Denver Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Club

The Golden Compass (1995)
His Dark Materials Book One
(UK title Northern Lights)

Knopf hardback edition - 399 pages
Cover artwork by Eric Rohmann (left)

Del Rey paperback edition - 351 pages (right)

The young girl Lyra lives and plays among the scholars at Jordan College in an alternate world version of Oxford England.  Her constant companion is her shape shifting daemon, Pantalaimon, a talking animal familiar.  One day, from hiding, she sees Lord Asriel's presentation about his Arctic mission.  Lyra learns of a city in the northern lights, and of Dust, not ordinary dust, but a magical particle with unique properties.

Children are mysteriously disappearing, taken by the Gobblers.  Lyra's friend Roger becomes one of the missing.  The glamorous Mrs. Coulter, who has a golden monkey daemon, volunteers to look after Lyra.

The Master of Jordan College gives Lyra an alethiometer, an instrument that can tell the truth.  But how to place the instrument's hands around the dial and read the thirty six symbols Lyra has to learn for herself.

Lyra discovers more about Mrs. Coulter's Oblation Board, which is experimenting with daemons.  Then Lyra becomes entangled in dangerous adventures that lead to the far North - to Bolvangar and to Svalbard.  Along the way Lyra befriends gyptians looking for their missing children, witches that fly on cloud pine branches, a balloonist from Texas, and an armored polar bear.

At its foundation, this book is a fun adventure story.  The adventure follows Lyra, a spunky young woman who travels to the ends of the earth hoping to free a group of captive children, including her best friend.  Pullman covers a lot of territory effectively and introduces a host of interesting side characters, especially the strong-willed gyptians and the somber polar bear Iorek Byrnison.  The adventure story works largely because Lyra is a terrific protagonist for a young adult novel.  She suffers all the confusion and uncertainty of a typical adolescent, yet repeatedly manages to escape danger and help her friends through cleverness and sheer determination (both of which she has in greater supply than Harry Potter, I must say).  I feared things would turn maudlin when Lyra’s parents were discovered to be important and powerful people, but Pullman avoids this by making her parents remarkably unlikable.  There is plenty in this book to entertain readers young and old.

But as fun as the story is, the novel transcends its adventure underpinnings, for at least two reasons.  First, it is infused with great fantastic imagery.  When I found myself fully absorbed in a wonderfully surreal scene depicting a squadron of armored polar bears launching flame at a zeppelin, while the zeppelin fires back with machine guns and flying witches pepper the bears with arrows, I realized I was reading something truly unique and memorable.

Second, the device of the daemons, animal-shaped companions to all human beings in Pullman’s universe, is brilliant.  The daemon concept is marvelously conceived and carried out.  Pullman brings his readers to believe in daemons as an integral part of his characters’ lives, to the point that we are actually shocked when we learn that the villains have been separating children from their daemons.  (What?  A child left with no daemon?  How horrible!  Wait a minute…)  The daemons allow Pullman to take internal thoughts and struggles and show them in external, literal terms.  Where other books might tell you that an adult compels a youth to obey through strength of will, Pullman actually shows the adult’s daemon overpowering the child’s.  Instead of telling us that Lyra had to force herself to overcome her fears in order to talk to the intimidating Iorek Byrnison, Pullman shows us her daemon literally pulling her forward.  The daemons are also central to Pullman’s metaphorical points, allowing him to grapple with issues regarding the soul and religion in a way that can fascinate sophisticated readers without distracting his younger readers.

One mistake Pullman made was not showing us more of Lyra’s friend Roger in the early passages in Oxford.  If we had gotten to know him better, the later sections of the book when he is in grave danger would have had more impact.  But this is only a minor quibble with an outstanding effort by Philip Pullman.

The Subtle Knife (1997)
His Dark Materials Book Two

The Amber Spyglass (2000)
His Dark Materials Book Three

Paperback cover artwork by Eric Peterson (left)

Hardback cover artwork by
Eric Rohmann (right)