His Dark Materials - The Trilogy

Been a while. Been reading. It seemed wiser to talk about all the books in the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman rather than one by one.

I just finished the set.

I was halfway through the first one, which I was LOVING when a colleague came up to me: "You enjoying that?" he asked.

"Yes! It's F.A.B.!"

"Yeah... my mom sent it over to me. She wanted my opinion on whether I thought the writer was fascist. She's a minister, by the way."

Erm... I didn't ask which faith. It seemed like a weird thing to say. Fascism? This is obviously a fantasy book for young adults. It's about a girl with a lot of spirit. There's a prophesy concerning her. There'll be a coming of age! It takes place in a world that is like ours but is slightly different! There are weird words explaining common things despite the fact that place names are the same. You aren't sure if you know what's being talked about, but that doesn't matter. You go with the flow. You are embalmed in the atmosphere of the book.

In short, this is everything I look for in a good fantasy book.

Then I started Book Two.

Book Two starts in our world. With a new character. All of a sudden I was in a cloak and dagger mystery that seemed to have very little to do with the story in the previous book. I was cool with that. The character was compelling. He had problems. He was a kid that could think and keep cool under any circumstances.

And then the story went weird.

Really weird.

While still rather liking the premise of the book, the conflict in the story took a turn for the strange. I now understood why a minister could have such difficulty with the story. Philip Pullman himself is a confirmed atheist. I'm still not sure how the story swung from a girl's coming of age to creationism and the fight against the dogma of christianity and the oppression it engaged for its own survival over the ages... but it did.

There were assassins who bargained with "god" for the good of their faith. Angels who were subject to a class system and an angel that styled himself God's regent who had a name that sounded like it was straight out of the Transformers circuit. Odd worlds where life evolved differently.... and so on and so on.

In fact, there was so much stuff going on, that I was being pulled in too many directions at once. I couldn't concentrate on the story at hand, because I was wondering how the heck I got there in the first place. I can tell you now though, that it is possible to have too much going on at the same time in a book. I can't even make sense of it enough to give you a proper review. What I can say, is that I finished it out of duty, rather than racing to end because my heart was pulling my eyes across the page. It left me feeling bewildered.

What a shame.