"Philip Pullman's young-adult fantasy classic The Golden Compass was published in 1995, two years before Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Both are wildly popular, but only J. K. Rowling's series inspired a theme park. Even after 30 years, during which The Golden Compass became a trilogy, His Dark Materials, which begat a second trilogy, The Book of Dust-collectively selling something like 50 million copies-Pullman's books retain an idiosyncratic spikiness."
"For starters, Pullman's world-building is spotty, probably intentionally so. Magic in contemporary fantasy is meant to function as a system, with rules and regulations, but his is wild and willful: Witches fly on cloud-pine branches; angels coalesce out of dust. His books are more permeable to the real world than Rowling's-boat-borne refugees and climate change crop up. Not least, Pullman stakes claims; he politely but firmly declines to mince words."
The Golden Compass debuted in 1995 and expanded into His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust, together selling roughly fifty million copies. The series presents intentionally uneven, spiky world-building in which magic resists codified systems: witches fly on cloud-pine branches and angels coalesce from dust. The narrative centers on eleven-year-old Lyra, her talking dæmon, and a long-running conflict with the Magisterium, an authoritarian incarnation of Christianity. Real-world issues such as refugees and climate change intrude on the plot. The series stakes outspoken anti-religious claims and concludes with The Rose Field.
Read at The Atlantic
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]