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language: English
country: UK
year: 1995
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: His Dark Materials, #1
dates read: 29.12.23-1.1.24
I found out my partner had never read His Dark Materials, so we listened to the audiobook of The Golden Compass, and god damn (no pun intended) it’s a good book — and an incredible audiobook, because it’s full-cast and very well acted, with narration by Pullman himself. I loved it as a child, too, but it’s even more rewarding now that I know things about history and theology and can fully appreciate the unhingedness of (e.g.) “Pope John Calvin”, the implications of some of the politics that flies over Lyra’s head, the speculative wordplay, and the academic politicking (fuck the Palmerian professor!).
Pullman does, generally, an excellent job of keeping Lyra believable as a child caught up in world-historical events without overstating her position or, conversely, condescending to his (presumed-child) reader. the one section where this falters slightly is during the section with Iofur Raknison on Svalbard, where everything falls together just a little too neatly (particularly the fact that his little puppet daemon is conveniently human-shaped, setting up Lyra’s lie). this is outweighed, though, by the vast majority of the book.
the characterization is excellent. the writing also skillfully balances a child audience and a possible adult reader — I’m thinking, for example, about the description of Lyra’s life in Oxford, where some of the descriptions of the disconnect between the children’s social world and adult perceptions of it, which really nicely both speaks to the importance, complexity, and felt gravity of children’s social lives (taking children seriously in a way that I appreciated as a child) and also reminds adults of the ways children experience the world (pushing adult readers to take children seriously, making an effective claim for itself as a Serious Book).
the world-building is mostly incredible, although there are some points where it appears to rest on (charitably, hopefully) unexamined racial and colonial prejudices — the positioning of the implicitly-Sámi “Lapland witches” as otherworldly (even if not literally other-worldly) magical beings who don’t feel cold, the unproblematized presentation of the “Tartars” as essentially mindlessly violent “barbarians”. conversely, I appreciate the commitment to the Gyptians as both realistically marginalized (complete with recognizable political concerns about freedom of movement in a sedentary society) and heroic, though it’s ultimately, I think, a romanticization rather than a substantive engagement with antigypsyism.
the book also achieves on multiple occasions one of the feelings I crave most when reading speculative fiction, namely encountering something that is wrong in-world, but which there is no real-world basis for assessing, and feeling it as wrong in (something like) the way the characters do. Lyra finding Tony Makarios clinging to his piece of dead fish is one of these — and imo one of the most emotionally affecting scenes in any fantasy — and Lyra and Kaisa finding the room full of intercised daemons in cages is another.
I’m regretting, now, that I didn’t bring the other two books with me, but the audiobooks of them are just as good as this one, so that’s something to look forward to.
moods: adventurous, dark, emotional, tense