Customer Reviews

The Elements of His Dark Materials: The Guide to Philip Pullman's Trilogy

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

There's no better recommendation for a reference book than when the author of the original series states that he's using it to help him remember his own books. And this reference has just such a recommendation.

This is an awesome source, part concordance, part encyclopedia, part character guide. It's a great companion and helped me innumerable times when I was looking for an elusive quote. I also enjoyed seeing the differences between the US and UK versions of the books laid out. The information is presented in a concise and entertaining way, and it's as easy to simply flip open a page and read a bit for fun as it is to look up a specific character or concept.

Frost's attention to detail makes this a book that I will always be glad to own. (Plus, the cover is a shiny picture of the Northern Lights, which just makes it that much more attractive.)

If Philip Pullman refers to this book, how can you go wrong? It is totally encyclopedic. A dense reference book that covers everything that you have remembered or may have forgotten. I keep referring to this tome though I am not currently re-reading the trilogy. The drawings, the cultural references (in the real world), the UK and US differences, this is a mind boggling work. I cannot imagine the effort put into this book. Laurie Frost has seemed, to me, to have exceeded all human limitations in documenting this masterwork.

Most fiction stands alone as a good read. Some make you think and some do not. However as with all the classics, many writers do not create characters and places out of whimsy.

There are so many hours in a day and it is not possible for the masses to be educated in every discipline needed to understand the deeper meaning of many of the symbols, places, and names involved in the stories we read. So we can use the help of books like "The Elements of His Dark Materials" by Laurie Frost to fill in the gaps and keep us focused on the original story. The book seems more massive than the book it is describing.

Even with books like "Annotated Alice" the philosophy is absent and another book "Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy" is needed to fill in the gaps. This book may not be the whole story but it is a great starting place.

From the Back Cover:
Spoiler Warning
Please be aware that the encyclopedic nature of this book makes spoilers inevitable.

Dear Mr. Welsh,

I am the author of the book you trashed. I readily agree there are a number of typos in this edition; the UK 2007 and 2008 editions are much cleaner.

Nevertheless, your review's account of one of the book's "glaring errors" is irresponsible and inaccurate. You claim: "Frost asserts that the angel Balthamos is female even though all the quotations she offers refer to Balthamos as 'he.'"

The main clause of this sentence is simply untrue.

The only use of the word "female" in Balthamos's entry is in the section Alliances, which reads as follows: "Baruch, Unnamed female angel 'banished' by the Authority when she found out he was not her creator."

Now, had "Unnamed" been lowercased, you could have argued that I said Baruch -- not Balthamos -- was female, if you understood the rest of the line to be an appositive. But Unnamed is not lowercased. It is uppercased for a reason which you failed to comprehend.

If you want to provide other, defensible examples of errors to illustrate your one-star rating, go right ahead. But I will consider it a malicious act of defamation if you do not amend your review.

Finally, I am puzzled by your comment, "Philip Pullman might use this as a reference, but he also knows what she gets wrong."

Please let us all know how you know what Philip Pullman knows.

LF

Philip Pullman might use this as a reference, but he also knows what she gets wrong. There are a number of glaring errors, of which I will cite one. Frost asserts that the angel Balthamos is female even though all the quotations she offers refer to Balthamos as "he." And Balthamos is male as is his friend Baruch. Frost's work is seemingly comprehensive but careless, badly edited, and at times misleading. Too bad, as a good encyclopedia of HDM would be welcome.