A Golden Compass... by any other name... (Northern Lights - Philip Pullman)

Member Name: ladybahnsidhe

Product:	Northern Lights - Philip Pullman
Date:	02/03/01 (242 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Engrossing read

Disadvantages: It ends.

Breathtaking barely begins to do it justice. Philip Pullman has drawn together bits and shreds of history, mythology, alchemy and science to craft one of the most engrossing and stunning worlds it has ever been my privelege to visit.

I'm not alone in my opinion. Among the honors heaped on this book: winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Prize for Fiction, named by the American Library Association as a Notable Book and one of the Top Ten Books for Young Adults, a Publisher's Weekly Best Book of the Year, and 1997 Children's ABBY Honor Book and more. Are they deserved?

In a word, YES. If anything, the book is underappreciated, eclipsed by the much less engrossing but easier to read Harry Potter series. No offense to young Harry and his cohorts meant -- the Potter books get quite a lot of reading in our house as well -- but Pullman's books have a majesty and power that merit a place beside such classics of adult fantasy as The Lord of the Rings, the Belgariad and Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon.

The last of those come to mind because it's the only other book I have ever read that so engrossed me from cover to cover. From the moment I met young Lyra Belacqua in the first sentence of the story till I closed the book on the last words, I couldn't bear to be parted from her. I had the sense that something was happening while I wasn't looking, that if I left her for a moment, it would be that moment that Mrs. Coulter chose to draw Lyra back into her web of deceit, or that Lyra discovered yet another secret of her hidden history.

Pullman does not coddle his readers at all. There are no narrator's explanations of his world. You learn about it bit by bit as the story unfolds, a device that makes suspension of disbelief wonderfully easy. One accepts without question that human beings have 'daemons' that are born with them and remain with them until they die, that the bond between h
uman and daemon is the closest bond that any will ever know. It is absorbed through the relationship between Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon, a wonderfully whimsical and fond relationship that is the best parallel I have ever read for a conscience or soul. It grows as the reader meets other characters and their daemons, sees the interactions between them, and between daemons -- and prepares the reader to be as horrified as Lyra is by her realization of the evil that is being perpetrated by the 'gobblers'.

Ah, the gobblers! The bogeyman of every child's nightmare. They're rumored to lie in wait for bad children and snatch them away to eat them. When Lyra's best friend Roger disappears, she is positive that he has been kidnapped by the gobblers -- and determined that she and only she must rescue him from them. Her journey takes her from the halls of learning, to the salons of high society to the wilds of the cold northlands. Along the way she learns long-hidden secrets about herself, her parentage and the world in which she lives. Her journey of discovery sets into motion events far beyond her own little quest, and she finds herself in the center of an adventure that will change the world she knows forever.

Lyra's story is one of layers peeled back to reveal layers, secrets hiding puzzles, simple relationships that unfold to reveal complex and intricate histories that slowly are brought together through the actions of one tiny girl, with only the aid of a magical compass, and the love she inspires in those she meets.

Oddly enough, Northern Lights seems to have been published as 'The Golden Compass' here in the U.S. No matter what the name, though, it's easily the best read I've had in years, never mind that it's written with children in mind. Hunt it down. Buy it. Read it. I guarantee you won't put it down till you read:

So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were bo
rn in, looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky.

I promise you, it will be all right to take a breath then.

Summary: