Archive for January, 2010

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

ISBN: 0440238137
368 pages
published in 1995.

I first read this book a few years ago. I found the story itself captivating, as well as the idea of the daemons, like many readers before me. It was recommended to me many times before I finally got around to reading it, and by the time I did, I wished I had read it sooner, because I feel like I would have appreciated it even more as a child. In any case, most of us are familiar with the movie version that came out a couple years ago, which I did go to see and was very happy with.

The Golden Compass, known throughout most of the world as Northern Lights, is the first book in a trilogy about Lyra Belaqua, a young girl from Oxford, who exists within a world parallel to our own. Everyone in her world has a daemon, a manifestation of their soul that takes the form of an animal. Daemons are able to change form when a person is young, but as soon as puberty is reached, they assume a fixed shape and stay that way for the duration of the person’s life. Consequently, Lyra’s daemon, Pantalaimon — or Pan, as she calls him — is Lyra herself, yet a separate entity from her own body. The bond between human and daemon is the strongest in the world and for normal humans, even being far apart from each other causes intense physical pain for both. In this world is also witches, whose daemons can travel far from them, ghouls and ghosts and various sorts of ghasts, and armored bears, bears who are larger than normal bears and who can talk and have their own society in the North, on Svalbard, and who make themselves armor out of metal.

Lyra befriends members of all of these groups as she seeks to find out about the Gobblers, a group that has been stealing children from Oxford and from other places around the world, are up to. A device that tells the truth and thus can answer any question, the alethiometer, also falls into her hands. All of these circumstances are caught up in the question of Dust, a substance that has been causing great controversy among theologians and philosophers around the world, Lyra’s Uncle Asriel and a mysterious, enticing woman named Mrs. Coulter.

I’ll be starting the second book in the series, The Subtle Knife, as soon as I can. I really love this series and I can’t wait to find out what happens. I never got beyond the first book.