None
3 stars
I've just finished reading this for the fourth time, and think I liked it a bit better than I did the first time. The last time I read it was just after seeing the film (which had the title The Golden Compass) and I wanted to see how it compared with the book. That was ten years ago, so I'd forgotten quite a lot when I re-read it this time.
It's about Lyra Belaqua, who is about 10 years old when the story starts. She believes she is an orphan, and is brought up by the scholars at an Oxford college, only it is an Oxford in a parallel universe, where some things are similar to our universe, and others different. The most notable difference is that humans have external souls, called daemons, which take the form of animals. Another difference is that air travel developed differently, with airships …
I've just finished reading this for the fourth time, and think I liked it a bit better than I did the first time. The last time I read it was just after seeing the film (which had the title The Golden Compass) and I wanted to see how it compared with the book. That was ten years ago, so I'd forgotten quite a lot when I re-read it this time.
It's about Lyra Belaqua, who is about 10 years old when the story starts. She believes she is an orphan, and is brought up by the scholars at an Oxford college, only it is an Oxford in a parallel universe, where some things are similar to our universe, and others different. The most notable difference is that humans have external souls, called daemons, which take the form of animals. Another difference is that air travel developed differently, with airships and balloons being more common than heavier than air aircraft.
And once one gets further away from Oxford the differences between our world and Lyra's become bigger. Lord Asriel, the man Lyra believes to be her uncle, is an explorer in the snowbound north, where he is trying to find the origin of a mysterious dust that adheres to adult humans, and Lyra wants to join him in his exciting life as an explorer and natural philosopher, and has many adventures on the way. In the North she finds witches, who have human form, but do not apparently count as human. For one thing they live much longer. And there are also talking armoured bears, who have a militarised culture, dedicated to fighting.
One thing that stands out in the book is that Lyra leaves people behind. She does not have a stable childhood with stable relationships. She meets one group of people, and leaves them for another, and they fall away, and for the most part never enter life again. Some she manages to say goodbye to, but in the case of others she either runs away or is snatched away, and never sees them again. This doesn't trouble her as much as we might expect because, unlike children in our world, she has her daemon, Pantalaimon, for company.
