique. While I normally bounce off of young protagonists, Lyra’s character worked reasonably well for me. Further, I feel like the plot played to the strengths of having a young protagonist, without falling into the traps, which is also appreciated.
The thing that bugged me the most about The Golden Compass though, was the ending. The Deus-ex-Machina-ness of it, and especially the relationship between Asriel and Coulter was just oddly orchestrated, like the characters were subservient to the plot (namely, to provide context for a second book).
The second book, The Subtle Knife, improves on the first book in that the pacing is better. The book itself is a bit shorter, and generally has the characters with more agency, though what they do with that agency is rather mixed. Which leads me to note that the plot of the second book is a lot less cohesive. This starts to show the cracks in the story as a whole, as characters “know” things or “do” things that don’t make any sense, only because it is in service to the plot.
One could argue that this is part of the theme that Pullman is going for – that determinism is an active, knowledgeable, force that robs us of free will. I disagree with this interpretation, mostly because I’ve seen it done better, and it feels lazy by comparison. On the one hand, I’m okay with a seemingly omniscient third party telling characters what will be, but here, we don’t get that and instead get characters that feel like they’re marionettes at the mercy of the author (notably, not the Authority – the omniscient antagonist of the work).
Which brings me to the last book, The Amber Spyglass, and the point at which I could no longer trust Pullman’s writing. Not to tear down this book too much, but I found his allusions to be both heavy-handed and sloppy (if sometimes entirely misaligned). This lead to muddled themes and the plot being more important than the story or the characters. In this book, more so than the others, Pullman is also very wasteful of the space given to him. There are a number of arcs, plotlines, and even whole characters that are built up only to be aborted, anticlimactically, without giving meaning to the story. Once I had seen this a couple of times, I began to lose faith in Pullman’s ability to tie up loose ends in any meaningful way, and made those sections of the book much less interesting.
Still though, I have, at this point, watched both The Golden Compass movie and the first two seasons of the His Dark Materials TV show, and I plan on finishing out the TV show if it ends without going too much further.
As in my other media reviews, this one does need a final rating. I give the series a single plank – one that can be easily plucked from one’s eye before spending any more time on Dust.