Ravkikkerten: Det gyldne kompas 3

This is the final book in the Dark Materials trilogy, and contains the battle of Lord Asriel's forces against the forces of the Regent of Angels. There are three main focal points of this book: Dr. Mary Malone and her slow exploration of Dust in an alien world; Mrs. Coulter and her machinations; and Will and Lyra, who venture into the Land of the Dead. I enjoyed the chapters on Mrs. Coulter the most--she is a vivid, wildly demanding person, and I was fascinated by her skill at manipulation. The other characters felt less real. They seemed to act only how and when it would serve the plot, which is clunky at best. The villains are ineffectual and always defeated by the protagonists, generally through sheer chance.

Overall, this book read as though Pullman had written an outline of what his fantasy series should say. "Now it's time to confront Death," his outline says, "and now it is time for a supreme sacrifice." Moreover, I got really sick of the weird focus on Christianity.

Ah. Contains one of my favorite ending sentences of a novel, ever.His Dark Materials is one of those YA series that seems to grow up with the reader... each novel progressively darker and more nuanced. For example, Mrs. Coulter, who was such an unadulterated villain in the first book, is much more complex by the third. Layered characters with conflicting motives -- they're like crack to me.Also, I came to love the idea of Dust, which seemed little more than a plot device in the first novel, but by the end... what a beautiful idea.UPDATE: I just had a minor epiphany (minipiphany?) today at work: that getting my brain ready for subject analysis is very much like Lyra's state of mind when reading the alethiometer. Except that my alethiometer isn't inscribed with pictures, but MARC tags, each with ladders of meaning, defined by indicators, delimiters, subfields, and thesauri.Or maybe I just really need the long weekend.

EVERYTHING HURTS, OKAY?

Excellent ending to His Dark Materials! This is a good series to engage your imagination, particularly the audio version.

Preachy propaganda in narrative form which betrays the insecure attitude of the author who wants to destroy the kingdom of God and yet who longs for transcendence. His depictions of the church, the ancient of days, of the kingdom of heaven are so predictable and one dimensional. Though Pullman is a materialist, his depictions of other transcendent beings — of daemons, fallen angels, supernaturally strong animals and witches — are breathtaking and betray his longing for their to he an unseen realm beyond our own.This was the most preaching of the series.

It took me ages to read this, and I didn't like it as much as the first two. I suppose that's because it got deeper and deeper into the theological stuff I didn't appreciate that much when I first read it.

I also liked the third book a bit less than the others. The whole thing seemed rushed, as if he threw together every disparate idea he could think of at the last minute and didn't really plan ahead. I wanted this to be a great series, but it didn't really reach its potential.

I really liked the descriptions of angels at the beginning of the second book, as these strangely alien creatures with wisdom far beyond our own and their attention fixed on other-worldly things. But as the story progressed, it seemed like they became petty and simple and not really any different from flying, glowing humans.

I liked the way he described Mary's conversations with the mulefa in italics, to represent her poor understanding of the language without bogging down the reader with the poor translation itself. I liked the machine-conversations with Dust. I liked Iorek's discussion about how the knife should never have been created, and the observation that someone was going to create it eventually, so it's for the best that good-hearted people hold it.

But some parts seemed quite implausible or unnecessary:

Harpies given the task of tormenting people for eternity, and they just turn around and become nice after being told a story? None of the trillions of dead people from the last thousands of years ever thought to try that?

Shining with brilliance, the angel, second-in-command to God, with the wisdom and insight of thousands of years of existence, is betrayed to his death... by a few minutes of flirting?

And how can Will just teach the angels to close the windows? Isn't that his job alone?

How can you grab an angel by his wings and drag him to his death if angels can change form?

But I liked the whole notion of the war against God, so I gave him some leeway in his attempts to describe it. I like the idea of Will putting God out of his misery, without ever realizing what he's done.

Two chapters from the end, I put the book down and was awash with ideas about religion, authority, war, peace, the "god-shaped hole" that we supposedly try to fill with material pleasures, Mary's ex-Christianity, my own ex-Christianity, and the relationship of all these things to our experience of love and happiness and fulfillment. I was really liking the series, pacing my apartment in excited thought and wanting to recommend it to everyone, especially those with religious backgrounds.

But then all that hopefulness and inspiration is ruined by the needlessly traumatic ending. You have such empathy for Lyra and Will's young perfect love, everything's coming together for good and happiness, without a need for a god, and then Pullman breaks your heart and splits them apart forever. It felt to me like the entire ending was just a series of hastily-invented plot devices existing solely to force the main characters into unhappiness.

"Oh, by the way, you can't live in the same world as each other for more than a few years or you'll die. Annnd all the windows have to be closed, or the world will end. I guess you can have one open, but you can't use it for yourselves. No, not two; just one. And you can't make temporary holes because every one you make kills people. And uh, you can teach the angels to close them even without the knife, so no, you can't go around with Lyra visiting all the different worlds together and closing all of them. Not yours."

Not only that, but he takes away their special abilities and thrusts them into dull normal lives again. Boarding school? Running from the law? Why? I don't know what he was trying to teach by doing all of this. Something about growing up and... what? The whole "Republic of Heaven" ending is lost on me now; all I can think of is the tragedy of their lost love.

This is supposed to be a book about losing faith in religion and finding other meaning in life, but all I got out of it was depressed. Good thing I didn't read this when I actually was leaving my religion.

Philip Pullman gives those of us who have been religious a lot to think about in his books. While this was not my favorite of the triology, it was still a great book.

The concluding part of the trilogy had a suitably epic feel, though I did not enjoy it as much as the other two, especially the first one. The plot was rather opaque and buried rather too deeply in places under layers of wanderings through different worlds. I found the final resolution of the crisis affecting all the worlds unsatisfactory (giving away no spoilers), though suitably sad in its consequences. The most moving parts were those set in the Land of the Dead with the pathetic ghost children.

In the third and final book in His Dark Materials trilogy, Will Parry and Lyra Silvertongue find their way to the Land of the Dead, where they attempt to rescue Roger (from the first book). The Magisterium becomes more powerful and evil. An epic battle ensues.

This book puts me in the mind of why I generally do not read books in a series. I loved the first book. I could imagine this mystical world similar to our own, but filled with courageous children, daemons, armored bears, and mysterious dust. I enjoyed the second book, but the feisty Lyra starts to lose the limelight to the more stereotypical “hero figure,” Will. The third follows this downward trend.

Lyra’s character becomes a shadow of her former self. Another main character changes significantly, out of the blue. New beings are introduced that do not add anything to the storyline. The author completely disregards important elements already established, changing them in ways that made no sense to me.

The finale did not take me to a place I recognized from the first two books. The storytelling is disjointed – it jolts along with major new components thrown in constantly all the way up to the anticlimactic ending. There was so much potential here. I am disappointed in the resolution.

The final volume in this trilogy. It's interesting to read outside your normal genres, and this has been an enjoyable ride. The juvenile protaganists suggest a teen audience, but there is plenty here for adults to appreciate and enjoy.While the genre is fantasy - with witches and spectres (and armoured polar bears!) there are enough links back to the real world to make the whole thing "realistic". The Christian Church takes a thoughtful and well considered walloping. The fantasy elements are given a tenuous link to sub-atomic particles and quantum physics.Overasll, an enjoyable and diverting read.

A satisfying conclusion to the series. I just wish I had read it right after I finished The Subtle Knife because I forgot A LOT.

This book is so much longer than I remember and I had forgot 95% of it so Im glad I reread it. Adventure story that is also about religion and politics and morality. I wasnt really into the emphasis placed on romantic love as a marker of becoming an adult tho.

I would give it 1.5 stars if I could. My friends warned me that the series really jumps the shark in this book but I had no idea. I had assumed that it would be about as radical as a departure as Book 2 was from Book 1 but boy was I wrong. I'm thankful that the book is short and easy to read, otherwise I don't know if I would have finished it even though I was curious how the story was resolved. Only worthwhile if, like me, you have to finish a series or if you really liked the second book. I know I'm being pretty harsh so I should say that it was OK, nothing miserable it just totally missed on all the magic of the first book and just felt very anticlimactic.

I really wanted to like this more, but I just couldn't. Honestly, the 3 stars is probably giving it more than it deserves.

What Philip Pullman has done here is to write a full blown, unashamed genre novel to conclude 'His Dark Materials' (even if he'd deny it). Lord Asriel is holed up in an Adamant Tower, there are battles between zeppelins and gyrocopters, there are tiny people with poisoned spurs who ride dragonflies, there's some real science-fictional world-building with alien elephants on wheels, thought-directed flying machines and a DNA bomb. It may not be certain quite which genre it is, fantasy or science fiction, but it's definitely genre. Let no-one tell you otherwise.In the meantime, we have all the apparatus of the previous two novels carried forward: the daemons, Dust, the Church militant and the intercision devices. Marisa Coulter plays a large part in this book; her motivations become clearer. Will and Lyra journey to the Land of the Dead, where things are changed. In an afterword, Pullman says that he has taken ideas from every book he's read: certainly, whilst reading, I kept connecting the story with other ideas, facts and events that I'd come across in my life. That shows that I was never this book's intended audience; if I were 13 or 14, there would be so many new ideas in this book that I might be astonished. Instead, as an adult, I kept nodding to Philip Pullman in acknowledgement. In classifying this novel as genre, I'm also drawing on that same experience. I can think of a number of genre novels from genre writers that cover a lot of the same ground; the difference is that many readers will not have come across these other writers, and 'literary' critics would most likely dismiss those writers as mere hacks. Well, that's their problem. As subjects for a 'young adult' novel, life and death and love and loss and getting along with other people are important themes, and this book tackles those things perfectly well. Ultimately, the book is about trying to get young people to recognise what life is like: people are sometimes neither good nor bad, stuff happens, people we love pass on, and other people we've never met turn out to be full of good things like honour and generosity and curiosity and ingenuity. The BBC/HBO television dramatisation hasn't got as far as 'The Amber Spyglass' yet; part of me kept wondering "How are they going to tackle that?" at various points in the book. I was now irrevocably locked into visualising the characters in the book as the actors from the dramatisation; not a bad thing, though it did make me raise an eyebrow at the love between Will and Lyra because, as I said in a previous review, in the dramatisation they are played by slightly older actors and that adds a degree of sexual tension to the story that the bare words of the novel would not support. Pullman's anti-clericalism is given full play in this book: the Church are definitely the Bad Guys here, waging war and sending out an assassin. The assassin is dealt with almost off-handedly, almost by accident; this might seem like a cop-out, but it's more believable than if there had been a show-down between a professional killer and two children.Overall, then, a worthwhile conclusion to the trilogy, but perhaps not as ground-breaking as some give it credit for. Pullman brings all his threads together and delivers a book rich in life's lessons.

It’s kind of amazing how out there this trilogy gets. I wish I’d known back in the day when I first started reading it, because I might have made the effort to finish what I’d started instead of stopping after book one. These books were easily some of the best I’ve read in a good long while, and each book in the trilogy only improved on the one before it.

This one includes a harrowing trip into the afterlife for Lyra and Will and ends with some hard choices for both characters. There is an epic battle scene between humans, angels, witches and just about everything under the sun.

I’m hugely excited about the HBO adaptation, which will hopefully do it justice, even though they are condensing the books into two seasons instead of doing a book per season. Still, the bizarre visuals in the second and third books should more than make up for anything condensed for television.

I honestly don't know how to review this book. I liked it but it was weird. The end felt weird. I thought the battle with the forces of the Authority and Metatron would be... more. And that Lyra and Will would have a more active part on it.

I got bored with all the Mary side story in that world. I thought that the conflict within the two groups of creatures (the giants birds and the mulefa) would be explored more and that that was going to be the main point on that side story. But then all ended in... nothing.

What I did like was the feeling of true epic fantasy of this book. The different worlds and creatures presented were cool, and my favorite part was definitely the world of the dead. I was confused at first when Will's daemon didn't appear like his father's but then it kind of make sense... kind of.

I also liked the message of the book, but the ending felt like it should be different. I don't know. I still feel weird about it.

Anyway, a good book in general, a little disappointing because the start of the trilogy was great, but still good and I like it.

A disappointing end. Probably 2.5 stars.

The first book in this series was much better than I remembered; the second was a tad confusing, but I'll make allowances for middle books in trilogies; this one was disjointed and boring.

(I was reading it before bed and my attention kept wandering after every page - sometimes every paragraph. I'd get distracted stroking my cat (not a euphemism) and suddenly ten minutes would have passed with no desire to return to this book.)

Anyway.

There's a lot going on here but I didn't feel connected to much of it. I wanted Lyra and Will to survive, but that never really seemed in doubt. I wanted to know the "answers" about Dust and daemons and Spectres... and I never felt like I got any.

Dust was... what happens when matter knows itself, which is a sentence made up of English words, but doesn't have a lot of meaning. Also if the Dust vanishes then so does consiousness? But Dust itself is a metaphor for conciousness? It's also somehow connected to puberty and sexual maturity? At the end of this book Lyra talks about people needing to go on learning and creating to keep Dust around, but what brings Dust back is... a couple of adolescents kissing? And maybe more.

I'm confused. And maybe stupid.

Then, we find out that the Dust is flowing away because of the Subtle Knife opening doorways between worlds that haven't been closed which would seem like a nice quest for Will-the-Kinfe-bearer but wait! Actually angels can close these doorways just fine, and they'll take on the resonsibilty for them. So why weren't that angels closing the !#%&ing doorways to start with? Why did it get to this point?

Also can we please talk about the delightfully Freudian moment when Will tries to use the Knife but then he thinks about his mother and his Knife breaks? Please?

(Talking of Will's mother - she's his central motivation for the majority of the story, then we get absolutely no answers about whether she's ok. Sure, Lyra told him much earlier that she was alright at that point but a) a lot of time has passed since then, and b) I got a strong sense Lyra Silvertongue was lying when she told him that.)

ALSO do all the worlds have a God/Authority/Chistianity the way we know it? Did all the beings that fought for Asriel get returned to their own worlds? How did the fact that these people had actually seen and fought alongside/against actual angels change the meaning and practice of theology in their worlds? How did it change it in Will and Lyra's world? A core tenent of most religions - certainly Christianity - is faith. Belief in something you have no proof of. And now there's a heap of people who've seen that angels do exist. That should change things.

Pullman is obviously deeply critical of religion (in this case represented by Christianity) but it changes the games completely when he's made a world where God and angels are actually real. But he doesn't acknowledge it. Hell, he makes a lot of statements about how religion is Big Bad but he never actually shows it? I mean, I'm an atheist, and I absolutely recognise the many, many harmful things Christianity has done in our own world.

But in Lyra's world, we're just repeatedly told that religion is Bad without really being shown how it impacts on society (apart from the whole cutting-away-daemons which is both a new occurance and doesn't seem to be sactioned by the Church as a whole). We see what I presume is an analogy of a gay or transgender person (the man with a daemon of the same gender as himself) alive and holding down a job and apparently unpersecuted. We see societies that don't follow the Authority living their lives untroubled by missionaries or armies.

Anyway. Enough disappointed ranting. I'm free to move on to other books now.

This audiobook was brilliantly done. It’s seriously better than the first two. If you have read is novel, or listened to the audiobook, please do so ASAP. You will be happy you did. The audiobook is a full cast, if you get the correct copy from your local library. Just like the first two.


Philip Pullman as the narrator
Joanna Wyatt as Lyra,
Peter England as Will Parry,
Alec McCoud As Balthamos,
Richard Pierce as Pantalaimon,
Seán Barrett as Lord Asrial and Iorek Byrnison,
David Timson as Chevalier Tialys,
Denika Fairman as Lady Salmakia,
Steven Thorne as The Inquisitor, Saturmax, and Farder Coram
Douglas Blackwell as John Faa, Semian, and the boatman,
Andrew Branch as Kaisa
Alison Dowling as Mrs. Coulter ,
Susan Sherridon as Serafina Pekkala and Roger,
Kate Locke as Mary Malone,
Stephen Grife as Martin Lanselius
Alex Norton as Father McFale,
Garrick Hagen as Lee Scorsby
Stephen Grife as Metatron,
Eve Carpe as the Fernier,
Nigel Anthony as Frau Pavel,
Nigel Carrington as the Angel Baruch,
Angel Xaphania....?
Bert Cesar as King Ogunway,
Ken Drury as Lira’s Death,
Rupert Degas as Peter,
Theresa Gallagher as Atal and Alma,
Emmadean Zerno as Angelica
David Graham as Pugs and Culca,
Nigel Lambert as the Galavesti and Lord Roake,
Jill Shilling as the Harpy, no name
James Green the ghost of John Perry,
Haywood Morse as Mr. Vasaleedies,and Rosenfeld Dame Hannah
Andrew Branch as Father Gomez and Doctor Culca,
Jane Callingwood as Kiriava,
Liza Ross as Stelmaria and Madam Oxentiel,
John O’Connor as the teacher and the thin man,

Lauren Donovan, Alexander Mitchell, Arthur Mitchell, Harriet Butler, Fiona LaMont, and Andrew LaMont played the children
“All the other roles were played by members of the cast.”

**any misspellings are my own, as I didn’t find a full listing of the cast online anywhere. So I had to transpose this list myself.**

I could have easily done without the love story at the end (I actually made gagging noises in parts while listening to the audiobook in the car). But the rest of the book was lovely.

The author might be a huge Louis Wain fan.

I think this was my first rereading for the first time since it came out 25 years ago. I came away with a deeper appreciation of it.

The Third part of "His Dark Materials" brings the war that was brewing in the first two parts. As the various parallel worlds begin to intermix, Lyra and Will are frantically trying to talk to the dead -- they enter the gray afterlife in search of answers. The ending is satisfactory, but still leaves the possibility that it is not the ultimate end, and, indeed, Pullman has written a continuation of the story almost 20 years later. I don't really want it to continue... I can't say I would ever read the series again. Overall, it seemed... interesting... but not fascinating. Too many things seemed random or unexplained. I am a little excited about watching the series based on the books though, probably because so much of the book is very visual and as I read it I could easily see how cinematic the scenes would be.

I really enjoyed this final book. I found the alternate worlds lively and inventive and I liked the parallels with quantum physics. I agree with Angela, though - the spunky, brave Lyra is unrecognizable now that she knows Will, which is too bad.

I'm glad I read these books, but I don't think I'll be recommending them to anyone.

I loved the biblical rewriting aspect, and the multi-verses, and daemons, but the actual writing and plot I found weak and confusing. It was okay, but my mind often drifted as I read because there was nothing to pull me in. The land of the dead section was by far the best in the series, but the first book was the most engaging.

All in all, a decent fantasy series, but not one I'd ever reread.

I suffered my way through this trilogy as it was "The greatest thing" and concluded that it was only deemed such as the Literati never deign to read Sci-Fi and so thought he dreamt up all the stuff he just re-hashed.

Definitely the best of the three.

In Amber Spyglass, the last installment of the His Dark Materials trilogy, Lyra, who started off as an ordinary kid in The Golden Compass, is seen as the most important child who has ever lived according to the church. Their fate depends on Lyra's journey into womanhood. She may be important but she is also seen as a threat as she is in the position of biblical Eve as the temptress of man's downfall. Heavy, right? Remarkably, young Lyra is on the cusp of introducing the concept of sin (Dust) to the world. She must be stopped before the Dust (sin=evil) takes over. When we first catch up with Lyra in The Amber Spyglass, she has been hidden away and kept drugged and sleeping in a cave by her mother (remember Mrs Coulter?). But. But! But, is Mrs Coulter all that evil? She acts the grieving mother as she recounts how she almost killed Lyra earlier. This is an epic battle between good and evil with lots of fight scenes and dying declarations (just wait until you get to the land of the dead). The references to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden are laid on pretty thick, but Lyra is coming into her own as a young woman and she has an equally adulting young man as her companion...The good news is that many of your favorite characters are back even if they died in an earlier installment. Iorek Byrnison the armored bear is back with his army! I was excited to see the bears and the witches but there are plenty of new creatures like harpies and ghosts. Probably my favorite characters to imagine are Gallivespians. They are small, slender spies able to ride hawks and dragonflies.

Book 3 His Dark Materials. With the use of the alethiometer and the subtle knife, Will and Lyra travel between different worlds, as the great battle of good versus evil begins and some tough decisions have to be made. An enjoyable trilogy with many layers, and of course reading complemented by the lovely Folio Society edition