by Philip Pullman Publisher: Yearling, 2001 This book is part of the series: His Dark Materials
Review of The Golden Compass
By William R. Stott
In The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman creates a fantastic alternate reality that is both familiar and strange.
It's set in Europe, but not quite our Europe. Many of the place names are familiar--like Oxford, where the story begins. But that familiarity is jarred almost immediately by the subtle and some not-so-subtle differences.
In this novel, each person is bound to a daemon. The main character, Lyra Belacqua, is a precocious, rambunctious, pre-adolescent girl whose daemon, Pantalaimon, at various times takes the form of a moth, an ermine, an owl, and many other types of animals. The daemons of children are free to change forms. It's only when the person reaches adolescence that his or her personality becomes more settled and his or her daemon also settles on one form. The human-daemon connection is at the heart of the novel and becomes extremely important later on.
With elements like daemons, and, later in the novel, witches and talking bears, The Golden Compass is clearly a fantasy novel. It's filled with a sense of wonder reminiscent of the works of C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia), Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland) or J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan).
Although it can be classified as a young adult novel, and although it certainly has appealed to young adult audiences, The Golden Compass begins an ambitious attempt to retell the story of man's fall from grace, using fantasy elements and a different mythology. It also contains elements of science fiction, with discussion of alternate worlds, elementary particles and (briefly) string theory. So there is plenty here for sophisticated readers as well.
In the story, Lyra becomes entangled in a struggle to discover the nature of Dust, a mysterious elementary particle that is somehow related to daemons, children and the northern lights. It's also the force that powers her "alethiometer" (the golden compass of the title), a mysterious and powerful device left to her by her father, a famous explorer and scientist who is also at the heart of the struggle.
Along the way, Lyra witnesses cruel experiments on children and their daemons, battles between "gyptians," Tartars, armored bears, witches, cliff ghasts and more.
The story will soon be a major motion picture, to be released in December 2007. The Golden Compass Movie Trailers are online.
You can also get the 2nd and 3rd novels in the series by buying the whole series.
As if that's not enough, you can also get the video games: The Golden Compass
