4/5
The Amber Spyglass is the last book in the His Dark Materials trilogy. It was my favorite of the three books by a considerable margin. I was able to leave behind all the background noise mentioned in my previous posts about the first two books. I have all the same questions and continue to ponder many of them, but they never interfered while reading The Amber Spyglass.
The third book is the longest by more than one hundred pages, and several of the reviews I read rate The Amber Spyglass as the third best book in the series for various reasons. I disagreed with each of them. Everything really comes alive in the final book. Pullman creates some incredible scenes and continues to expose different aspects of his characters. Lyra, Will and several others take a trip to the land of the dead, which was beautifully interesting and tragically hard. In addition we see Mrs. Coulter make several changes that are believable even though they are extreme. Either Pullman took the story and the characters in a direction I wanted, making it easier for me to believe or he is even more skilled than I previously thought. I would definitely recommend this series to any fan of fantasy.
What about some of that background noise? The theology got to a point where what was being described in the book was so drastically different than my beliefs that it was pointless to even compare them. The strange part is that many of the evangelical voices are most upset by specific events in the final book. I will not spoil those events, but again I have to wonder if some of those voices read each book from cover to cover or simply browsed them looking for controversy. If you do try to compare the theology of His Dark Materials to your own, you may very well be offended. For me the theology was nothing more than fantasy like the rest of the story.
Would I let my children read these books? Yes. I think the recommended age is thirteen and I am confident each of my girls will be able to handle these books by that age, if they even have any interest in the fantasy genre.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
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3 comments:
I read this article today, and thought it might be your kind of thing: http://electexiles.wordpress.com/2008/01/27/there-will-be-blood-and-postmodernism/
when you get the chance you may want to check out mervyn peakes trilogy. its called gormenghast and tho i have yet to read it cs lewis gave it high praise so im sure i will work my way toward it soon.
Looked it up on Wikipedia, sounds pretty good. May have to put that one before the Harry Potter books now.
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