reading notes

His Dark Materials Book II

by Philip Pullman

ISBN: 0375823468

Note: spoilers in this review. If you don’t want to know anything about what happens, don’t read this until you’ve read the book. If you read Book I, even if you felt only so-so about it, read Book II.

This second book in Pullman’s trilogy is faster-paced and less annoying (no hisself here) than the first book, The Golden Compass. While I missed Iorek the armored bear, I think this novel is better than Compass.

Knife is set in our world, in Lyra’s world, and in a strange third world where the adults are preyed upon by soul-sucking Specters. It turns out that people in worlds other than Lyra’s have their dæmons “on the inside” or so Lyra decides it, because the dæmon-less people she meets are alive and not soulless.

The bigger questions Pullman asks are given more room in this book. Early on, I took “She is the one who came before, and you have hated and feared her ever since! Well, now she has come again, and you failed to find her…” to mean that Pullman was going to explore the question “what if the Messiah was female?” That turns out not to be what he is asking, though. I do think looking at Eve’s fall as a mistake, and the angels’ failed rebellion as a loss for the good guys is, if not the same kind of question, equally interesting.

I liked Will, the twelve-year-old boy who Lyra constantly compares to Iorek, much better than I liked Lyra. For all her fated, special status and her ability to make other characters love and care about her, I find her whiny, not as smart as she thinks she is, and more than a bit annoying. Perhaps this is fitting for a mother of the human race, who knows.

Pullman has a hell of a setup going on here. He seemed to rely a bit less on the magic truth-telling alethiometer this time around, but then he did introduce a different magical potentially plot-fixing-uppable object. There were some neatly wrapped up bits here, with Grumman and Will, and other characters left hanging, such as Dr. Mary Malone, nun-turned-physicist. Iorek and Lord Asriel were mentioned enough that I feel safe in assuming they make appearances again in the last book, along with that evil monkey woman, Mrs. Coulter, and my favorite witch, Serafina Pekkala.

I don’t know that I think Pullman can satisfactorily resolve all the issues he raises, but since he made me cry reading this book (when Hester and Lee Scoresby die) and he asks interesting questions, I want to see if he can. Witches and angels fighting on the same side, against The Church and against God — I need to see how this turns out.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 6th, 2004 at 10:08 pm and is filed under young adult/children.