Your Humble Blogger first read The Golden Compass perhaps five years ago and thought it was magnificent. I was knocked out, blown away and utterly, um, pleased. I read The Subtle Knife shortly after, and it was quite good, although I remember being a bit disappointed. Still, second book in a trilogy is always tricky, isn’t it? We finished (my Best Reader and I, who I’m pretty sure read Compass aloud as a bedtime book, and I think Knife as well) just about in time for the release of The Amber Spyglass in hardback, and we shelled out twenty dollars (or perhaps less, I don’t recall and we don’t seem to have used the receipt as a bookmark, or at least didn’t leave it in the book) and dove right in. About halfway through Spyglass I was through. It left a bad taste in my mouth about the whole series. My feeling, now, is that I disliked His Dark Materials, which I did. But I forget that I liked The Golden Compass.
So, what with one thing and another, I didn’t reread the book for five years. Which you’ll know, Gentle Reader, is not my way with a book that I like, particularly if I have it in paperback. And I was scrounging for a bathtub book the other day, feeling peevish and whatnot, and knowing, besides, that I wasn’t going to have enough time to soak in the tub because the Youngest Member is not a patient sort of person, and I didn’t want to read a Vorkosigan book again, and I didn’t want to read a Dick Francis again, or a Laurie King, or a Dianne Wynne Jones, or ... dammit there must be something to read on these bookshelves. Fine. I’ll read The Golden Compass.
And you know what? It’s a great book. It’s extraordinary. The characters—not so much our heroine Lyra, who is not a plausible child but interesting nonetheless, but the incidental ones, Farder Coram and Lord Faa, Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter, Lee Scoresby and Serafina Pekkala, Iorek Byrneson and Pantalaimon. And the world, the ominous Magisterium, the powerful armored bears of the north, the d�mons, the gyptians, the Gobblers. It’s simultaneously a dazzling world of surface images and an iceberg world where it feels like we are only seeing ten percent of the world, that most of the world exists without making it into this story. Just wonderful.
And now I have to exercise my self-control, and not read the other ones. Or see the movie. Because this time, I should quit while I’m ahead.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
That’s odd, V. I had almost exactly the opposite reaction to the books. Compass was neat, but I was put off by the implausible Lyra. The rest of the world was sufficiently plausible, and in fact pretty compelling, however, that I gave Lyra a chance, and for me, she came through. I found that by the middle of the second book, she had become much more real for me, where the world had become less, and it sort of achieved a balance that I recognized as “comfortable suspension of disbelief.” The third book, for me, brought the series, qua series, on par with what I’ve read by Diana Wynne Jones.
All that said, though, I think you and I read books with different criteria for enjoyment, so maybe it’s not so odd that we’d experience something so differently, now that I think on it 🙂
peace
Matt
I agree with pretty much everything V. said. Love love loved the first book (for essentially the reasons V. cited), but sadly and increasingly disappointed over the course of the other two. I keep having to restrain myself from recommending the first one to people, ’cause it’s not a complete story and the ending will leave people wanting to read the others….
I remember being fond of all three, perhaps for different reasons, but I haven’t read them since the week Amber Spyglass came out and I read the entire trilogy within one week so it all blurs together.
What I remember most was being fascinated by the iceberg-qualities you mention, and spending hours pondering what the past few centuries of that world must have been like to result in a world where the Texans, Danes, and Native Americans have the societies and territories they do. Also, I became sort of obsessed with the island of Svalbard, to the point of ordering a giant wall map of it.