Le Review: His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (spoilers ahoy!)

I don’t know how, but I’d never heard of this trilogy until the movie The Golden Compass came out, and even then I didn’t pay much attention. It wasn’t until I was creating my fill in the gaps list (and someone at work recommended them to me) that I really looked into them. Set in parallel universes, it’s the coming of age story of Lyra Belacqua (I’m so infatuated with her name!) and Will Parry. It’s also a critique of organised religion, and (thanks Google!) an inversion of the epic poem Paradise Lost by John Milton.

While there were some bits I didn’t like,  on the whole I really enjoyed reading these books. The doomed lovers bit at the end just annoyed me, but I find all doomed lovers annoying. (This is probably more a reflection on me than the books.) Occasionally I found Pullman’s style a little grating and overly wordy, but to be fair, the scene where Lyra says goodbye to Pan when she sets off for the land of the dead made me bawl my eyes out so it did its job. (I was on the train coming home from work at the time. Embarassed much?)

After I’d finished reading the books I clicked around on some reviews on the interwebs, and found a lot of reviews blasting the books as Anti-Christian. I don’t think that’s true at all, I think the books are against organised religion, or at least the negative aspects of it, but I don’t think there’s any point in there where Pullman is trying to turn us all into atheists.

This morning I started reading Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. By the time I got to Flinders Street I thought I was on the London underground. If it wasn’t for the fact that I need to at least look like I’m doing work, I’d be reading it right now. Instead, I am eating speckles that I just bought at Haighs, and feeling so sad for this kid.