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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Breathtaking, 24 Jan 2004
I read this trilogy after seeing it plugged on the BBC's Big Read. Well what can I say. It is quite simply breathtaking. Reading His Dark Materials really takes you off to the world with Lyra and it's hard to come back. It is witout a doubt the best read I have had for as long as I can remember.
The most wonderful thing about it is it's relevance to the real world mixed with such fantastical storytelling with it's twists and turns. You won't be able to put it down!
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34 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A stunning set of works, 12 Nov 2001
By A Customer
If one somehow managed to throw John Milton's theology, C. S. Lewis's writing, and H. G. Wells's imagination together, the wildly-popular trilogy that would result is His Dark Materials. I enjoyed every moment of these books. Northern Lights was to my mind an extremely strong start, and to continue the quality and depth in the second and third books in a way that grips from beggining to end is a feat rarely achieved so well by authors. The imagination and intelligence employed throughout the story dazzled, and the theological implications of the plot left me reeling.
I would heartily reccomend these books to anyone from ten to a hundred years old. The depth of the characterisation and the intelligence with which the story is written extends far beyond what the Harry Potter phenomenon has achieved, and this eclectic mix of fantasy, religion, science fiction and adventure, with it's subtle humour lurking always, truly deserves a place in the minds of all readers as one of the greatest pieces of literature ever written. If you haven't read them yet, buy the set. It'll save you making three seperate orders. And I have no doubt you'll want to finish the trilogy after reading the first chapter of Northern Lights. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
one of the very few books to which i award five stars, 15 May 2005
I am not a gracious star giver. It sounds harsh, but I have been reading fantasy books since I was three years old (no joke), when I first picked up the Hobbit. I didn't finish it, the spiders scared me witless. I was fifteen when I dared read it again.
But that's beside the point. Phillip Pullman is a genius. An inventive, literary genius. He has created two characters so far removed and yet so alike to our own childish selves that we dearly wish to win their battle.
Lyra Belacqua, or Silvertongue. A twelve year old girl with an extraordinary task on her shoulders: she must save the world by commiting the original sin, and in doing that, betray the one she most loves. And, to add insult to injury, her mother runs a child-abusing sector of the all-powerful church, and her father is in league with angels from another world.
Will Parry is desperately trying to find his father, who, with his departure, made his mother sick with grief. A thirteen year old boy whi bears an awful burden, who must assist and be assisted by a strange, fiery girl from another world.
The idea of usurping the church is an old one. Many authors have opposed the Christian religion in their writings. But none have gone directly to the source as powerfully as Pullman. In these two people, barely past childhood, he challenges everything christianity has created, and turns it around into an evil cult, run by sickly old men who sit in Geneva and bitch.
Pullman brings theology and science, real, intense, present scientific reasearch, into one astounding trilogy. I do not wish to use the word epic, as to me that signifies something more sophisticated than this book, but the closest thing to that word we can find is applied. Many books invent their own scientific experiments. For a long time, I thought this was the same. Then, on the BBC news one evening, I heard a broadcast about elementary particles, shadows, and a conscious lifeform. This book is real science, and real theology. Who knows what's out there beyond the Aurora Borealis? Pullman is a master - he challenges modern perceptions and turns them into myths, using our own suspicions and fears.
And who hasn't wanted to go to China?
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