June 13th, 2008
The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
I haven’t written any book posts in the past few weeks out of time constraints, which hasn’t kept me from staying on track for my 52 books in 52 weeks challenge. I have updated my progress today with the three books I read over the past 21 days, being Bill Willingham’s Fables: Animal Farm, Jeffrey Brown’s Unlikely, and this one, Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass.
When my son ploughed through the entire Spiderwick Chronicles during the fall of 2007, I decided that giving him the entire His Dark Materials trilogy for Christmas would be a great idea. Of course, his interest (and mine, admittedly) had been piqued with the advertisements for the Golden Compass movie, but knowing full well it wouldn’t be released in English in my town and we’d have to wait for the DVD release before seeing it, I figured he could go the other route and read the book before seeing the movie.
He simply adored The Golden Compass. He’d keep me updated daily on Lyra’s progress, on her tribulations with Mrs. Coulter, her meeting with the gyptians, her travels up North, the awesomeness of Iorek Byrnison, and, of course, her improvement in reading the alethiometer. His imagination had not been captivated like this with the Spiderwick books, and I therefore took it upon myself to read The Golden Compass once he was done with it.
What I discovered was a surprisingly intricate fantasy-like universe, profound and layered, written in a perfectly dynamic, colourful, and paced style which doesn’t go too easy on the audience the novel is targeted for, while remaining gratifyingly escapist for adults. In fact, I enjoyed a great deal the modern themes Pullman was trying to convey through the people, politics, and institutions of his Earth, as numerous parallels with our (not-so-different) world were fascinatingly drawn.
My son’s started on The Subtle Knife, and I believe I will be next in line.
Book: The Golden Compass
Publisher: Knopf
Next: Inconegro
Consider the quirkyness of the premise: a millionaire Yemeni sheik contacts a mild-mannered British fisheries scientist to devise a way to bring the sport of salmon fishing into the arid Yemen. As in transplanting salmon into a Yemeni river and ensuring they survive so they can be fished by the local population.
The danger of reading Sylvia Plath is to have the tragic circumstances which formatted her death precede her work. However, when considering The Bell Jar it is extremely difficult to separate the two, especially considering the semi-autobiographical nature of the novel. Echoing her own experience through that of her protagonist Esther Greenwood, The Bell Jar is the life of a young, talented English major who attempts to cope with a society which expects her sensitive, gifted self to set herself into preordained roles, causing her to break down as her identity becomes suppressed. The novel chronicles Esther’s slow descent into a profound depressive state, marked by a growing sardonic dislike of the world and repeated suicide attempts.
If there was one good thing that came out of that “
I was pleasantly surprised to realise that Patrick McGrath’s Asylum would allow me to reacquaint myself with the gothic novel. It hadn’t been presented to me as such. Essentially, I was told it to be a psychological thriller in which passion was pitted against reason in a battle for one woman’s existence.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I got a copy of Sharp Teeth, other that I was in for a modern-day werewolf story. Opening it up and realising that it was written in free verse admittedly surprised me, and my first reflex was something to the effect of “Hm, gimmicky.” Doing proper, compelling free verse is hard, so the little cynic inside me relegated Toby Barlow’s choice of narrative flow to the realm of cheap trickery.
As it stands, creationism and evolution cannot coexist. All major religions are mutually exclusive. All existential trains of thought, whether they be based in reason or faith, find great woe in sharing their supporters with other “rival” dogmas. You have to choose your camp and discard the others, out of fear of ethical adultery. But what if it was possible to mix some of those belief systems together? What if it was possible to (using the best modern lingo possible) mash-up all these ideas, concepts, and beliefs into a single, vast perception of the world? That is what Yann Martel’s exceptional Life of Pi propounds, in the guise of one of the single most engrossing and penetrating novels I have ever read.
Well, there it is. I have successfully concluded reading the third part of Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry trilogy. And it’s every much as grandiose and epic as one would expect such high fantasy to be.
If book one of the Fionavar Tapestry trilogy was a slow burn, The Wandering Fire is quite the opposite. The pace immediately feels more urgent, which is normal because the threat of war looms over Fionavar, and our five heroes scramble to collect the forces needed to stand a chance at defeating ultimate evil. Bu tI do nuance: patience is a virtue when in Fionavar, it seems, we’re far from a breakneck tempo. After all, the book does start off six months after the end of the previous one, and its fledgling war still has yet to ravage the lands.
Was I time I read quite a bit of fantasy novels, which is in direct correlation with my gamer past. And as long as it has been since I’ve read, it’s been even longer since I read a fantasy novel (which, I believe, was the Icewind Dale trilogy).
