La Belle Sauvage
I'll admit that I came to this one with my hackles raised. My feelings toward the original trilogy are strong and complicated, and they get more complicated the more I think about them. In all honestly I hadn't been planning to read it at all. But then I got it as a Christmas present and I can't just not read a book once it's sitting on my shelf. Plus I like The Golden Compass enough to give this one a chance, since it didn't cost me anything.
The truth is that I genuinely liked the beginning of the book. Malcolm is a bright, observant boy who works in a tavern. He gets recruited as a spy inevitably and almost without being aware of it. But he sees a lot and he's smart enough to put things together and subtle enough to get more information. The result is a slow story in a deeply familiar world, where information is slowly parceled out and pieced together. I liked the puzzle of it all.
It also seemed like Pullman was addressing one of the bigger weaknesses of his original trilogy. His Dark Materials is strongly anti-Church and anti-organized religion. Which isn't even a stance I disagree with necessarily. But Pullman built up a bit of a strawman organization in which every member of the church in any capacity was corrupt. Life is more complicated than that, and I always thought that ignoring those shades of grey weakened his argument. So it was great to see an order of benevolent nuns who are kind and generous and doing the best they can. And it was interesting to watch the emergence of a smaller but corrupt organization within the church, which gradually gains more power until it takes over. It added the nuance I so desperately wanted from him.
And then something happened. About halfway through the book, one of the spies attends an informational dinner. The book grinds almost to a halt during this extended info dump, and the bald presentation of all the facts takes all the fun out of what had been an interesting and intricate book. Then we shift gears into an adventure tale. Malcolm's escape by canoe with baby Lyra is exciting at first. But then it starts to feel rote and paint by numbers.
Every chapter is a new island with a new threat that is swiftly defeated. None of it had any time to breath, and it seemed to just be happening because that's the sort of thing that happens in books like this. By the end of it I was wondering what the point of half of it was, and I was more than ready for the book to just end. Perhaps the fairy and the witch and the weird island of forgetting will play a bigger role in the rest of the series and I'll be forced to eat my words. But for now they just felt like they were forced in to remind the reader that this is a fantasy novel.
Throw in Pullman's weird obsession with the sexual awakenings of eleven-year olds and the whole book ended up leaving a weird taste in my mouth. It's a shame, because I genuinely loved the first half of the book. But I just ended up disappointed.
The truth is that I genuinely liked the beginning of the book. Malcolm is a bright, observant boy who works in a tavern. He gets recruited as a spy inevitably and almost without being aware of it. But he sees a lot and he's smart enough to put things together and subtle enough to get more information. The result is a slow story in a deeply familiar world, where information is slowly parceled out and pieced together. I liked the puzzle of it all.
It also seemed like Pullman was addressing one of the bigger weaknesses of his original trilogy. His Dark Materials is strongly anti-Church and anti-organized religion. Which isn't even a stance I disagree with necessarily. But Pullman built up a bit of a strawman organization in which every member of the church in any capacity was corrupt. Life is more complicated than that, and I always thought that ignoring those shades of grey weakened his argument. So it was great to see an order of benevolent nuns who are kind and generous and doing the best they can. And it was interesting to watch the emergence of a smaller but corrupt organization within the church, which gradually gains more power until it takes over. It added the nuance I so desperately wanted from him.
And then something happened. About halfway through the book, one of the spies attends an informational dinner. The book grinds almost to a halt during this extended info dump, and the bald presentation of all the facts takes all the fun out of what had been an interesting and intricate book. Then we shift gears into an adventure tale. Malcolm's escape by canoe with baby Lyra is exciting at first. But then it starts to feel rote and paint by numbers.
Every chapter is a new island with a new threat that is swiftly defeated. None of it had any time to breath, and it seemed to just be happening because that's the sort of thing that happens in books like this. By the end of it I was wondering what the point of half of it was, and I was more than ready for the book to just end. Perhaps the fairy and the witch and the weird island of forgetting will play a bigger role in the rest of the series and I'll be forced to eat my words. But for now they just felt like they were forced in to remind the reader that this is a fantasy novel.
Throw in Pullman's weird obsession with the sexual awakenings of eleven-year olds and the whole book ended up leaving a weird taste in my mouth. It's a shame, because I genuinely loved the first half of the book. But I just ended up disappointed.
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