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language: English
country: UK
year: 2000
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: His Dark Materials, #3
dates read: 8.1.24-15.1.24
The Amber Spyglass is, notwithstanding some slightly preachy passages (Pullman never effectively manages to escape the Christian moralization of labor and suffering as ennobling; he just transfers the reward from the Christian afterlife into this world), rich and engaging. as a child I found it overwhelming, and it never quite all clicked for me the way it did for my brother.
like The Farthest Shore and especially The Other Wind, it is (among other things) an attempt to deal with the problem of death; ultimately I think that, like Le Guin, mainly what it does is evade the problem, but, like Le Guin, I don’t begrudge it, first because it’s doing enough other interesting things and second because what it’s responding to is first and foremost the Christian conception of the afterlife. its handling of the Land of the Dead (and the Clouded Mountain) is a primarily a response to the concepts of “heaven” and “hell” rather than to “death” in the abstract or in and of itself.
what I love most about this book is the pacing: the battle with the forces of the Regent seems, at first glance, like it should be the “climax” of the novel. but it isn’t: it is, like the War in Heaven in Paradise Lost, just a prelude to Pullman’s refiguring of the Fall, which is — absent a tyrannical Authority to chastise and punish — quiet and lovely, inevitable and yet (I found) somehow unexpected.
the other highlight is Mary. truly a Character. she should be a lesbian, though. she and Atal have a vibe, and it would make so much sense with her analogy about falling in love. how easy to miss what’s happening if you have no frame of cultural reference for making sense of what it is you’ve been feeling. at least there’s Baruch and Balthamos!
moods: adventurous, hopeful, inspiring, reflective