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A review by verymom
The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
I HAVE SO MANY THOUGHTS. Pardon me while I write an ESSAY.
tl;dr: I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the whole series (audiobooks are so well produced), but I think Pullman's theological arguments against religion and god could have been constructed better. I'm also not sure he handled his many plot points as deftly as he might have, though his writing is really powerful and beautiful. Thus, I'm torn and don't know how to rate this.
Book one, [b:The Golden Compass|119322|The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)|Philip Pullman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1505766203l/119322._SX50_.jpg|1536771], is my favorite in this series. In the first book Lyra's moral ambiguity made her an intriguing protagonist. Just twelve years old and left to fend for herself for much of her childhood, she is an adept manipulator and liar. But she's also charmingly self-assured and independent. I found myself rooting for her as she escapes from Mrs. Coulter, helps Iorek regain control of his kingdom of armored bears, and rescues children from Bolvanger.
In book two, [b:The Subtle Knife|41637836|The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, #2)|Philip Pullman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1535965085l/41637836._SY75_.jpg|1570229], we lose Lyra as the spunky, strong-willed protagonist. Instead Will becomes the star, and Lyra bizarrely submits to him, even refusing to consult the alethiometer unless he asks her to. This continues in the last installment, The Amber Spyglass. Lyra is kept unconscious via a sleeping potion for quite a large portion of this book. We get glimpses into her dreams about Roger, but I don't know how much more passive you can get. She literally becomes the damsel in distress in need of rescuing, rather than the fierce little girl who rode into Bolvanger to free the children.
I do like Will's character, but this shift away from Lyra as the hero was unexpected and I didn't really love it. I wanted to see the same Lyra I met in book one. (She isn’t completely passive. She is passionate about making it to the land of the dead and sticks to her promise even when forced to leave her daemon behind. I still like her.)
I had a lot of questions after book one. I knew the author, [a:Philip Pullman|3618|Philip Pullman|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1396622492p2/3618.jpg], had been very outspoken about his reasons for writing this series, but I couldn't really see a clear enemy in the Magisterium yet.
Even though the agenda became much more clear in books two and three, I'm still not sure he executed this as well as he might have hoped. I found out by reading several interviews he's given that he's a "pantster" - someone who doesn't plan out a series, but writes "by the seat of one's pants." This explains a LOT for me because while his imagination and world-building is really amazing in many areas, the series does wander sort of aimlessly in just as many areas. I don't think Pullman spent a lot of time planning or building the villainous world of "the church," nor did he really make it clear which side one should be rooting for (which was maybe his intention?).
On one side, we have Mrs. Coulter. She is (rather inexplicably) a staunch member of the church, and the church is against "dust." Dust is an invisible magical substance that the church blames for original sin--though I really have no idea why. In order to eliminate (?) original sin, the church sanctions the experimental procedure of separating children from their souls (represented as animal familiars, or daemons in the book). This separation releases quite a lot of "dust energy" and makes the children sort of empty and malleable. In the first book, this is obviously very terrible, and we root for Lyra as she breaks into the secret compound in the north to save the children from their fate. Harder to understand is why Mrs. Coulter finds this work so important as she herself enjoys the company of her own daemon. The book does not explore her own theological beliefs, it just paints her as a very manipulative person who cares nothing for her child.
On the other side, we have Lord Asriel. He is supposedly against the church... though his theological beliefs aren’t explored either. He is no hero to rally around as he too, is an absentee parent who cares nothing for his daughter. And! He murders Lyra's best friend Roger--a small boy!--(presumably by separating him from his daemon as the church is doing?!!) in order to cut a hole into a new world. (The church refuses to acknowledge the existence of other worlds, and claiming they exist is heresy?) In whatever world Lord Asriel enters, he builds a mysterious sort of fortress and gathers an army of fallen angels and witches to wage a war against heaven.
All of the characters we grow to love (Lyra, Will, Iorek, Lee Scorsby, Serafina Pekkala, Dr Mary) seem to feel that siding with Lord Asriel is of the utmost importance even though he’s a murderer. Muddy, gray characters are often fascinating, but I'm very confused as to why Pullman would make the supposed "good side" rally around such a clearly terrible person. I don't care how good his intentions are (and those intentions are never made particularly clear), the murder of Roger is inexcusable.
A third side is made up of Will and Lyra as the new Adam and Eve. There's a very mysterious prophecy about this and no one tells Lyra anything about it. But the prophecy is why the church wants to kill Lyra so much. They are afraid she will "fall" as the first Eve and original sin will continue to exist. Will obtains the "subtle knife" and is told he needs to deliver the knife to Lord Asriel in order to help his cause. However, they don't actually deliver the knife to Lord Asriel. Nor do they do much to help him at all. Instead, Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter have a bit of a redemption arc.
First, Mrs Coulter, overcome with love for her daughter, does a lot of lying and stealing and manipulating in an attempt to stop the church’s bomb that will kill Lyra, but she doesn’t succeed... it’s actually some ghosts that save Lyra from the bomb. The bomb detonates and opens up a sort of pit to hell (???) and that’s kind of the end of the church side, I guess. It isn’t clear.
Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter then sacrifice themselves to drag Metatron (bizarre name for the acting president of heaven*... but not the creator god) into this pit where they all presumably die, though it’s later alluded that Mrs Coulter somehow survives. (????) I know. It's a lot. These redemption arcs come from nowhere, and while powerfully written, I still found myself scratching my head quite a bit.
*I learned that Metatron is a real name used in Judeo-Islamic apocrypha for the highest of angels who serves as a scribe.
It’s Will and Lyra who end up doing what Lord Asriel set out to do himself... they "kill god," though it isn't god either, and they kill him by accident. This, the most controversial plot point in the series, is pretty strange. I mean, people burned and banned these books and I just don’t really see what’s so shocking. Will and Lyra don't seem to understand what they're doing, and the frail little angel in a crystal(?) is so old and demented that he welcomes his... evaporation(?). But again, he's not even god and seems to hold no power of his own, so I don't know why his death was important other than he seemed ready and willing to embrace it.
What the death actually achieves, I'm not sure. It stops the war? It lessens the power of the church? Or does Metatron's death achieve that?
With the church side thwarted (?) and their angel-gods destroyed (?), they are no longer a threat (how they even know the outcome of the war is unclear, through their slower alethiometer reader? Or does he die in the post-bomb blaze?) We still have the wandering priest-assassin, though his story serves little purpose and goes nowhere.
Lord Asriel’s side, I guess, continues to fight the other angels of heaven, though I think the war ends after Metatron dies?
The actual climax of the series isn't the angel-god's death, but Will and Lyra's sexual awakening. Which I have really mixed feelings about as they are TWELVE YEARS OLD. The series builds to a very strong friendship type of love, but after a former nun tells them a story about eating marzipan and falling in love, these little children (who are *called* little children throughout the entire series) are suddenly hyper aware of all of their sexual bits. Oookayyyyyy.
I was kind of grossed out by how Pullman describes it. Not because writing about or discussing a sexual awakening should be taboo, but because he's an old man. And he's talking about a little girl's private areas... albeit in flowery, poetic ways.
My ‘rich house’ full of ‘doors’ is full of cringe, y’all.
This sexual awakening appears to be the entire point of the whole series. The church's experiment on children is stopped and they lose power in Lyra’s world. The war between heaven and earth(s) is stopped/won. But what ends up fixing the ecological unrest everywhere (melting ice caps, trees dying, pollination not happening, races threatened) is two kids making out in a grove of trees.
Even if one argues that all Lyra and Will did was kiss (which is a valid argument, I think?), this is still the thing that fixes everything. So. Pullman’s point is that sex? love? is super important? And he uses a twelve year old girl to illustrate this?
HOW their love fixes everything is confusing and I found a lot of other confused people online wondering what happened. Here’s a redditor attempts to explain:
Ok, sure, I can see that. It stilllll feels a little troubling, though.
Again, I don't think there's anything wrong with writing about or discussing a sexual awakening. I don't love how taboo the subject is in American society, but a twelve-year-old's vagina as a multiverse-saving-device raises some eyebrows for me.
All that said, the kids/sex/love *doesn’t* solve everything. There’s also the matter of all the knife-opened windows between worlds, the massive hole Lord Asriel tore between worlds via murder, and (I think?) the bomb-made pit to hell. All of these are creating the odd spirits who feast on the souls of adults in one of the worlds where people don’t have visible daemons. Bafflingly, Pullman said (on his website) that these creatures were ways to talk about depression.... which he doesn’t really explore fully, I don’t think. Nor does it tie into his overall themes, so color me confused. To fix this problem, the witches have to close all the openings except for the ones through which non-soul-eating ghosts can escape from purgatory/the land of the dead. And Will must destroy the knife.
Oy. It’s all very complicated and messy, honestly, and some of it really doesn’t make sense.
In the end, Pullman stops being so mysterious and unclear about his reasons for writing the book. (To be fair, I think he believes he's clear from the get-go, but he really isn't). He comes right out and says that god never existed and that Christianity is a mistake (which, btw, doesn't offend me in the slightest). He's allowed to write whatever he wants, but I think as annoyed as he is about Narnia (he said this series is his answer to Narnia), book three ends up being annoying in a different way. Instead of preaching Christianity, he is preaching something else. And he's preaching it just as loudly. The message also feels confused... the church isn’t set up as a proper villain, Mrs Coulter and Lord Asriel are too gray to represent clear ideas and never discuss their actual belief systems, and the climax has more to do with love and sex than religion. The preachiness removes the magic from the fantasy world for me, and I think it removes the magic of free thought, too. He doesn’t trust his reader to draw their own conclusions. He has to have Dr Mary spell out the moral for us, and it’s a bit like seeing the man behind the emerald curtain. If the series were more allegorical and less soap-boxy, I think he would have achieved something that really made people think and talk*. As it is, it's just a different kind of preaching.
*He did achieve this, I realize, as I sit here thinking and talking about it. I just think it could have been done a little more... gracefully? Without losing whatever message he was trying to convey. I think ALL books that try to preach—and are really in your face about it—lose some of their power.
Pullman is tackling a butt ton of theological themes in this book and while it's an EPIC undertaking and he does pull off an immense amount of incredible and fantastical writing, I can't say he manages to pull all of the plots and theological stuff together in a concise and clear way.
Still, he is one of the most amazing wordsmiths I've ever read--his ability to string beautiful words together is unparalleled. The concept of the subtle knife and how it can cut windows into new worlds is a marvelous invention. I think book one was an amazing accomplishment.
I cried as Lyra and Will had to separate at the end of this book, each back to their own worlds, with no possibility of interworld travel anymore.
Beautiful, right? Regardless of how I feel about Pullman's treatment of his female characters and whether or not he can adequately juggle a million different plot lines and weighty themes, I will be thinking about and studying the way he writes for a long time.
tl;dr: I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the whole series (audiobooks are so well produced), but I think Pullman's theological arguments against religion and god could have been constructed better. I'm also not sure he handled his many plot points as deftly as he might have, though his writing is really powerful and beautiful. Thus, I'm torn and don't know how to rate this.
Book one, [b:The Golden Compass|119322|The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)|Philip Pullman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1505766203l/119322._SX50_.jpg|1536771], is my favorite in this series. In the first book Lyra's moral ambiguity made her an intriguing protagonist. Just twelve years old and left to fend for herself for much of her childhood, she is an adept manipulator and liar. But she's also charmingly self-assured and independent. I found myself rooting for her as she escapes from Mrs. Coulter, helps Iorek regain control of his kingdom of armored bears, and rescues children from Bolvanger.
In book two, [b:The Subtle Knife|41637836|The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, #2)|Philip Pullman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1535965085l/41637836._SY75_.jpg|1570229], we lose Lyra as the spunky, strong-willed protagonist. Instead Will becomes the star, and Lyra bizarrely submits to him, even refusing to consult the alethiometer unless he asks her to. This continues in the last installment, The Amber Spyglass. Lyra is kept unconscious via a sleeping potion for quite a large portion of this book. We get glimpses into her dreams about Roger, but I don't know how much more passive you can get. She literally becomes the damsel in distress in need of rescuing, rather than the fierce little girl who rode into Bolvanger to free the children.
I do like Will's character, but this shift away from Lyra as the hero was unexpected and I didn't really love it. I wanted to see the same Lyra I met in book one. (She isn’t completely passive. She is passionate about making it to the land of the dead and sticks to her promise even when forced to leave her daemon behind. I still like her.)
I had a lot of questions after book one. I knew the author, [a:Philip Pullman|3618|Philip Pullman|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1396622492p2/3618.jpg], had been very outspoken about his reasons for writing this series, but I couldn't really see a clear enemy in the Magisterium yet.
Even though the agenda became much more clear in books two and three, I'm still not sure he executed this as well as he might have hoped. I found out by reading several interviews he's given that he's a "pantster" - someone who doesn't plan out a series, but writes "by the seat of one's pants." This explains a LOT for me because while his imagination and world-building is really amazing in many areas, the series does wander sort of aimlessly in just as many areas. I don't think Pullman spent a lot of time planning or building the villainous world of "the church," nor did he really make it clear which side one should be rooting for (which was maybe his intention?).
On one side, we have Mrs. Coulter. She is (rather inexplicably) a staunch member of the church, and the church is against "dust." Dust is an invisible magical substance that the church blames for original sin--though I really have no idea why. In order to eliminate (?) original sin, the church sanctions the experimental procedure of separating children from their souls (represented as animal familiars, or daemons in the book). This separation releases quite a lot of "dust energy" and makes the children sort of empty and malleable. In the first book, this is obviously very terrible, and we root for Lyra as she breaks into the secret compound in the north to save the children from their fate. Harder to understand is why Mrs. Coulter finds this work so important as she herself enjoys the company of her own daemon. The book does not explore her own theological beliefs, it just paints her as a very manipulative person who cares nothing for her child.
On the other side, we have Lord Asriel. He is supposedly against the church... though his theological beliefs aren’t explored either. He is no hero to rally around as he too, is an absentee parent who cares nothing for his daughter. And! He murders Lyra's best friend Roger--a small boy!--(presumably by separating him from his daemon as the church is doing?!!) in order to cut a hole into a new world. (The church refuses to acknowledge the existence of other worlds, and claiming they exist is heresy?) In whatever world Lord Asriel enters, he builds a mysterious sort of fortress and gathers an army of fallen angels and witches to wage a war against heaven.
All of the characters we grow to love (Lyra, Will, Iorek, Lee Scorsby, Serafina Pekkala, Dr Mary) seem to feel that siding with Lord Asriel is of the utmost importance even though he’s a murderer. Muddy, gray characters are often fascinating, but I'm very confused as to why Pullman would make the supposed "good side" rally around such a clearly terrible person. I don't care how good his intentions are (and those intentions are never made particularly clear), the murder of Roger is inexcusable.
A third side is made up of Will and Lyra as the new Adam and Eve. There's a very mysterious prophecy about this and no one tells Lyra anything about it. But the prophecy is why the church wants to kill Lyra so much. They are afraid she will "fall" as the first Eve and original sin will continue to exist. Will obtains the "subtle knife" and is told he needs to deliver the knife to Lord Asriel in order to help his cause. However, they don't actually deliver the knife to Lord Asriel. Nor do they do much to help him at all. Instead, Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter have a bit of a redemption arc.
First, Mrs Coulter, overcome with love for her daughter, does a lot of lying and stealing and manipulating in an attempt to stop the church’s bomb that will kill Lyra, but she doesn’t succeed... it’s actually some ghosts that save Lyra from the bomb. The bomb detonates and opens up a sort of pit to hell (???) and that’s kind of the end of the church side, I guess. It isn’t clear.
Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter then sacrifice themselves to drag Metatron (bizarre name for the acting president of heaven*... but not the creator god) into this pit where they all presumably die, though it’s later alluded that Mrs Coulter somehow survives. (????) I know. It's a lot. These redemption arcs come from nowhere, and while powerfully written, I still found myself scratching my head quite a bit.
*I learned that Metatron is a real name used in Judeo-Islamic apocrypha for the highest of angels who serves as a scribe.
It’s Will and Lyra who end up doing what Lord Asriel set out to do himself... they "kill god," though it isn't god either, and they kill him by accident. This, the most controversial plot point in the series, is pretty strange. I mean, people burned and banned these books and I just don’t really see what’s so shocking. Will and Lyra don't seem to understand what they're doing, and the frail little angel in a crystal(?) is so old and demented that he welcomes his... evaporation(?). But again, he's not even god and seems to hold no power of his own, so I don't know why his death was important other than he seemed ready and willing to embrace it.
What the death actually achieves, I'm not sure. It stops the war? It lessens the power of the church? Or does Metatron's death achieve that?
With the church side thwarted (?) and their angel-gods destroyed (?), they are no longer a threat (how they even know the outcome of the war is unclear, through their slower alethiometer reader? Or does he die in the post-bomb blaze?) We still have the wandering priest-assassin, though his story serves little purpose and goes nowhere.
Lord Asriel’s side, I guess, continues to fight the other angels of heaven, though I think the war ends after Metatron dies?
The actual climax of the series isn't the angel-god's death, but Will and Lyra's sexual awakening. Which I have really mixed feelings about as they are TWELVE YEARS OLD. The series builds to a very strong friendship type of love, but after a former nun tells them a story about eating marzipan and falling in love, these little children (who are *called* little children throughout the entire series) are suddenly hyper aware of all of their sexual bits. Oookayyyyyy.
I was kind of grossed out by how Pullman describes it. Not because writing about or discussing a sexual awakening should be taboo, but because he's an old man. And he's talking about a little girl's private areas... albeit in flowery, poetic ways.
It was the strangest thing: Lyra knew exactly what [Dr. Malone—the prophesied tempter snake—who had just told Lyra a story about her first kiss] meant, and half an hour earlier she would have had no idea at all. And inside her, that rich house with all its doors open and all its rooms lit stood waiting, quiet, expectant.
My ‘rich house’ full of ‘doors’ is full of cringe, y’all.
This sexual awakening appears to be the entire point of the whole series. The church's experiment on children is stopped and they lose power in Lyra’s world. The war between heaven and earth(s) is stopped/won. But what ends up fixing the ecological unrest everywhere (melting ice caps, trees dying, pollination not happening, races threatened) is two kids making out in a grove of trees.
Even if one argues that all Lyra and Will did was kiss (which is a valid argument, I think?), this is still the thing that fixes everything. So. Pullman’s point is that sex? love? is super important? And he uses a twelve year old girl to illustrate this?
HOW their love fixes everything is confusing and I found a lot of other confused people online wondering what happened. Here’s a redditor attempts to explain:
Mary talks about how putting a single stone in the exact right place, at the exact right time can change the course of a mighty river. Lyra and Will, realizing they're in love and kissing, started very suddenly attracting a lot of dust (like adults), and that small change, at the right place and right time, was enough to stop the flood. - clarabosswald on reddit
Ok, sure, I can see that. It stilllll feels a little troubling, though.
Again, I don't think there's anything wrong with writing about or discussing a sexual awakening. I don't love how taboo the subject is in American society, but a twelve-year-old's vagina as a multiverse-saving-device raises some eyebrows for me.
All that said, the kids/sex/love *doesn’t* solve everything. There’s also the matter of all the knife-opened windows between worlds, the massive hole Lord Asriel tore between worlds via murder, and (I think?) the bomb-made pit to hell. All of these are creating the odd spirits who feast on the souls of adults in one of the worlds where people don’t have visible daemons. Bafflingly, Pullman said (on his website) that these creatures were ways to talk about depression.... which he doesn’t really explore fully, I don’t think. Nor does it tie into his overall themes, so color me confused. To fix this problem, the witches have to close all the openings except for the ones through which non-soul-eating ghosts can escape from purgatory/the land of the dead. And Will must destroy the knife.
Oy. It’s all very complicated and messy, honestly, and some of it really doesn’t make sense.
In the end, Pullman stops being so mysterious and unclear about his reasons for writing the book. (To be fair, I think he believes he's clear from the get-go, but he really isn't). He comes right out and says that god never existed and that Christianity is a mistake (which, btw, doesn't offend me in the slightest). He's allowed to write whatever he wants, but I think as annoyed as he is about Narnia (he said this series is his answer to Narnia), book three ends up being annoying in a different way. Instead of preaching Christianity, he is preaching something else. And he's preaching it just as loudly. The message also feels confused... the church isn’t set up as a proper villain, Mrs Coulter and Lord Asriel are too gray to represent clear ideas and never discuss their actual belief systems, and the climax has more to do with love and sex than religion. The preachiness removes the magic from the fantasy world for me, and I think it removes the magic of free thought, too. He doesn’t trust his reader to draw their own conclusions. He has to have Dr Mary spell out the moral for us, and it’s a bit like seeing the man behind the emerald curtain. If the series were more allegorical and less soap-boxy, I think he would have achieved something that really made people think and talk*. As it is, it's just a different kind of preaching.
*He did achieve this, I realize, as I sit here thinking and talking about it. I just think it could have been done a little more... gracefully? Without losing whatever message he was trying to convey. I think ALL books that try to preach—and are really in your face about it—lose some of their power.
Pullman is tackling a butt ton of theological themes in this book and while it's an EPIC undertaking and he does pull off an immense amount of incredible and fantastical writing, I can't say he manages to pull all of the plots and theological stuff together in a concise and clear way.
Still, he is one of the most amazing wordsmiths I've ever read--his ability to string beautiful words together is unparalleled. The concept of the subtle knife and how it can cut windows into new worlds is a marvelous invention. I think book one was an amazing accomplishment.
I cried as Lyra and Will had to separate at the end of this book, each back to their own worlds, with no possibility of interworld travel anymore.
And at the word alone, Will felt a great wave of rage and despair moving outwards from a place deep within him, as if his mind were an ocean that some profound convulsion had disturbed. All his life he'd been alone, and now he must be alone again, and this infinitely precious blessing that had come to him must be taken away almost at once.He felt the wave build higher and steeper to darken the sky, he felt the crest tremble and begin to spill, he felt the great mass crashing down with the whole weight of the ocean behind it against the iron-bound coast of what had to be. And he felt himself crying aloud with more anger and pain than he had ever felt in his life, and he found Lyra just as helpless in his arms. But as the wave expended its force and the waters withdrew, the bleak rocks remained; there was no arguing with fate; neither his despair nor Lyra's had moved them a single inch.
Beautiful, right? Regardless of how I feel about Pullman's treatment of his female characters and whether or not he can adequately juggle a million different plot lines and weighty themes, I will be thinking about and studying the way he writes for a long time.