The Amber Spyglass

Wow.... I was paging through the reviews for The Amber Spyglass on Goodreads and there is a lot of hate.

While TAS certainly isn't perfect, it's still five times better than most fiction people pick up. One reviewer commented on how much better a writer Dan Brown is than Philip Pullman. How anyone could ever arrive at that conclusion is beyond me.

There was a lot of stuff going on in TAS, and I don't think all of it succeeded.

Good Stuff:

I loved the relationship between Will and Lyra. It was pretty perfect.

I thought the evolution of Mrs. Coulter was handled well. She's so diabolical that even when she's double crossing Metatron I thought, “Wait, maybe she's going to screw over Asriel. Again.” But it's apparent at the end that she's got a heart, and it's nice to see.

Revisiting Scoresby, Iorek, and of course Roger was terrific.

Bad Stuff:

There's just too much going on.

The Assassin priest bit seemed anti-climactic. I didn't feel like there was ever any danger for Lyra, Will, or Mary Malone.

Slaying the Ancient of Ancients was over so quickly. When I think about this event, I imagine that there should have been more weight given to it. Wasn't it Lyra's main prophetical purpose, other than to succumb to temptation by Mary? But wasn't it Will who made the cut? I think I will have to re-read this portion to gain better understanding.

There's more stuff, but I needn't really go on. It was still an awesome read. I think The Subtle Knife is still my favorite out of the series.

This book is so painful and makes me ache and makes me weep and love and there's so many things going on I don't know what to focus on
I spend a lot of time reading the books of His Dark Materials and now that I'm done i'm just empty and that's when you know a series was good. The way that you feel empty, almost numb, and not knowing what the hell you were supposed to do now.
I loved the series, all that happened and the ending too, even though it made me ache.

I really liked the ideas the book proposes surrounding the movement from childhood to adulthood being the movement from grace to hard work. It meshes very well with my own feelings of child development, and that point at which you realize people aren't going to hand you magic objects anymore. That said, I thought this books ideas on the way to lead a good life were the most bluntly stated in the trilogy. It's philosophy I agree with, but I'd rather it wasn't spelled out in quite such large letters. Let the message of the story speak for itself.

On that story, I really love the parallels being drawn between Lyra and her mother. At the end of the book, I still don't feel I truly grasp Mrs. Coulter as a character. I'm not sure if that's a failing in my own reading or in the storytelling. The same could be said of Lord Asriel. Lyra and Will, on the other hand, are such deeply gripping characters that I couldn't put the book down during their chapters and got rather frustrated with anyone else's point of view. Ah well. A great book, though still stretching the definition of “children's literature,” publishers. Pullman never intended them as such, but I'm still shelving them there because thoughtful, mature children should read them.

After the excellence of the previous part of this trilogy, this book was definitely a let-down. More of the final preparations for war are made, and Will and Lyra learn that love can conquer all (even God), but that sacrifices must be made along the way. Pullman continues to write beautiful pieces of prose in this work, although he still suffers from this sense that he's trying to write Important Literature, and not just children's fantasy. Overall, I would say that this series was a bit of a let-down, although it definitely was a bold story to tell.

For the most part I did enjoy The Amber Spyglass, but when looking at it a little more critically I find that it delivered so little of what it promised. I see no need to go over ground that other reviews have already covered a thousand times. Suffice it to say that the book died for me about here:

“The Regent was a being whose profound intellect had had thousands of years to deepen and strengthen itself, and whose knowledge extended over a million universes. Nevertheless, at that moment he was blinded by his twin obsessions: to destroy Lyra and to possess her mother.”

This review is also featured on Behind the Pages: The Amber Spyglass

The war grows ever closer as angels and creatures from all the worlds gather to each side to fight for what they believe in. God, or man. Tasked by his father to join Lord Asriel in his war, Will refuses to join until he finds Lyra. With the guidance of two angels, he races to rescue Lyra who lays in a drugged sleep, balancing between the worlds of the living and the dead. It is in this drugged sleep Lyra finds her departed friend, Roger. She swears she will find him again once she wakes. As Will and Lyra are reunited, they will travel through worlds once more, this time on a quest to save the dead.

Will and Lyra are the best characters in this trilogy. When they are on the page, it is guaranteed that the reader will be entertained. Having watched them grow throughout the trilogy, you can see how their previous choices have formed the people they are by the end. And despite the growing odds against them, they don't give up. They always think outside the box and maintain that childhood innocence that makes them believe anything is possible. Even in their darkest moments, they know that if the two of them are together, there will be a light at the end.

While Will and Lyra carried the main plot, I was surprised at the amount of filler the subplots had. Mary's story arc didn't even make sense to me. While it might have been interesting that she journeyed to a new world and made friends with the inhabitants, I couldn't help but wonder what the point was. The events that happened could have easily been summed up in a lesser quantity to tighten the storyline and not lose sight of the main plot. In fact, the namesake the book's title takes after seemed to be dropped in. It wasn't significant like we've seen the golden compass (alethiometer) and the subtle knife. I have a feeling there was hidden symbolism that I missed.

There was also an attempt at a redemption arc for some characters, but after watching one pull apart a living creature for fun that redemption fell short. And I was surprised when the main plot ended, and I saw that I had a decent chunk of pages left. Admittedly the conclusion came faster than expected and was anticlimactic, but I didn't expect the story to continue for so long. I have a feeling Pullman wanted to add in more connections to religion and lost sight of his story's vision. I'm sad to say, I didn't like this conclusion. The first two books were amazing, but this one seemed forced.

Pullman writes quite well, he has a good imagination, and some of his imagery is memorable. But his imagination seems to me undisciplined: there's not just one fantasy element here but many, a stack of different weirdnesses piled untidily on top of each other. As a general rule, I disapprove of fantasy that runs riot like that. Even Terry Pratchett has more discipline, and he writes comic fantasy in which it doesn't matter so much.

Pullman's characterization is good only when he concentrates. His main characters, Will and Lyra, are quite convincingly drawn and I came to care about them, but the other characters in the book, even quite important ones, are only sketched and don't exist in any depth.

Although Will and Lyra are juveniles, this is a very serious adult story in which seriously bad things happen. It doesn't make comfortable reading, and I'm really surprised that it became so popular.

I should perhaps mention that Pullman appears to be virulently anti-Christian. This isn't a particular problem for me as I'm fairly anti-religious myself, but I was a bit startled by the strength of his feelings.

When I finished this trilogy, I was disgusted with the ending.

On a cosmic level, the right side wins. But, on a personal level, it seems that all the characters end up dead, unhappy, or no better off than they'd been at the start; and Will and Lyra in particular seem doomed to live unhappily ever after.When you write fantasy, particularly with the sort of wide-open licence Pullman gives himself, you can have any sort of ending you want. If he gives us an ending no better than that, it's because that's the sort of ending he wants, which indicates that he and I are thoroughly incompatible. I don't expect I'll ever read any of his other books, because plainly he has no intention of delivering the kind of book I want to read.There are rarely happy endings in real life; but we experience real life whether we like it or not. We read fiction by choice, and I choose not to read fiction that allows me to emerge at the end feeling dismal and let down. Fiction is entertainment; if I'm not agreeably entertained, I don't come back for more.It's admittedly difficult to imagine an ending for Will and Lyra of the form “... and so they lived happily ever after.” Neither of them was suited to be written off in such a quiet and peaceful way. Any happy ending for them would really require several more books to be written about their subsequent adventures. Indeed, even with the ending as written, I suspect that they got up to many unreported adventures after the end of the story.The really unpleasant thing is that they were condemned to do so separately. Pullman contrived that they eventually fell in love with each other and were then almost immediately required (for bizarre reasons of cosmic expediency) never to see each other again. It might even have been preferable if one or both of them had died.

I was reminded of the story of John Lennon's first meeting with Yoko Ono. He was at an avant-garde art exhibition, and one of the exhibits involved climbing up a ladder and peering through a magnifying glass at something. When he did so, what he saw was “Yes”. He was pleased that the message turned out to be positive, and sought to meet the artist.

With Pullman, I felt that I spent quite a long and weary time climbing the ladder, looked through the magnifying glass, and saw “No”. I feel no desire to meet the artist.

I had my own copies of these books, but I later got rid of them. This is not the sort of thing I want to reread.

Executive Summary: Just as I was starting to really enjoy this book, it turned again and I was just happy to be done with it. That kind of sums up my feelings on the series as a whole too.

Audiobook: The audio is honestly the best part about this. It's fantastic. If you're going to do this book/series, audio is definitely the way to go. Once again you get a full cast, and their are fantastic.

Full Review
I wanted to like this series more, but it just kept letting me down. It's not bad, but based on how many people whose opinions I trust liked it, I expected to like it more. I'm not sure if it's because I'm too old to read this, or if I just fundamentally disagree with some of Mr. Pullman's ideas or what.

I was hoping/expecting a fun series. What I got instead was often frustrating and depressing. I'm not in the school of belief about sugarcoating everything for kids, but this almost seemed to shove the notion that life isn't fair down their throats. Unless you lie. Lying will get you ahead. This book did finally have some consequences for lying, but not nearly as much as their should be. It seems to glorify lying.

Oh and religion is awful and anyone who believes in it is awful too. I'm not even religious, but I have many friends who are, and they wouldn't be my friends if they weren't great people. The level of preaching present in the last two books ramped up to a whole other level.

The part that I liked the best was the middle, and the traveling to the land of the dead. I thought that was a really cool idea. This series had a lot of really cool ideas, but the execution of them just didn't work for me.

The book, like the series wasn't all bad, I think my high expectations played a role in my being pretty underwhelmed. I'm glad I finally read it, but it's not something I'm going to recommend people go out of their way to pick up.

like I hear what you're SAYING about how this book went bonkers off the rails
but my HEART says it was still awesome upon re-reading??

I will note that, much like the delicate mental state required to read the alethiometer, I was just trying real hard not to think about gender roles while re-reading? like I think if you dug into it like at all there's some wackness w/r/t sexuality in here but I'm just not thinking about it byeee

Ooh boy it gets very heavy-handed at the end. But I do appreciate how Pullman refuses to pigeonhole his characters and to wrap most things up with a tidy bow—characters who were antagonists early on show some goodness, perhaps even redeeming goodness, and not everybody gets what they want in the end. The wrap-up is full of messaging that I liked but which I suppose I wish were a bit more subtle.

O amor do Will e da Lyra me manteve na ponta dos pés metade do livro. O amor (Mary, Serafina e Coram, Marisa e Lord Asriel, até Iorek e Lyra) de modo geral foi lindo. Claro, o livro é cheio de furos (nota-se o furor religioso do autor deixando confusões antiquadas pros dias de hoje, com bons versus maus, submissão cega à fé e sua incompatibilidade com a vida real e a necessidade dos anjos de explicarem aos pobres personagens o q está acontecendo - mesmo que os anjos apaixonados tenham sido um bom toque). Mas é uma sessão da tarde fofinha.