Book 322: The Amber Spyglass
The last in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and, I might add, the creepiest. The entire book basically hinges around two 12 year olds getting it on, and I still think that’s really weird. Discussing this recently with Tristan, I learned that not everyone reads this book that way, and maybe that’s why it became so popular, because people could pretend that isn’t what happened, but, I mean…come on. What happens is pretty obvious, it’s not like Pullman tries to hide it with slippery language at all.
Anyway, that aside, it’s an interesting concept. Our child heroes have to find a way to release ghosts from the Land of the Dead, track down their daemons, do a bit of growing up, and deal with very adult issues, all while meeting interesting denizens from a multitude of worlds.
This book gets a little repetitious at times, and sometimes the metaphor is extremely heavy-handed, but I think that it’s fundamentally an interesting and compelling story. Many readers, I suspect, like the idea that thousands of worlds are only a fingertip away, if only they knew how to reach them, and I suspect that’s why books like these, the Chronicles of Narnia, and the Harry Potters become so popular. It’s not just that the story is good, but that there’s a sense of magic and wonder, a hint that there’s a mystical world which ordinary people have the ability to touch and be touched by.
The vision of God as a decrepit old angel at the end is awesome, as is the idea that the powers in Heaven are conflicted, and don’t agree on the best thing for mankind (or themselves). Good, in this case, is represented by knowledge, while evil is expressed as the desire to suppress knowledge, and I think that’s a great way to divide good and evil, and to illustrate that in order to do evil, you must have the knowledge to know that you are doing it.
I’m a bit disappointed that Lyra’s fundamentally evil mother is given a redemptive scene at the end, although there is some gratification in the fact that she is consistently portrayed as greedy and repugnant to the end. Personally, I believe that some people cannot be redeemed, but maybe Pullman and I will just have to agree to disagree on that one.
Demographics:
The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman. Published 2000, 518 pages. Fiction.
Tags: book project