Wednesday, July 07, 2004

Phillip Pullman's His Dark Arts

This trilogy of books (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass) was recommended to me as an antidote to Harry Potter series. Pullman's books predate Rowling's blockbuster, and they certainly seems to have influenced it. But where Harry treads lightly, Lyra stomps loudly, leaving debris in her wake.

As you already figured out, the protagonist of His Dark Arts is a young girl who grew up in Oxford, and whose parents, to say the least, are shady characters (the word 'evil' is about to roll off the tip of my tongue). Disastrous events seem to be happening in Lyra's world, and she's hell-bent (literally) to discover why. The McGuffin du jour is Dust, a strange substance that seems to be somehow related to that minute difference that makes us human and not ape.

While main characters of the book are children, such weighty topics as multiplicity of worlds, religion, and the origin of human consciousness are considered. The author is obviously an agnostic (or an atheist, perhaps) . Do not even consider reading this book if you are violently christian. The organized religion, christian especially, is largely the villain of the piece. In my not so humble opinion, the book is a breath of fresh air among theme-light or chritianized young adult literature. The same people who thought Harry Potter books should be burned, will think that the plates with which His Dark Arts were printed should be melted.

The books themselves are sublimely entertaining, even though the last one is a letdown, where the author cannot resist hammering his ideas into reader's heads with some rather massive sledgehammers. They are also more than a little terrifying -- in the second book vampiric ghosts that quite graphically suck consciousness from people are introduced, for example. But they are by far more fun than Potter books. There are also only three of them, and considering the last time I have read an already completed fantasy series -- this is quite an achievement by itself.