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43 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A worthy successor to "The Golden Compass", June 11, 1997
By A Customer
When Dickens' novels were first serialized, anxious crowds gathered at American docks, waiting for each fresh installment from across the ocean. Readers of Philip Pullman's "The Golden Compass" have found themselves similarly looking across the water for its sequel, and after an eighteen month wait "The Subtle Knife" has finally arrived.
"The Subtle Knife" is the second installment in the "His Dark Materials" trilogy, in which Pullman has created an alternate universe nearly as vivid and credible as our own. Whereas "The Golden Compass" was set in a parallel world in which bears talk and witches fly, the action of its sequel occurs primarily in our own world. The book introduces a new protagonist, Will Perry, who joins the heroine of "The Golden Compass," Lyra Belacqua, in an eschatological quest for the nature of "Dust" -- subatomic particles which correspond to the mysterious dark matter of modern astronomy. Will and Lyra meet in Cittagazze, a frightening world in which spectres suck the souls from adults, and thus the only fear children have is of growing up.
Reviewers of "The Golden Compass" made inevitable comparisons to Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. While it is difficult for any fantasy book to escape the long shadow of Frodo Baggins, the Dark Materials series admirably avoids the painful kitsch that so often mars Tolkien's work; Pullman's characters seldom burst into song or sigh as they contemplate a noble past where men and elves walked tall and... well, one gets the picture. Indeed, what sets Pullman apart from so many fellow fabulists is his respect for restrained, inventive language. For instance, the following passage describes a spell of invisibility: "True invisibility was impossible, of course; this was mental magic, a kind of fiercely held modesty that could make the spell worker not invisible but simply unnoticed."
I resisted the initial temptation to review the book immediately upon completing it; rather, I passed it off to a friend to compare her reaction with mine. We were in agreement on the verdict: "The Subtle Knife" ranks among the best modern books written in any genre. It is that good.
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31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Something of a let down, September 21, 2007
This review is from: The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, Book 2) (Mass Market Paperback)
After speeding through the Golden Compass, one of the best fantasy books I had read in years at the very least, I could barely wait to start on the sequel. Unfortunately, it did very little to live up to my expectations.
Nearly all of the charms of the first book--a unique and well realized alternate reality, an interesting and masterful reshaping of "real world" institutions into this alternate reality, intriguing technologies--were lost in the sequel. However, the biggest disappointment had to be what I consider the near character assassination of Lyra. Lyra, I thought, was one of the primary strengths of the first book. In the Golden Compass, we had that rarest of all things, a female protagonist in a fantasy novel who isn't some kind of patient saint or super warrior. She was selfish, brave, ungrateful, loyal, resourceful and something of a brat. In short, she felt very much like a real girl who found herself swept up in horrible events far beyond what any 12-year-old child should have to face and, while she had her failures, faced those challenges with resourcefulness and sometimes terrible courage. At the end, we had Lyra, betrayed by her own parents, her dearest friend dead, about to leave behind the sole protector she'd found--but who was facing this unknown new world and a war against her giant of a father because she felt it was right. It was a powerful image.
So I excitedly opened The Subtle Knife only to find Lyra's quest nigh well abandoned. Will is a decent if underdeveloped character, but he's tremendously common. In how many fantasy novels is the chief protagonist a boy with a mysterious father who ends up having a destiny well beyond his expectations? Will as sidekick I could have born. Will as primary hero with Lyra abandoning all self-agency in order to play hand-maiden to the male protagonist I found trite and somewhat insulting. And the one time where Lyra dares to remember her own quest after the Dust she is immediately chastised for not making everything about her new man. And then Will's destiny wasn't even that interesting. Boy with magical bond with weapon discovers he's the center of the universe--it's been done dozens of times before. Lyra's interactions with her daemon and the entire plot of what Dust is was new. And why did Lyra have to become so dumb and horridly insipid? Where was the Lyra who led her group of Oxford children in successful wars against other children back at Oxford? Where was the Lyra who earned the title Silvertongue? Where was her rage at her father and her grief for her friend?
For a series which prides itself at rejecting the dangerous suffocation of ideas by the establishment, it surely does prop up more than a few patriarchal ideas.
There were a few grace notes. I liked Mary tremendously and Lee Scoresby's plot had some of the best and most heartbreaking writing of the series. Just after The Golden Compass I felt Pullman had lost the plot a bit and picked up too many cliched threads that ended up diluting what had been a creative series.
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36 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Response to Religous Criticism, January 16, 2000
By A Customer
I snatched up the Subtle Knife from my bookstore the very first day the book was released, eager with anticipation. Almost three years later, at 15, I still have not lost that joyous and excited feeling of delight every time I pick up the book. I originally reviewed the book long ago, but I came back to check what others thought about Philip Pullman's masterpiece. Needless to say, I was extremely disappointed. Readers seem to be criticizing Pullman for the religious aspects of his works and their apparent "immorality." The fact that these absurd thoughts completely contradict the ideals of the pluralistic society we're supposed to be living in doesn't even bother me at this point. Readers simply fail to realize that the very nature of Pullman's work forces him to deal with these issues! The Dark Materials Trilogy is based on a single passage from Milton's Paradise Lost, which, as you know, deals with Satan's rebellion, original sin and man's fall from grace. And although Milton in his first two books of Paradise Lost portrays Satan as an almost heroic character, no one accuses *him* of blasphemy. In fact, he was a devout Christian, one of the greatest writers of the seventeenth century and his work is commonly upheld to be a great resource to and extension of the Christian faith. Pullman simply takes a few lines from Paradise Lost and explores the concept within them. What if God had indeed, created other worlds that we are not aware of? Pullman, with his immense genius and imagination decides to explore this question. What if there were thousands of worlds like ours, where every possibility of probability occurs? He manages to answer this question in a magnificent and skillful manner. His work needs not be marred by religious censure. Perhaps most important is the fact that Pullman's various religious viewpoints don't even go against the organized religion established in our world. In Lyra's world, the Church is a completely different entity. For one thing, the Calvinist church has taken over all of Europe. Secondly, the Church there exerts a type of social control that our Church hasn't enjoyed since the 14th or 15th century. Lastly, Lyra's Church is obviously as corrupt and sinful as ours was during the Avignon papacy and before the Counter Reformation. We apparently didn't think it was wrong to go and rebel against the Church and try to cleanse it, so how can we blame anyone in Lyra's world for opposing their Church? And how for one thing do we not know that the Devil himself has corrupted this Church? Pullman never says *our* Church is bad, he only implies that Lyra's is. The next troubling issue is the whole plot line of the fallen angels' rebellion. Again, Pullman is *forced* to write about this - it is, as mentioned before, what Milton's work was about in the first place. What if Satan has finally decided his army has been built up enough for another battle with God? Or, if he sees Asriel (who, as the reader from Pennsylvania so cleverly mentioned, might be an incarnation of Azreal (Death), who is Satan's son) preparing for a battle, and decides to send his support? There are other issues which critics complain about, but they've already been discussed in previous reviews and this is getting a bit too lengthy already =). At this point in the trilogy, we don't know Asriel's true purpose, we don't know what side Lyra is on, we don't know what is good or evil, in short, we can't judge. So please, from now on, try to see it from the viewpoint that Pullman is writing from, or at least reserve your judgement until the last book is published.
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