Review: His Dark Materials
As a whole package, the His Dark Materials trilogy tells a good story. It’s a story of a young seemingly ordinary girl named Lyra who ends up tangled in a prophecy that determines the fate of the worlds. Yes, plural worlds. The idea of multiple worlds was one of the best things about this book. The explanation of it makes sense and is explained in the same way as it is in the short-lived sci-fi series, Sliders.
The first book, The Golden Compass, was my favorite of the three. The world of Oxford, demons, and armored polar bears felt so real that it made me wonder if it really was possible that there was a world running parallel to ours that could be like that. It made me wish I had a daemon of my own or a polar bear I could ride.
The second book, The Subtle Knife was a bit of a let down because it felt like a book-long introduction. Reading about how the other worlds reacted to something that was affecting all of them was neat because of all the coincidences that happened in each world, but none of the other worlds felt as rich or as complex as that of the first book. A couple of new characters were introduced in the second book, but they seemed pretty one-dimensional.
I thought the third book, The Amber Spyglass, would be the best book of all since it would bring an end to an epic story, but it sort of just fizzled out. The end of the antagonists was anticlimatic to say the least. The third book was also a bit too heavy handed for my taste, but since these books are written for younger readers, I can see why there was a loss of subtlety.
A lot of the backstory could be inferred from bits and pieces picked up throughout the trilogy, so I didn’t think it was necessary to have a straight-forward explanation of events in the last book, but apparently the author did. It felt a bit patronizing.
I’ve been recommending people who want to watch the movie to read at least the first book first. I feel weird recommending the whole trilogy though, because the third book is just so mediocre compared to the first one.
