CBR III 8: The Subtle Knife - Philip Pullman

The Subtle Knife is the second in the His Dark Materials trilogy. I read the first, The Golden Compass, in the last cannonball round, but I don't think I ever got to a review. I'm going to try something new with this one and NOT have spoilers. Vague descriptions all the way!

The first book was fine. A good YA fantasy-adventure, with a female protagonist, which I appreciated, a cool world that's similar to, but different from, ours, and a solid mystery. Mysteries, really. What is Dust, why is the church so interested in it, what's happening to the children who keep disappearing from Jordan College, what is Lord Asriel up to, what's Lyra's place in all this, and so on. The mysteries are what kept me going. Mystery, really. What the hell WAS Dust? I had to know. I didn't want to read two more books to find out, though, so I went to Wikipedia. I was not overly enamored of the writing-it's serviceable, I think I'm just a little out of the target age group.

My congratulations to Mr. Pullman. He crafted a phenomenon so involved that after ten minutes of trying to understand the explanation, I gave up and resigned myself to either never knowing or eventually reading the rest of the books.

And here I am.

I was in the library, about to check out season 1 of Battlestar Galactica, when I remembered that libraries have BOOKS! I need a book! A girl can't survive on a diet of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man alone. You can't tell from the books I've reviewed, but I've been reading a lot of classics. I needed a palate cleanser. Despite never having a great drive to read this one, it has served perfectly well as just that.

The focus has shifted from Lyra Belacqua in her world to Will Parry in ours, creating new mysteries while effectively merging them with the existing storyline. Will and Lyra are both orphans in a sense. They have absentee/dead explorer fathers and mothers who are dead or gone or unstable and in need of care themselves. Will has had to take care of his mother, who's unstable and deathly afraid of an unseen danger, and his father was lost, assumed dead, on an Artic expedition when Will was a baby.

Both books involve Will and Lyra on quests that involve finding out about their parents, learning about other worlds, and being thrust into incredibly dangerous situations. Both children are "important" in a grander sense, crucial to the immense event that is brewing. They're thrown together for a reason, and need to trust each other despite initial misgivings. Their relationship develops as naturally as can be expected when they're a) from different universes, b) running for their lives, and c) VERY IMPORTANT CHILDREN.

The titular subtle knife is pretty awesome, I'm not gonna lie. Since I'm erring on the side of non-spoilers, I won't describe what it does, but it lives up to its name. Pullman has created quite a neat universe, with many cool features and creatures. Plus, eff the church! Who doesn't love a good round of Eff the Church?

I can understand why these books are celebrated, but you will probably get the most enjoyment out of them if you're a young teenager, or really have a taste for YA fiction or fantasy. I was a huge Harry Potter fan, and I wonder what my feelings on that series would be if I was in my twenties when I first encountered it, instead of my early teens. I felt much more invested in even secondary HP characters than I did in some of the main HDM characters. And the Dementors were scarier than the... things in this series that are like Dementors. Now that I've gotten this far, though, I want to hurry up and read the third book. I have more mysteries to solve! Read about being solved. Whatever.