After somewhat enjoying the movie, and being a bit torqued over the vehement condemnation of the source books by various religious conservatives, I really wanted to like this book series. Well, I liked it enough to get the rest of the trilogy — but it’s not as good as I’d hoped.
The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman (1995)
| Overall |  | Story | |
| Re-Readability |  | Characters | |
Story: Pullman tells a story of an intricately crafted world, similar to ours, but where magic is treated as science, technology is vaguely Edwardian, and everyone has an external expression of their soul in the form of a familiar animal, a daemon.
The background of the story — with its various lands and peoples, it’s strangeness and familiarity, ruled over by the churchly Magisterium — is lovely, well thought out presented. The story is far more pedestrian, as a young girl — who coincidentally is the subject of a mysterious prophecy — gets caught up in the various machinations of the Magisterium, her iconoclast uncle, a mysteriously dangerous woman, various freedom loving peoples, a disgraced war-bear, and Something Awful Going on Up in the North. Coincidence tends to snowball with coincidence, with little Lyta at the center of all of them.
Characters: Pullman’s characters, for the most part, are well played cardboard cut-outs. Aside from way too much Nobody Is As They Appear (and Nobody Can Be Trusted Except Those Who Can), all of the major players tend to be somewhat (or terribly) unpleasant, while the supporting cast is all unrealistically nice. The aforementioned war-bear is the most interesting one of the lot, and even there he’s not all that complexly drawn.
Re-Readability: There’s probably plenty there that bears re-reading — for the background of the world, if nothing else — but the miasma of general unpleasantness might make it a while before I do so.
Overall: The Golden Compass isn’t a bad book, it’s just not as enjoyable, innovative, or interesting as I’d hoped it would be. I’m hoping the succeeding volumes showed improvement.
Bearing in mind I haven’t read the next two (though I plan to), I found nothing presented that I’d call a nasty or unfair attack on religion. The Magisterium is clearly not a nice bunch of folks, but we don’t encounter them all that much, and the plotting and scheming of various groups within it certainly has precedent in our (non-fictional) history when religions take over the state. That’s not a condemnation of religion, faith, or theism — but of the frailty of humans. You’d think religious types would actually applaud that recognition — but in the context of church governance, perhaps it hits too close to home.
I’d have to agree that the first book is probably the weakest of the three in the trilogy. The series as a whole was interesting in part because, while I was pretty good at seeing where the story was headed, the final resolutions were quite a bit different than what I was expecting.
The first book for example is notable mainly because Lyta, when you stop to think about it, fails at just about everything she sets out to do. She’s almost an anti-hero in some respects because not only does she lie quite a bit and disobey authority, but everything she accomplishes is either by coincidence or accident and is hardly ever what she had intended to accomplish. It was different enough that I never could quite put enough words together to write a review myself.
I think you summed it up quite nicely.
I’m glad to hear the other books are stronger. I look forward to reading them.