His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass (Book 1)

"His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass" enchants readers with its richly imagined world and compelling characters. As a 37-year-old woman, I found myself transported to a realm where magic intertwines with adventure in the most captivating way. Lyra's journey, filled with wonder and danger, kept me eagerly turning pages until the very end. Philip Pullman's masterful storytelling and intricate world-building make this book a timeless classic that deserves every bit of its 5-star rating.

This book and this series is exceptional in so many ways. I give it five stars, and my 9-year-old son is reading the series as I re-read it with him.

Here are three things I love about this book:

1- The main character is a strong girl (Lyra) with incredible willpower as well as a pre-ordained important role to play in the world. She is funny, scrappy, and a very likable and relatable main character. The fate of the world is literally in her hands, but she doesn't realize that.

2- The world building here is so creative and so different from other fantasy novels. After reading a lot of fantasy novels with my son, at some point I get bored of the traditional storyline of wizard fights some sort of evil and prevails. In this world, every person is born joined to a Daemon, which is an animal who talks and basically always stays within ten feet of the person. They are bonded forever, and part of being a whole human is being bonded from birth to death with this talking animal. There's also a huge theme here about physics, which they call "Dark Matter" or "Dust" - that creates mystery that keeps you on the edge of your seat throughout the book. There are also such creative creatures, including armored polar bears who talk and are mercenaries for hire. There are witches, who live for thousands of years and exist within clans. And the Daemons are fascinating. They can change shape at will into any animal basically until their human hits puberty, at which point they pick one animal shape to maintain for the rest of their lives.

3- The settings are interesting, and also related to parts of the earth. For instance, the story starts in Oxford in England where Lyra grows up as a part of a college. She is a little girl among scholars, who mainly runs around and does what she wants throughout the town. She's proud of her mastery of the spaces around her, and becomes the center of most groups of kids, who follow her - from her best friend who is the son of a kitchen worker at the college to her friends the Gyptians who live on boats. Then the story moves to the Arctic, where there are detailed descriptions of auroras and vivid explanations of the cold. My son got more interested in the Arctic here, and found himself exploring the science in the science fiction. That's an exciting advantage of a book like this!

Notes for parents raising kids in a religious tradition:

The church is evil in this book and in this series. And the church uses names and terms like many real religious traditions- clergy, magisterium, priests, etc. The church is funding an evil plot to try to harness energy by physically harming children in the Arctic. Phillip Pullman is unapologetic about the church being evil in this series, and even extrapolates later in the second book to make statements about churches always being on the wrong side of things.

The book is just so, so good, so I didn't want that to be a reason not to share it with my son who loves fantasy and science fiction. But I did want to read it with him and talk about it throughout the book. We talked about how worlds are different from each other in fantasy and real life. We've also spent time talking about how church is an institution, and institutions make mistakes and have done things that are wrong or even evil- and how to square that with being confirmed in a church literally this year.

If you are a parent of a child being raised in a religious tradition, I strongly recommend reading this series together with your child.

Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass was one of the first audiobooks I listened to after joining Audible in 2004. I followed it not long after with The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, and subsequently with every other published book by Pullman I could get my hands on. The novels of His Dark Materials are both exceptionally good books and exceptionally good audiobooks. The Listening Library audiobooks are full-cast productions.

The Golden Compass takes place in a fantasy world that resembles our Earth in some respects -- for instance, there is a university called Oxford -- and is different in others. For instance, every person has a daemon -- a soul. The daemon is a talking animal. A person must remain close to his or her daemon -- to separate by more than a few yards causes both great distress. The daemons of children are changeable in form, but those of adults are fixed. For instance, Lyra, the girl at the center of the story, has a daemon called Pantalaimon, who, when we first meet him, is in the form of a moth, but who more often is something like a weasel. Mrs Coulter, one of the principal adult characters, has a daemon who is a monkey.

Lyra comes into possession of an device called the "alethiometer" -- this is the thing that the title The Golden Compass refers to. It is not in fact a compass. In the hands of a skilled user, it gives truthful answers to any questions it is asked. Lyra, it turns out, has a special affinity for the alethiometer. She learns dangerous things from it and she and Pantalaimon find it necessary to flee Oxford. Adventures and intrigues ensue, which I will not spoil.

Before I listened to The Golden Compass, I felt that J.R.R. Tolkien had in a sense frozen fantasy. Every fantasy work published after The Lord of the Rings felt, in a way, like a version or reflection of that Great Work. His Dark Materials did not. In 2004 when I read it I felt that I had for the first time in four decades found a fantasy series that owed nothing to J.R.R. Tolkien -- something new and completely original.

This book starts a bit slowly at first, but then kicks up into high-adventure and keeps this pace to the end. Pullman’s writing is very good and he manages to capture a perfect voice for the main character of Lyra as she negotiates this strange world populated by anthropomorphic soul-animals, witches, ghasts, and armored bears.

In reading this book, I felt reminiscent of the that sweet, nostalgic tone achieved by C.S. Lewis in “The Narnia Chronicles.” Perhaps this is simply due to the omniscient point of view in which the narrators guide one along in these comparable fantasy works. There is something comforting when you feel as if a story is being told you by a dear old friend while at the same time you’re being truly immersed in the narrative. That is a subtle art in which the author must carefully balance the use of the narrative voice so as not to feel intrusive or too expositional. I think there is something in the human psyche that responds to this mode of storytelling that harkens back to our ancient oral traditions.

The work is not particularly a “Christian” one, even though I am mentioning The Narnia Chronicles which are more overtly Christian in their telling. Pullman does draw on the dogma, practices, history and teachings of the Christian Religion to create his fantasy world and also to better illustrate what is happening and drive the plot along. However, unlike The Narnia Chronicles, the institutional nature of religion plays a much bigger and more nefarious role in The Golden Compass. That being said, this particular tale is not overly caught up with this theme. During some portions the religious aspect is missing altogether—though I admit that it does make up an important part of the book. So in essence, I am saying that however critical this book might be toward the institutional aspect of religion—it is not solely concerned with that point.

The world created by Pullman feels rather unique, even though it is a secondary world not unlike our own (in many ways). He devises a magical system utilizing a special dust-like substance; and souls that live outside the body in animal forms called daemons. This feels very authentic and manages to be quite delightful. Probably the strongest and most developed part of the book is the relationship Lyra has with her own daemon.

Other elements of the story come flying in as Lyra (the protagonist), takes up her quest to deliver a magical item to a far off and dangerous land. She meets interesting, fun and compelling characters all along the way. My only gripe is that at times, these non-player-character-types seem to drop on and off screen as needed. So too, does the adventure seem to proceed along one step at a time. The feel of this story is that as the protagonist progresses, the author foreshadows the next event, a challenge is overcome and the protagonist advances to the next level. A bit mechanical—not exactly contrived, but somewhat stilted. The writing is really great and the plot has a lot of fun and interesting elements that leave you anxious to see things through. There is just something a bit….in the background…missing... Perhaps it was the dropping away of secondary characters without a lot of follow through on their individual subplots? But, maybe that would have just slowed things down? I’m not sure.

All in all, I have no real problems with this book. It’s very well written, a great read and I’d definitely recommend it and am curious to read more. Mainly though, the author has a great voice for his story telling and that is what really pulls you in.

Podcast: If you enjoy my review (or this topic) this book and the movie based on it were further discussed/debated in a lively discussion on my podcast: "No Deodorant In Outer Space". The podcast is available on iTunes, Tune-In Radio, Stitcher, Google Play Music, YouTube or our website.

I have seem the movie which wasn’t awful, but I feel like it kind of ruined the book for me in some ways and normally that doesn’t happen for me……typically the book is so much better and engages me. In this case the movie mostly followed the book, there were some things that were out of order but more or less it was very similar. I had hoped that the book would fill in some lingering questions for me that the movie didn’t answer…..which in some ways it did but not as extensively as I had hoped.

While I think the book was better, I would say that it wasn’t ‘much’ better than the movie. I would say they were about the same. I was hoping for more suspense, new details, and more explanation of the characters and the events happening……but I felt like I got a surface overview of everything. I will probably read the other books in the series as I am curious where this is going, however I don’t know that I will move them up my TBR list any time soon.

Maybe it’s because the book and movie were so similar but I didn’t feel that whole ‘what happens next’ intrigue pulling me in to keep reading…..there wasn’t any suspense for me unfortunately but that could be different in the other books which will be ‘uncharted territory’ for me.

On another note….I can’t believe this book is for children! Now, I don’t believe in book banning or censorship, however I do think that there is an age where some themes are more appropriate than others. I think this book would probably be for older teens (14-18) rather than 11-18 as it is marketed. I think the religious themes and challenges to convention/tradition are wonderful for the 11-18 age group and I think with guidance from parents this would be a great book to encourage discussion about religion etc…..what I was hesitant about was the violence of some of the scenes. I thought some of the descriptions….the missing heads for example….. of the missing heads etc were a little graphic and ‘scary’ for children 11-18….I would say 14-18 would be a little better for some of the violence and the graphic nature of part of the book. Overall though, adults and children a like would enjoy this book.

The other thing that bothered me a little is was the language. For a young girl growing up with a lord has her guardian and living in the most exclusive Oxford colleges…..I expected Lyra to speak better but instead the way she spoke was almost more ‘working class’. Yes I know she hung around with a lot of servants and such but it bothered me that her linguistics didn’t match her ‘class’….minor though it may be, this bothered me for a number of reasons but mostly I thought what are we trying to teach these young readers? A lot of children are reading this book and looking up to Lyra and in my opinion it would be nice to see Lyra’s speech be equal to that admiration.

Overall this was a decent read…..I think I would have liked it better if I hadn’t seen the movie first (again, a rarity for me) but it satisfied a need that I was craving…..more cold winter-ish books. It also inspired me to pick up books that I loved in my childhood such as The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe and A Wrinkle in Time. I am curious to see where this story goes and the potential for the alternative universe…..what would that world look like? That is the big reason that I will pick up the other books in the series….to see what that world might look like.