The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife

Last month when I was writing that paper on young adult fantasy, I used this series as one of my examples. However, I hadn't read it through in its entirety in a couple of years. On Friday I picked it up, and am through books one and two. (I'm a fast reader.) I remembered that, like Harry Potter, this is one of those young adult series that Christians love to bad mouth. Couldn't really recall why... Right. It seems we have Dust, or Dark Matter, which has started to increase in the sky and seems to be drawn to humans. And a character who is out to destroy it at its source because he believes it is original sin manifested in particle form. By the end of The Subtle Knife, this is turning into a war on The Authority, who we can assume is God himself.

The interesting bit about all this, of course, is that the adults are for the most part evil and greedy. The Church is doing vicious experiments on children (essentially, cutting out their souls to see if this eliminates original sin, but it's more complicated than that in the book). Lyra, our child protagonist, decides that if all these bad people think the Dust is a bad thing, then it must really be a good thing. This is where our American churchgoers have their problem, I expect: A) the suggestion that original sin is part of what makes us human (though it's beginning to appear as if this theory of Dust is going to turn out to be wrong, so this might be a premature conclusion), and B) the fact that the Church is the bad guy in this whole scenario. Oh, well, I suppose we can add the war against God. I'll have to read the third book again, though. At this point, we really don't know anything about The Authority. We as readers can't make our decision yet as to whose side we should be on. There are many fascinating ideas being kicked around here, and I think it's a shame that some Christian parents think it's a bad thing if their children are exposed to ideas.

I love the idea of parallel worlds in this work. It becomes apparent that Lyra's England is not our England. It seems to be about one hundred years behind ours, for one thing. They have electric streetcars but no automobiles. Texas won its independence and is a country there. Certain geographic names are just barely close enough for the reader to guess what they might be, yet "off" enough for us to know this isn't exactly the same place. From what I can tell, though, Will's England, which is introduced in The Subtle Knife, is meant to be our world. The part that gives you a shiver is when Lyra is at Will's Oxford and sees "S.P." carved into the same stone in the same place as in her Oxford. It makes you wonder, if there are parallel universes, where exactly might they diverge? Is there a "me" in another universe? Is there a "you?"

Tags: books, fantasy, philip pullman