Philip Pullman: The Amber Spyglass (2000)

Edition: Point, 2001
Review number: 1310

As anyone who has read my reviews of the earlier novels in the His Dark Materials trilogy will know, I am not a Philip Pullman fan. I did feel, though, that I should make an effort to get to the end of this series, as so many people rave about it. I had hoped that this would be a more interesting read, and I would finally begin to care what happened to Will and Lyra.

The novel starts with Lyra in a magical sleep in the power of her mother, while Will (and others, who are more sinister) search for her. Lyra asleep is a much more interesting character than Lyra awake, and this section is probably the best written of all three novels. But soon she is wakened, and from that point she and Will are questing through the worlds accessible with the knife (see The Subtle Knife) and the dullness returns, giving me an almost irresistible urge to skip large chunks (I only didn't because I was intending to write this review).

Pullman has frequently and loudly complained about the Christian symbols in C.S. Lewis' Narnia stories. However, the way that Lewis approaches his symbols seems to me to indicate a much greater writer and storyteller, regardless of his religious convictions. He subordinates the external ideas to the demands of his story (for example, the parallels between Aslan and Jesus are less exact than critics would make out). Pullman's ideas, on the other hand, seem far more important than any story-telling, and his symbols are clunky and irritating. They also tend to be pointed out very directly by the author - as when he describes the meaning of the knife towards the end of this novel. I don't really mind what the purpose symbolic objects hold in a work of fiction, as long as they're well done and their meanings contribute to the strengths of the novel. This is not the case here, and they just become intrusive, making the reader unable to ignore the fact that there is some kind of agenda behind what they see on the page.

My basic objection to this entire trilogy is that it is extremely dull. It certainly reads more like the kind of thing adults expect children to like rather than something that will really appeal to most children - a real contrast to Harry Potter. (I've seen lots of adults raving about His Dark Materials - but not one teenage or pre-teen fan.) I'm certainly not intending to read any more Philip Pullman, no matter how wonderful people think his books are.

Philip Pullman: The Subtle Knife (1997)

Edition: Scholastic, 2001
Review number: 1278

The scope of the His Dark Materials trilogy widens in this second novel, which is set in three worlds, including our own. The Subtle Knife also introduces the second of the two protagonists, Will Parry. Like Lyra, he is an independent child, in his case because his father was an explorer lost on an Arctic expedition when he was a baby, and his mother has become barely able to function after years of stress. When he discovers that her paranoid fantasies have a grain of truth, and then accidentally kills a man who attacks them, he has to flee, and ends up in another world where he meets Lyra. He has his own quest, to find his father, but it becomes clear that, for a time at least, their purposes will be parallel and that in some way Will will be key to stopping the forcible removal of the souls of children that motivates Lyra.

While the background remains interesting, the faults of Northern Lights seem magnified here. Will is just as poorly animated a character as Lyra is, and the story really lacks the spark of excitement that would be needed for it to really take off. This is made worse by the splitting of the narrative into two; I can see why the book is organised like this (the purpose of the lesser thread, which is mostly very tedious indeed, is to prepare the ground for a surprise in the other), but it does make the novel drag. I suspect that if this had been the first novel in the trilogy, few children would have bothered to read it. (Mind you, I get the impression that this is a series that adults rave about as a fantastic children's trilogy but not one which is really a great favourite with young readers.)

It is in the latter part of the novel that Pullman's controversial twisting of Christian theology really begins. As it appears here, it is basically a reversal of how orthodox Christianity looks at the universe - the side that a Christian would call good is here about regulation and conformity; while the traditional "fallen angels" want to bring freedom and happiness to humanity. This is hardly a new way to attack the Christian religion, particularly as it is based on an institutionalised version of Christianity that has little to do with what the Bible actually says (and attacking it is really a version of what is known as a "straw man" argument - demolishing a misrepresentation of an opponent's position). Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh has a similar message, and that was written over a century ago as an attack on the hypocrisy of the Victorian church. And yet this trilogy has generally been singled out for praise, as though every book that children could read before Pullman began writing were putting the same point of view as C.S. Lewis (whose Narnia stories are, incidentally, better written and more fun.) Christianity is an irrelevance to the majority of people in the West today - there are far more interesting targets that could be attacked truly controversially, from the cult of celebrity, to cultural imperialism, to the morality of today's capitalism. There is no reason to start fighting our grandparents battles over again.

Considering the amount of praise I have heard heaped on this series, it has proved immensely disappointing. I will probably eventually read The Amber Spyglass, but I'm certainly not holding my breath in anticipation.

Philip Pullman: Northern Lights (1995)

Edition: Scholastic, 1996
Review number: 1262

Harry Potter may have started the current revival in the children's books market, but it is Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (of which this is, of course, the first) which has picked up most of the critical acclaim. Aimed at an older reader than the first Harry Potter stories, this is an imaginative and dark tale of a fantasy world where human beings are accompanied by personal daemons - basically externalised souls - in the form of animals.

Central character Lyra is a young girl brought up (in a neglected kind of way) by the scholars of an Oxford college. When children across Britain begin to go missing, she resolves to save them (after her closest playmate disappears); this decision takes her to fashionable London, a gypsy parliament in the Fens (at Ely under another name), and finally to the Arctic, where the Aurora or Northern Lights play an important part in beginning to resolve the mystery.

Comparison with the Harry Potter stories, particularly the Philosopher's Stone which began that series, is quite a useful way to enumerate some of the praiseworthy and not so praiseworthy aspects of this novel. The first thing that the reader notices about Northern Lights by comparison is that Pullman imagines a far more complex, logically thought out and intricate world, one that is a great deal less like the one in which we live than the one that contains Hogwarts is. Everything we read about seems to have a purpose within the overall scheme of things, while Rowling, at least some of the time, appears to put in details on the spur of the moment. While the Harry Potter books do have a plan - the final chapter of the seventh novel being among the first to be written - many of the background details do not relate to it (what do every flavour beans tell us about how the universe is structured, for example?). Everything here has its place, it all fills out a corner of a master plan. Though this may be in part something Pullman is able to do because he is writing for an older readership, this particular contrast is valid for the later Harry Potter books as well, which are not aimed at such young people.

Pullman's writing is made to seem far deeper and have more to offer on repeated reading by this method. It should be remembered that Rowling's books are meant to be funny, while Pullman wants to deal with big issues.

The feeling that there is more to be gained by repeated reading of His Dark Materials is bolstered by a second difference: the background to Pullman's series is far more imaginative than Happy Potter, which is really just a boarding school story with magic and a villain. The daemons, the cosmology (all the stuff about the Dust), the bears and so on are original ideas; this is not just another post-Tolkien fantasy novel. Pullman wins out on the broad brush aspects of writing a fantasy novel - the general background is far better - but what about the detail? On the character front, the central cast of Rowling's novels all seem to have something individual about them, though sometimes Ron Weasley in particular is a bit of a caricature. It takes a long while here to feel that Lyra has much of a character. His portrayal of her upbringing as a sort of urchin doesn't seem realistic - for that done really well in a book for teenagers, try Leon Garfield's Smith. The characters here seem to be mainly intended as pegs for the background - which is of course a common problem in novels driven by ideas.

Both Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Northern Lights aim to make a big impact in their very first pages, with the outlandish idea of a boy living in a cupboard under the stairs in one and Lyra discovering a plot to poison her uncle in the other. Here Harry Potter wins again, but then it does have one of the most attention grabbing openings in fiction. Harry Potter also continues in much the same vein, and the pace really keeps moving; this is not true of Northern Lights. This is not necessarily a case of one being better than the other, however; it is another difference of emphasis.

The differences between the two series could be summed up as Pullman having more intellectual weight (and it is interesting that most of the reviews I have seen are about the underlying ideas rather than the writing itself), but Rowling being more appealing. It's a matter of mind or heart - each appeals more to the one than the other. Considering that they are the two most successful examples of the current revival of the children's book market, they are remarkably different from each other - especially given that they both fall within the fantasy genre.