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The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, Book 3) By Philip Pullman ( Laurel Leaf )
Release Date: 2003-09-09
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Product Description
In the astonishing finale to the His Dark Materials trilogy, Lyra and Will are in unspeakable danger. With help from Iorek Byrnison the armored bear and two tiny Gallivespian spies, they must journey to a dank and gray-lit world where no living soul has ever gone. All the while, Dr. Mary Malone builds a magnificent Amber Spyglass. An assassin hunts her down, and Lord Asriel, with a troop of shining angels, fights his mighty rebellion, in a battle of strange allies—and shocking sacrifice.
As war rages and Dust drains from the sky, the fate of the living—and the dead—finally comes to depend on two children and the simple truth of one simple story.
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Amazon.com Review
From the very start of its very first scene, The Amber Spyglass will set hearts fluttering and minds racing. All we'll say here is that we immediately discover who captured Lyra at the end of The Subtle Knife, though we've yet to discern whether this individual's intent is good, evil, or somewhere in between. We also learn that Will still possesses the blade that allows him to cut between worlds, and has been joined by two winged companions who are determined to escort him to Lord Asriel's mountain redoubt. The boy, however, has only one goal in mind--to rescue his friend and return to her the alethiometer, an instrument that has revealed so much to her and to readers of The Golden Compass and its follow-up. Within a short time, too, we get to experience the "tingle of the starlight" on Serafina Pekkala's skin as she seeks out a famished Iorek Byrnison and enlists him in Lord Asriel's crusade: A complex web of thoughts was weaving itself in the bear king's mind, with more strands in it than hunger and satisfaction. There was the memory of the little girl Lyra, whom he had named Silvertongue, and whom he had last seen crossing the fragile snow bridge across a crevasse in his own island of Svalbard. Then there was the agitation among the witches, the rumors of pacts and alliances and war; and then there was the surpassingly strange fact of this new world itself, and the witch's insistence that there were many more such worlds, and that the fate of them all hung somehow on the fate of the child. Meanwhile, two factions of the Church are vying to reach Lyra first. One is even prepared to give a priest "preemptive absolution" should he succeed in committing mortal sin. For these tyrants, killing this girl is no less than "a sacred task." In the final installment of his trilogy, Philip Pullman has set himself the highest hurdles. He must match its predecessors in terms of sheer action and originality and resolve the enigmas he already created. The good news is that there is no critical bad news--not that The Amber Spyglass doesn't contain standoffs and close calls galore. (Who would have it otherwise?) But Pullman brings his audacious revision of Paradise Lost to a conclusion that is both serene and devastating. In prose that is transparent yet lyrical and 3-D, the author weaves in and out of his principals' thoughts. He also offers up several additional worlds. In one, Dr. Mary Malone is welcomed into an apparently simple society. The environment of the mulefa (again, we'll reveal nothing more) makes them rich in consciousness while their lives possess a slow and stately rhythm. These strange creatures can, however, be very fast on their feet (or on other things entirely) when necessary. Alas, they are on the verge of dying as Dust streams out of their idyllic landscape. Will the Oxford dark-matter researcher see her way to saving them, or does this require our young heroes? And while Mary is puzzling out a cure, Will and Lyra undertake a pilgrimage to a realm devoid of all light and hope, after having been forced into the cruelest of sacrifices--or betrayals. Throughout his galvanizing epic, Pullman sustains scenes of fierce beauty and tenderness. He also allows us a moment or two of comic respite. At one point, for instance, Lyra's mother bullies a series of ecclesiastical underlings: "The man bowed helplessly and led her away. The guard behind her blew out his cheeks with relief." Needless to say, Mrs. Coulter is as intoxicating and fluid as ever. And can it be that we will come to admire her as she plays out her desperate endgame? In this respect, as in many others, The Amber Spyglass is truly a book of revelations, moving from darkness visible to radiant truth. --Kerry Fried
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 Stillborn fiction ( jecurry )
I read this trilogy because the minister at my church condemned it from the pulpit. Usually (at least in my church), that's a pretty good indication that a book might have some interest or that it might give a good expression of an interesting point of view---even if it is not the interesting point of view that I accept as true. In this case, this contrarian form of guidance proved useless. The minister was not correct, but his error was in making the book appear as something when it is hardly anything at all.
Most people I know regard this book quite favorably. They suggest that it is "just fiction" and "just a fun book." From that point of view, it is reasonable to say that the author is a decent journeyman wordsmith, neither distinguished among professional authors, nor much worse than most. The editing of this third volume seems to have been very loose. It is paced quite slowly and more chaotically than necessary. It is, all things considered, less well crafted in its layout than the previous volumes.
I demand more of a book than "good fiction." To be worthy of my attention during this short stay on Earth, any work of art has to express something useful and, if at all possible, profound. This book is clearly the fictional construct of an atheistic author. Perhaps he is, indeed, as someone else commented, the atheist answer to C.S. Lewis. If so, the atheists are pretty short of spokes-people.
The book likes to repeat unhappy sayings about the Church of its world, about the corruption of the clergy and generally the need for a better institution. If that theme were carved on the pages in the literary equivalent of bass relief, then we could have fun together. Even as an avid church goer, I think we have seen no more urgent time for restructuring and purification of the Church since the time of Thomas Aquinas. So, we could have had fun. We could have agreed, but this aspect was sketched as a cartoon---hardly worth mentioning.
More of the philosophical effort of the book goes toward denouncing the author's idea of the unseen spiritual forces that lie much more toward the heart of religion. He makes the Creator God into some sort of extraordinarily pitiful God, perhaps suffering from some version of Alzheimer's. He makes the high angels, who serve before the throne of God into lustful bullies. It is not just irreverent, but ludicrous. Einstein was fond of saying that we cannot solve a problem from the same frame of mind that gave rise to the problem. We cannot understand the higher wisdom of deep mysticism from a cartoon caricature. It is so absurd that a grown person should be ashamed to put such a thing in print. It's just plain rubbish, and that's much too kind a phrasing for it.
This book may be amusing if you wish to read it for just entertainment. It's message is a caricature and unworthy of the time a person might spend reading it (even if you read very fast indeed).
The song "Shenandoah" or the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony are, indeed, melodies. However, because they strike generation after generation as lyrically beautiful and hauntingly expressive, it would be wrong to say they are "just songs." They are masterworks of music for the ages. That's what I want. My associates who claim this is "just fiction," are quite right. It is really "just fiction." It does not rate as highly on the scale of memorable art as some of the worse German drinking songs, and it certainly makes no comparison to "Im Himmel es Gibt Kein Bier."
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 Young adult fiction? ( bradshawgirl )
Pullman is an excellent writer. His stories are wonderfully told. The characters are engaging, and the plot certianly clips along. He has a powerful imagination.
However, he is dealing with very heavy subject matter here to be calling his books "young adult" fiction. I can totally see why organized religion has a problem with his books. Organized religion, in this trilogy, is the enemy/villain. God himself, and his cadre of angels, are the characters that the protagonists fight against (and defeat). While I think these books can be fruitful reads for adults, as they stimulate thought on topics not traditionally entertained (much like Sophie's World, which I really enjoyed), I would not want my, say, 12-year-old kid reading this stuff. It's hard enough trying to teach your child to comprehend the immensity of the world, God, faith, good/evil, without Pullman undoing all you've tried to instill.
Sooooo, if you're interested in theology, and you're over 18, read these books. If you're part of the backpack set, though, you might want to talk with your parents about them first.
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 I just couldn't get into it...
I couldn't get into this series. It took me forever to read the entire trilogy because I just couldn't engage myself with it. I read the three books a couple of pages at a time with large breaks in between. I finished it out of pure stubborness.
Its not that the books were bad. Because the idea behind them was quite interesting.
My problem was that I didn't like any of the characters. The only one I vaguely liked was Will and even then... after two books, I felt like I didn't know him any better than the moment he was first introduced.
That's my problem with the trilogy. There is no 'personal' moments where you feel you can really understand and identify with the characters. They are just soldiers. Shadows. They couldn't possibly be anything else because Pullman never told us what they were thinking. Lyra for example was on this amazing journey, but we were never told what she thought about it. Will was given this huge responsibility to wield the knife, but once again, we never heard a word about how this made him feel.
I'm a very character driven person.I like books where I feel I know the characters on a personal level and feel like I'm there in the story with them.
This trilogy was just all events... no emotion.
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Falling Apart
Okay, I have to admit that I'm not the greatest fan of the series; Pullman has an axe to grind, and hearing someone grind an axe in narrative is painful (see Atlas Shrugged). However, I really have to say that especially the second book was well written. There was a focus and narrative drive that made it probably the most coherent of the books. Along with this, the characters are most developed in the second volume.
And then we get to The Amber Spyglass. First off, the name of the book comes from an item that barely factors into the story, and if then, only near the end and tangentally. Certainly not items like the Alethiometer and the Subtle Knife that actually have a plot centered around them (Yes, I know that The Golden Compass was Northern Lights in the UK). It was as if Pullman decided that he needed to continue the pattern of an object being central to the story, but just couldn't figure out how, so he just shoved something in there.
And shoved something in there is something that you'll hear a lot of in this book, especially as far as theology goes. So many times you have Pullman take snipes at religion in the weirdest places. When Mary is having this amazing experience that she's only had before, Pullman has to add that the experience was not of her taking her vows as a nun. When Father Gomez thinks of evangelizing to the mulefa, he thinks he has to first abolish the "Satanic" seed-wheels, ignoring that the Catholic Church has been one of the greatest co-opters of "satanic" rituals, holidays, and lifestyles that the world has known (Jesuits taught that Confucious was a proto-Christian like Aristotle when evangelizing in China). There are dozens of places like this when it just became too much to not take a swipe at religion and Pullman just shoves a odd remark like that in there that makes the reader go "WTF?" In fact, pretty much any religous person is portrayed as a crazed zealot, certainly not the characterization that he imbues most of his other characters with. Even if he wants to write a novel about "killing God", you can't make the antagonists and the side characters so simplisticly bad that you wouldn't believe most of these people exist.
And then comes Mary. Mary is usually portrayed as an interesting character: her work, her observations, her life. Every so often however, you just get her turning into the mouth of Pullman about how evil the Church is. Her speech near the end about how God doesn't exist because she felt love was mind-boggling bad-- and worse, it didn't sound like something the Mary that we had started to get to know. She basically says that God doesn't exist because no God would want her to not indulge her senses in love, ignoring for the fact that monastic (and celebate) life is a vocation that isn't for most! In addition, Pullman's view of love is mere sensuality (not bad, but certainly not the high love that it's protrayed to be) so it becomes pitted against the life of contemplation. This takes another swipe when the harpies are allowed to torment those that haven't lived lives with enough stories.
Tacked on to all of that is a plot that comes crashing down with multiple characters doing things that and saying things that make no sense: Lyra never makes reference to Asriel killing Roger (and she always uses the passive tense with his death), Will Parry breaking his promise without much fanfare, multiple characters just showing up and then leaving, the love of two people healing the cosmos (uh, what?), Lord Asriel lying about destroying dust, Coulter shifting in such a way to be unbeleivable (remember her first reaction when she found out Lyra was to be the new Eve), and generally everything as it collapses into a gigantic mess.
Oddly enough, Pullman falls into the same trap as C.S. Lewis (who's work he hates) when trying to tie everything up. However, let it be said that at least Lewis respect his opposition more as he was an atheist for quite awhile. Hell, I'm not even a theist here, but I find Pullman's hashing plot about killing God as clumsy.
And in the end, that's what this book ends up being: clumsy.
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 Book 3 worth getting to ( mkmurata )
I though Book 2 (Subtle Knife) was a bit slow, but book 3 takes it (and its characters) all the way to an exciting end, if not a brave new world.
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