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Title: The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, Book 3)
ISBN: 0786241225
Author:
Philip Pullman
Publicate Date: 2003-02-02
Publish: 2003-02-02
List Price: $25.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $25.95
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1: 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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2: 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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3: Book 3 worth getting to
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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4: Excellent!
What a fabulous book! Definitely my favorite of the trilogy. So well written and intricate. The ending was bittersweet, but made a lot of sense. It left you hoping for a 4th book or an epilogue of the future.
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5: Classic experience
My children and I audio read this trilogy 10 years ago. My oldest who turned 22 yrs old in October requested it as a birthday present. The narration is wonderful. Pullman's trilogy is a classic gift to literature.
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