I actually finished reading this on Thursday night (this being Saturday afternoon), but my allergies were so severe that I could barely think, let alone write a coherent blog post. Likewise last night after work. The allergies are with me still, but they have cleared sufficiently that I can now function more or less at my previous level, paltry and insufficient though that may be. The Amber Spyglass was not quite what the first two books were. It didn’t have the sense of fun, adventure and wonder of The Golden Compass, nor was there the sense of transition of The Subtle Knife. This was a book almost exclusively of conflict and self-discovery. It’s also a book of considerable controversy, probably more so than the other two. One of the big points of contention is the so-called “sex scene” near the end of the book. The two underage children do not actually have sex, though I can see how it would seem that way to folks who see sex in any aggressive, romantically fueled contact between a male and a female. There certainly is such contact, but any reader who paid attention to what happened before and after the contact will realize that neither Will nor Lyra (I hope I haven’t spoiled anything for any of you) simply aren’t at that point. They are still young, and innocent, and so much full of joy and terror at this new notion of love and physical intimacy that they are barely able to kiss and hold hands. You can forget about them tearing off their clothes to get at the interesting bits underneath. It wouldn’t occur to them, and if it did, it would scare the bujeesus out of them. People need to grow up and stop looking for any excuse to vilify folks they don’t agree with. Speaking of vilifying folks they don’t agree with, the other major point of controversy is Pullman’s apparently anti-Christian and more specifically, anti-Roman Catholic point of view. I’m not entirely certain how to present Pullman’s point of view, except to say that it’s not really the religion that he vilifies. For Pullman, it all comes down to people. The Church has power in Lyra’s world, and so it attracts the sort of people who want power for its own sake, and to Pullman’s mind (and here I tend to agree with him), those people tend to be pretty bad people. Pullman obviously disagrees with the message, but he doesn’t present the institution as malevolent; it’s the people who are malevolent (and the Metatron, who was once a man—even God, or the Authority, who makes a brief appearance, is not the villain other characters have presented him as), and the reason to reject the church is not because the institution is evil, but because it forces people to give up human interaction with the world. It invalidates the human experience. And that’s really the choice that Dr. Malone tempts Will and Lyra with (just as the serpent tempted Adam and Eve in Eden). Will they meet the world afraid of themselves, disconnected from their souls because of what they’ve been told by some nameless, faceless authority, or will they greet the world and each other as human beings, fully aware of their weaknesses but with all of themselves? It’s not much of a choice, really, and I can see how even today some people would be afraid of it. I think it’s from that fear that many people condemn Pullman’s trilogy.
Even though I just finished reading a series of three books, they were all bound together in a single volume, and that made it seem in some ways like a kind of never-ending book (close to a thousand pages, folks!), so now I’m going to read to something quick and light before moving on to the next big thing. So, next is You Only Live Twice, by Ian Fleming.
