25 April, 2002: The Amber Spyglass
Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials series has been justly lauded; it's been compared to every major children's fantasy series, and the third volume, The Amber Spyglass, was longlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize. The Amber Spyglass, however, doesn't strike me as a very good children's book. The children seem almost an afterthought; the series as a whole is good, very good, but in the final chapter so much world-shaking is going on that the people and stories we care about are lost in the dust and rubble.
One of the great appeals of the first in the series, The Golden Compass, was its protagonists, Lyra. The talking bears and pseudo-Victorian setting and detailed cosmology didn't hurt, of course, but Lyra, a girl with the stubbornness of a mule and without an honest bone in her body, was a triumph of a character. In the second book, Lyra shared the stage with Will. Lyra's mother was shown to be creepy, nicely drawn villain; Will's mother was helpless, insane. Where Lyra was shovey, mouthy, the center of attention, Will receded into the background. Will was a nicely drawn character, but not the tour de force that Lyra was. Alas, in The Amber Spyglass, an even larger cast of characters pulls the spotlight away from Will and Lyra much of the time.
It's hard to accuse a novel that draws on Paradise Lost and the visionary work of William Blake for being too vast, but I felt that where The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife maintained their focus and pacing by attending the the needs and desires of Will and Lyra. Pullman managed to keep a human scale on a literal battle between Earth and Heaven. There's a kind of "hey, look how epic!" showiness that deadens the emotional effect. The Amber Spyglass spends dozens of pages on characters who aren't Will and Lyra, features political scheming, travels to the land of the dead, not one but two hitherto unrevealed alien races, the truth about the rulership of Heaven, and the revelation of the universe's spiritual cosmology, but the two kids -- the ones who should make it all hold together, give it a human face -- almost vanish.