Garoo

So… I burned through the three books (Northern Lights / The Golden Compass; The Subtle Knife; The Amber Spyglass) in the course of 72 hours, and two days later I’m still not sure what I want to write about them.

As soon as I found out about the subject — some kind of alternate universe where you don’t wear your soul inside you but outside, embodied in a companion animal — I was hooked, and I wanted to see how the story was really developed and not limit myself to whatever could fit in a two-hour Hollywood movie.

I was right to want to read the novels: the story is so dense I can’t imagine how you could reduce each book to a single movie script (I know that’s also true of Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings, for instance, but the bottomline is I don’t care about whiny orphan sorcerers and whiny dim-witted hobbitses and OMG I just figured out a trend here) and, while the author’s style is not spectacular, it’s efficient and straight to the point — quite cinematographic, one could say, if one could imagine that word not being an insult.

The big disappointment, though, was the lack of what I really hoped to find in the book that couldn’t possibly translate well into the movie: a coherent explanation, a real theory, of why those people have their souls outside of them and how that works. To be sure, the daemon thing is not a gadget — it’s really central to the first volume, and quite nicely exploited in the other two — but I could never really get over the fact that it makes no sense and, more importantly, that there’s no clear definition of what part of the characters’ personality lies in their heart/brain, and what lies in their soul/daemon. One of the books actually separates some characters from their daemons, and yet they don’t appear to act or think differently; if the soul is neither your emotions nor your conscience or, I don’t know, the center of your rational thought, then what’s your daemon really more than a talking plush toy with an uncanny gift for empathy (and an additional pair of eyes so you can watch behind your back)?

But that’s not so bad; the story is strong enough to make you want to go on, despite the kind of nitpicking I can’t really ever let go of. What is bad, however, and more distracting from the story, is the author’s anticlericalism — if you thought that Christian associations protesting the adaptation on movie screens were out of line, well… consider this: I’m an agnostic, raised an atheist, and the author’s attack on the Christian religion is so violent that I would think twice before stocking those books in a school library. It’s one thing to depict an alternate-reality Vatican as a worldwide dictatorship (they’ve kinda been there and done that); but what Pullman establishes in the third book is heinous, and properly insulting to anyone who believes in one God, and that’s a lot of people. I don’t mean that it’s a bad story or it shouldn’t be told, just that it’s quite impolite, in a way, and that it shocked me out of solidarity with my believer friends (and I’m not sure I have any). Or maybe it’s less the story than the way it’s being told.

Which brings me to the part where I’m glad I read the books but didn’t buy them (Thanks, rhino75): I don’t think I like this Pullman person very much. Nevermind writing a whole trilogy against religion (and making it all about destiny and religion, only pagan and new age-y); what really stopped me in my tracks was reading that dull people have dull daemons, and all manservants’ daemons are dogs and all maids’ are hens (if I remember correctly — the dogs are mentioned at least twice, but I’m not so sure about the hens). Erm… I’m sorry, that’s not something I’d much like to write, or read — and particularly not in a novel that’s purported to be for “children and young adults.” Yeesh.

And yet, like I said, I really am glad I read the books. Because the story is interesting, the universe is original, and the plot twists are… well, let’s say you really should read the trilogy before they start promoting the third movie, because you’ll want to save yourself the surprise of what’s going on there — by the way, I can’t wait to see how they handle the adaptation, if they removed any reference to religion from the first movie. (And the trilogy would make a very nice two- or three-season TV miniseries, if it were at all possible to produce a TV show with such a subject matter.)

Recommended, then, not because it’s a masterpiece, but because it’s an original perspective, and a break from those whiny orphan sorcerers.

Illustration: AeroMartin.