The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, Book 3)
by Philip Pullman
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Book Summary Information
Author: Philip PullmanEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-09-09
ISBN: 0440238153
Number of pages: 480
Publisher: Laurel Leaf
Book Reviews of The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, Book 3)
Book Review: Young love -- how stirring
Summary: 5 Stars
In this third part of the narrative I looked again for comparisons with JKR's Harry Potter (HP) series with questions in mind such as: which is better literature, why is HP so much more popular, and last to give my critical analysis of the plot and the moral narrative. Certainly all three of these issues are entangled with one another. Part of the analysis would have to be related to Milton's "Paradise Lost" and I will be reading several essays on that as well as refreshing my memory on that poem - since the last I remember reading it was in undergraduate school in the 70's. This is certainly an interesting challenge since both books are interesting. Grounds for saying that the HP series is more popular might seem pretty clear but this book at this writing lists as #12,907 while, by comparison HP 3 lists as #13,185. Yet overall sales makes HP far more popular [...]
Despite the addition of several more characters I still think character development is better in HP then PP and I would argue the main advantage to the HP series is in the way the characters interact as friends that develop detailed, interactive, maturation narratives while dealing with the course of action. The HP plot takes place over much more time - seven years. PP's idea of using daemons as intriguing insights into character type is an interesting one but also seems a bit strained. Why would an individual become fixed once they reached puberty? (I am still a kid at heart - my daemon would certainly be constantly changing! Humph!) Why would a bear not have one? Is this speciesism?
PP eats the church alive! I can see how this might be a take off from Milton's Satan who perhaps may be seen as a much richer character than God. How ironic --"the authority" -"the ancient of days" -- to have the creator puff away by accident. This plot juxtaposes the trite science versus religion narrative with all virtues on the side of science -- emotion, love, and intellect - while the church gets discipline, stupidity, mean spirited-ness, and evil. It sounds like the image Opus Dei gets in Dan Brown's DaVinci Code. Stephen Jay Gould would at least suggest that there are non overlapping magisteria (NOMAs) and religion and science are partners. The so called war between science and religion is really a war between smart people (including religious ones) and stupid people (including those fundamentalists who think their uneducated interpretation - the "literal" interpretation - IS the religion). But this ridiculous narrative is a central part of the main plot. This leads PP to present a narrative that in some respects makes use of the newest in quantum physics but uses metaphorical Biblical creatures, and others, as if they were real. We end up with witches flying on fir branches and angels holding a man's head underwater. Agreed, witches fly in HP as well but there is a difference. JKR does not couch the plot in contemporary physics making the suggestion that alternate universes can interact and scientifically impossible things in any possible universe exist in them. But if this is meant to be thought provoking and entertaining, well fine. So is Alan Lightman's "Einstein's Dreams". Besides, I am persuaded that Leibniz was right about this being the best of all possible worlds (read "universes" today).
Last, who are the kids that are the audience for the PP series? If HP created such conflict and even book burnings because of the narrative, why were there no like outcries over the PP books? (Were there?) Perhaps there wasn't because they did not get as much press? While saving the world through love is a wonderful motif, the relationship between two adolescents falling in love seems a different sort of love - Eros instead of Agape. In short, the series does not seem to be the sort of thing conservative Christian parents would want their children reading but might not protest since they don't know the books are there. I keep asking people if they have heard of them and finding no one saying yes.
They are good books. They are interesting. I am glad I read them. But HP wins.
Summary of The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, Book 3)
In the astonishing finale to the His Dark Materials trilogy, Lyra and Will are in unspeakable danger. With help from Iorek Byrnison the armored bear and two tiny Gallivespian spies, they must journey to a dank and gray-lit world where no living soul has ever gone. All the while, Dr. Mary Malone builds a magnificent Amber Spyglass. An assassin hunts her down, and Lord Asriel, with a troop of shining angels, fights his mighty rebellion, in a battle of strange allies?and shocking sacrifice.As war rages and Dust drains from the sky, the fate of the living?and the dead?finally comes to depend on two children and the simple truth of one simple story.
From the very start of its very first scene, The Amber Spyglass will set hearts fluttering and minds racing. All we'll say here is that we immediately discover who captured Lyra at the end of The Subtle Knife, though we've yet to discern whether this individual's intent is good, evil, or somewhere in between. We also learn that Will still possesses the blade that allows him to cut between worlds, and has been joined by two winged companions who are determined to escort him to Lord Asriel's mountain redoubt. The boy, however, has only one goal in mind--to rescue his friend and return to her the alethiometer, an instrument that has revealed so much to her and to readers of The Golden Compass and its follow-up. Within a short time, too, we get to experience the "tingle of the starlight" on Serafina Pekkala's skin as she seeks out a famished Iorek Byrnison and enlists him in Lord Asriel's crusade:
A complex web of thoughts was weaving itself in the bear king's mind, with more strands in it than hunger and satisfaction. There was the memory of the little girl Lyra, whom he had named Silvertongue, and whom he had last seen crossing the fragile snow bridge across a crevasse in his own island of Svalbard. Then there was the agitation among the witches, the rumors of pacts and alliances and war; and then there was the surpassingly strange fact of this new world itself, and the witch's insistence that there were many more such worlds, and that the fate of them all hung somehow on the fate of the child.Meanwhile, two factions of the Church are vying to reach Lyra first. One is even prepared to give a priest "preemptive absolution" should he succeed in committing mortal sin. For these tyrants, killing this girl is no less than "a sacred task."
In the final installment of his trilogy, Philip Pullman has set himself the highest hurdles. He must match its predecessors in terms of sheer action and originality and resolve the enigmas he already created. The good news is that there is no critical bad news--not that The Amber Spyglass doesn't contain standoffs and close calls galore. (Who would have it otherwise?) But Pullman brings his audacious revision of Paradise Lost to a conclusion that is both serene and devastating. In prose that is transparent yet lyrical and 3-D, the author weaves in and out of his principals' thoughts. He also offers up several additional worlds. In one, Dr. Mary Malone is welcomed into an apparently simple society. The environment of the mulefa (again, we'll reveal nothing more) makes them rich in consciousness while their lives possess a slow and stately rhythm. These strange creatures can, however, be very fast on their feet (or on other things entirely) when necessary. Alas, they are on the verge of dying as Dust streams out of their idyllic landscape. Will the Oxford dark-matter researcher see her way to saving them, or does this require our young heroes? And while Mary is puzzling out a cure, Will and Lyra undertake a pilgrimage to a realm devoid of all light and hope, after having been forced into the cruelest of sacrifices--or betrayals.
Throughout his galvanizing epic, Pullman sustains scenes of fierce beauty and tenderness. He also allows us a moment or two of comic respite. At one point, for instance, Lyra's mother bullies a series of ecclesiastical underlings: "The man bowed helplessly and led her away. The guard behind her blew out his cheeks with relief." Needless to say, Mrs. Coulter is as intoxicating and fluid as ever. And can it be that we will come to admire her as she plays out her desperate endgame? In this respect, as in many others, The Amber Spyglass is truly a book of revelations, moving from darkness visible to radiant truth. --Kerry Fried
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