His dark materials
I've just re-read His dark materials by Philip Pullman.
It's not really a trilogy, but rather a single novel in three volumes, like Lord of the rings. Pullman rather immodestly claims that his books are better than those of Tolkien or C.S. Lewis.
I first read His dark materials about five years ago, and didn't like it much. I thought the first book, Northern Lights was OK, the second, The subtle knife quite interesting, and the third, The amber spyglass an anticlimax.
The third book, in particular, I found annoyingly preachy. Lots of children's books are preachy; what was annoying about this one was that Pullman had castigated C.S. Lewis for being preachy, and then got preachy himself.
I was quite surprised to find that I enjoyed them a lot more on the second reading.
It was long enough since the first reading for me to have forgotten quite a lot of the details, but I knew how the story was going to end, so that softened the anticlimax. But even though the "spoiler" of knowing what was going to happen was really an "enhancer", I'll put it behind a cut for those who haven't read it yet.
I still liked The subtle knife the best of the three books, but on rereading them, found myself more in sympathy with the characters, the children Lyra and Will. At the end, after sharing many adventures, travelling through, into and out of many different universes using the subtle knife, and rescuing each other from danger, they fall in love, but because of the way the world is constructed, they have to separate.
Will and Lyra are from different worlds, and cannot survive long out of their own worlds, and opening doorways between the worlds with the knife is a danger to everyone. So, sadly, they must part.
This is often the way of fairy stories. There is usually some arbitrary and absolute prohibition, and violating it causes all kinds of problems. Pandora opens the box, and so on.
So the story has a sad ending in a way, because these 12-year-olds who have just fallen in love must part, because if they don't, one of them will be dead before they are 25, and if they try to go back and forth between each other's worlds, each time they do so they will create an intellect-eating spectre.
What makes the ending strange, however, in more than just the arbitrary prohibition fashion of fairy stories, is that their decision to part is not very far from the fundamental motivation for Christian asceticism -- giving up something good for something better. Obviously the decision to remain celibate in the case of Christian monastics is not fraught with such dire consequences for the world as it is in the case of Lyra and Will in the story, but at root, it is the same.
Yet throughout the book Pullman snipes at Christian asceticism, and in the third book ends up railing against it through one of the characters, Dr Margaret Malone, an experimental physicist who was formerly a Roman Catholic nun.
So after the reader had been urged throughout the book to share the author's view that asceticism is evil, suddenly the protagonists adopt it, and Pullman appears to believe that it is good.
Rereading the story knowing that that is what is going to happen doesn't make Pullman's sudden switch seem any more logical, but at least one doesn't expect anything better. On the first reading there is a build up that leads one to expect something radically different. Will and Lyra are children of destiny, they are going to change the future of worlds, and introduce something new and radically different to replace the old worn out religious values and asceticism. Pullman has this grand lead-up, building the expectation of something radically different. But it ends up with the same old same old.
It's not really a trilogy, but rather a single novel in three volumes, like Lord of the rings. Pullman rather immodestly claims that his books are better than those of Tolkien or C.S. Lewis.
I first read His dark materials about five years ago, and didn't like it much. I thought the first book, Northern Lights was OK, the second, The subtle knife quite interesting, and the third, The amber spyglass an anticlimax.
The third book, in particular, I found annoyingly preachy. Lots of children's books are preachy; what was annoying about this one was that Pullman had castigated C.S. Lewis for being preachy, and then got preachy himself.
I was quite surprised to find that I enjoyed them a lot more on the second reading.
It was long enough since the first reading for me to have forgotten quite a lot of the details, but I knew how the story was going to end, so that softened the anticlimax. But even though the "spoiler" of knowing what was going to happen was really an "enhancer", I'll put it behind a cut for those who haven't read it yet.
I still liked The subtle knife the best of the three books, but on rereading them, found myself more in sympathy with the characters, the children Lyra and Will. At the end, after sharing many adventures, travelling through, into and out of many different universes using the subtle knife, and rescuing each other from danger, they fall in love, but because of the way the world is constructed, they have to separate.
Will and Lyra are from different worlds, and cannot survive long out of their own worlds, and opening doorways between the worlds with the knife is a danger to everyone. So, sadly, they must part.
This is often the way of fairy stories. There is usually some arbitrary and absolute prohibition, and violating it causes all kinds of problems. Pandora opens the box, and so on.
So the story has a sad ending in a way, because these 12-year-olds who have just fallen in love must part, because if they don't, one of them will be dead before they are 25, and if they try to go back and forth between each other's worlds, each time they do so they will create an intellect-eating spectre.
What makes the ending strange, however, in more than just the arbitrary prohibition fashion of fairy stories, is that their decision to part is not very far from the fundamental motivation for Christian asceticism -- giving up something good for something better. Obviously the decision to remain celibate in the case of Christian monastics is not fraught with such dire consequences for the world as it is in the case of Lyra and Will in the story, but at root, it is the same.
Yet throughout the book Pullman snipes at Christian asceticism, and in the third book ends up railing against it through one of the characters, Dr Margaret Malone, an experimental physicist who was formerly a Roman Catholic nun.
So after the reader had been urged throughout the book to share the author's view that asceticism is evil, suddenly the protagonists adopt it, and Pullman appears to believe that it is good.
Rereading the story knowing that that is what is going to happen doesn't make Pullman's sudden switch seem any more logical, but at least one doesn't expect anything better. On the first reading there is a build up that leads one to expect something radically different. Will and Lyra are children of destiny, they are going to change the future of worlds, and introduce something new and radically different to replace the old worn out religious values and asceticism. Pullman has this grand lead-up, building the expectation of something radically different. But it ends up with the same old same old.