Rebecca's Belated Book One Thoughts

[sunnydlita]

I swear I actually have been done with Book One for about three weeks, but my old student instincts kicked in and I couldn't help procrastinating about writing this "book report." Also, another student instinct I haven't been able to shake is forgetting to take notes while I read, so forgive me if these observations, interpretations and applications are random, superficial and lame:

1. A lot of us have expressed difficulty with empathizing with the horror of being separated from your dæmon. What's interesting is that although Pullman doesn't explicitly distinguish between Lyra's World and ours (until Book Two), he acknowledges the foreign-ness by stepping out of Lyra's narrative perspective: "A human being with no dæmon was like someone without a face, or with their ribs laid open and their heart torn out: something unnatural and uncanny that belonged to the world of nightghasts, not the waking world of sense" (214). Although Pullman's simile allows me to picture the reaction to seeing someone without his or her dæmon, it comes at the expense of pulling me out of the book's universe and reminding me that dæmons don't really exist and I'm not supposed to understand what it's like to lose one.
2. Perhaps it's because I have a stomach for prophesied girl heroes (i.e. Buffy), even those that stop being real people and become slightly annoying archetypes (i.e. post-Season 5 Buffy), but I ended up really liking Lyra by the end of The Golden Compass. She started out as the worst kind of character: rude passing itself off as precocious. But she became more and more tolerable after she left Jordan College and her comfort zone. By the time she got to Bolvangar, I was outright cheering for her: "Billy nodded, and Roger said, 'What's the signal?' 'The fire bell,' said Lyra. 'When the time comes, I'll set it off'" (262). My patience during the first two-thirds of the book was rewarded by the absolutely breathtaking third act, beginning with Lyra's near-severing and the Escape from Bolvangar.
3. "Lyra has a part to play in all this, and a major one. The irony is that she must do it all without realizing what she's doing" (31). This is an interesting twist on the Chosen One story. It keeps the hero from getting all self-important, and it sort of alleviates some of the nasty fatalism that plagues these types of tales, when everything is kind of boring because it's all predestined. Then again, having a prophecy in place keeps me from getting frustrated when characters make mistakes and their plans don't work out, because I know in the end they will. What can I say? I'm full of contradictions.