Bill Batterman is the I finished Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (HDM) trilogy a few weeks ago and have been meaning to write a short review ever since. Today I came across a wonderful review of the books written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon in The New York Review of Books. Entitled “Dust & Daemons” (archive.org link), Chabon’s piece brilliantly describes HDM as a “deliberate, at times overdeliberate rejoinder or companion to Paradise Lost.”
Often categorized as children’s books or “Young Adult” fantasy, HDM is the kind of genre-bending epic that doesn’t play nice with orthodox classifications. Chabon (who happens, incidentally, to be an avid baseball fan) likens the stories’ plots with their indescribability.
Pity those—adventurers, adolescents, authors of young adult fiction—who make their way in the borderland between worlds. It is at worst an invisible and at best an inhospitable place. Build your literary house on the borderlands, as the English writer Philip Pullman has done, and you may find that your work is recommended by booksellers, as a stopgap between installments of Harry Potter, to children who cannot (one hopes) fully appreciate it, and to adults, disdainful or baffled, who “don’t read fantasy.” Yet all mystery resides there, in the margins, between life and death, childhood and adulthood, Newtonian and quantum, “serious” and “genre” literature. And it is from the confrontation with mystery that the truest stories have always drawn their power.
HDM is undoubtedly powerful, an impavid perigrination of genres and mythologies that refuses the artificial boundaries often assigned to fantasies.
[E]pic fantasies, whether explicitly written for children or not, tend to get sequestered in their own section of the bookstore or library, clearly labeled to protect the unsuspecting reader of naturalistic fiction from making an awkward mistake. Thus do we consign to the borderlands our most audacious retellings of what is arguably one of the two or three primal human stories: the narrative of Innocence, Experience, and, straddling the margin between them, the Fall.
That’s the story Pullman tells in HDM, a far-reaching trilogy that follows its main character, Lyra, in an adventure that transcends time and space and that at its very core is a tale of childhood and its inevitable loss. And that loss, Chabon argues, is really a loss of imagination, that all-powerful staple of childhood.
[P]ullman … is an unabashed concocter of stories, with a deep, pulpy fondness for plot. He is also, in the great tradition of unabashed concocters of stories, a highly self-conscious storyteller. By the end of The Amber Spyglass, one has come to see Pullman’s world-calving imagination, to see Imagination itself, as the ordering principle, if not of the universe itself, then of our ability to comprehend, to wander, and above all to love it.
I can’t recommend HDM any more vehemently. If you’re a fan of Paradise Lost or Virgil or just enjoy a thought-provoking fantasy (albeit with a thickly religious subtext), pick up these three books and prepare to be immersed in an absorbing and compelling universe rich with emotion and meaning.
Here are some Amazon.com links to get you started.
Good luck.