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The illustrious publishing house Knopf has just brought out the third volume of "His Dark Materials," titled "The Amber Spyglass," running 518 beautifully laid-out pages. English-born author Philip Pullman destined his first two volumes for the Young Adult market, ages seven to 12. Book III, however, is being marketed for us grownups and it is a Book of the Month Selection to boot. (Come to think of it, though, Books I and II, despite their juvenile orientation, work well for a grownup audience as well.) "The Golden Compass" and "The Subtle Knife," in their attractive classy Knopf paperback editions, carry within a genuinely impressive listing of honors accumulated during their time in bookstores: An ALA Top 10 Best Book for Young Adults, a 1997 Children's ABBY Honor Book, a Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books Blue Ribbon Book, a Publisher's Weekly Best Book of the Year, England's Carnegie Medal and Guardian Prize for Fiction. The snippets of reviews from leading publications are of a nature for which most authors would willingly give up a piece of their eternal souls to obtain. Here's a sampling. New York Times: "Very grand indeed ... scene after scene of power and beauty." The Washington Post: "Superb ... all-stops-out thrilling." Detroit Free Press: "Extraordinary." You get the drift. As a first indication of why I do not join this plethora of hosannas is the sourcing of the overall title of the three volumes -- "His Dark Materials." Author Pullen obligingly supplies us with the quotation from Milton's "Paradise Lost," Book II: Into this wild abyss, The womb of nature and perhaps her grave, Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire, But all these in their pregnant causes mixed Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight. Unless the almighty maker them ordain His dark materials to create more worlds, Into this wild abyss the wary fiend Stood on the brink of hell and looked a while, Pondering his voyage. I shall not even attempt to give a plotline of the three books -- it would require way too many digressions and explanations. Suffice it to say, two young people, Lyra, starting as a pre-teen girl, who lives in one universe, and Will, a youth living in another, parallel but different world, become involved in one another's lives, spending considerable time and many pages searching for one another. By page 31 of "The Amber Spyglass," we come upon Will suddenly finding himself with two angels -- whose appearance he can barely discern -- when the trio is attacked by some kind of chariot from the sky. Will kills one of the beings in the chariot in order to escape. He is shocked and disturbed. The angels assure him he had no choice but murder. Will asks them who these creatures were, "And what is the Authority? Is he God?" The angel quietly explains, "Authority, God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty -- those were all the names he gave himself. He was never the creator. He was an angel like ourselves -- the first angel, true, the most powerful, but he was formed of Dust as we are, and Dust is only the name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself. Matter loves matter." The concept of Dust is woven throughout the books, rather turning the conventional notions of heaven, hell and the afterlife topsy-turvy. The Church is presented as a dangerous, evil force, but let me hasten to assure you Pullen is not talking of the Church of Rome -- although it may share some of its historic attributes. The first pope is referred to here as "John Calvin the First." Heaven only knows what those young adult readers, aged seven to 12, are supposed to make of all this. Ah, yes, and Pullen gives us witches, good and bad, characters known as "gyptians," daemons or familiars you might call them -- here they appear as some kind of extension of the soul -- and the wicked Church practices something called "excision," which seems to be cutting a child and his daemon apart so the child will go to an eternal Limbo. Oh, it's all as original as all get out, but I certainly wouldn't want to put such a work into the hands of any 7-year-old I know. And talk of violence: I don't even want to think of the potential nightmares the scene where a mighty armored bear eats a man -- admittedly dead -- who was one of his dear friends. There is heavy and quirky violence in all three books. "Alice in Wonderland," they're not. If parents and school boards here and there can get worked up over Harry Potter and his wizards' school, they should only dip into Mr. Pullen and his creative exercises -- these books make Harry and his adventures seem about as anodyne as Mother Goose's Nursery Rhymes. I won't even try to go into the case some critics have made for the girl Lyra being equated with Jesus Christ. The mind can only boggle so far in one review. [ Source: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_grenierc/20001118_xccgr_roll_over_.shtml |