Lyra is a young girl who lives in Jordan college, Oxford university, with her daemon–a shapeshifting, talking animal companion that is as much a part of her as her growing, changing personality. She is perfectly content to stay at the university forever, exploring and playing games with the local children and their daemons.
All of that changes, however, when children across the countryside start to disappear. At first, it starts in far away places, but soon the mysterious “gobblers,” as the kidnappers are called, hit close to home, and Lyra is swept away into an adventure that takes her far to the north, to the land of auroras and the midnight sun; of witches and clans of ferocious talking polar bear warriors, and evil plans that have been revolving around Lyra since long before she was born.
I rated this novel a solid four stars. It had some elements in it that were fantastically wonderful and imaginative, such as the idea of daemons. In Pullman’s universe, every human being has a daemon, an animal companion that represents one’s personality and is as much an integral part of any human being as their head or arm. Adults’ daemons have fixed themselves onto a certain form, but since children are still growing and changing, their daemons can change shapes at will. Whatever one thinks, so does the other; whatever one feels, so does the other; and whenever one dies, so does the other (usually).
This concept of personal daemons was by far the strongest element of this novel. It ranks among one of the most satisfyingly imaginative fantasy elements I’ve ever seen in a story. It got me wondering “if I had a daemon, what kind would it be?” (probably a black bear), and I felt like a little kid imagining what it would be like to have one. Even though he doesn’t set out all of the rules concerning daemons (Do they need to eat like regular animals? Do they go to the bathroom?), it adds a sense of wonder to the novels and gives insight into the thoughts and emotions of the characters in a delightful way. It also ends up driving the plot, when you find out why the gobblers are kidnapping children.
There were other areas, however, where I felt that the novel was weak, mostly with regards to the plot. The first hundred pages were too slow. Pullman is fairly good about building up tension, but he releases it too quickly. For the first half of the novel, I felt as if Lyra was only getting swept around by things outside her control, rather than actually doing anything, and that was slightly annoying. The explanation for some of the crucial events, such as the opening scene, didn’t make much sense to me. The twist at the end, while surprising, was far from inevitable, and I felt jolted in a less than satisfying way. This is the first novel in a trilogy, and the first novel does not stand on its own as a complete story. It ends on a cliffhanger, somewhere near the bottom of the cliff.
Aside from the plot, however, I think Pullman does a good job. The characters were fairly interesting, with strong personalities that drove the story, and the setting was really well done. There were times in reading the story when I felt that I was up in the north, surrounded by forests dimly lit by the aurora, or flying high in a marvelous balloon above the freezing wastes, or in the midst of the bear castle, surrounded by the reek of bird poop and bear odors watching the bears fight in an epic battle.
There were a lot of things that I liked about this book, and the experience itself was very pleasant. It felt like a fantasy world, and that made it really fun.
A lot of people told me that Pullman is very anti-God and that his books are really preachy–or at least that a significant group of people are wrong to think of it that way. I can see how he sets up the church (he never refers to it as more than “the church”) like a straw man, but in this book at least, he wasn’t very preachy. I can’t really pass a verdict on his treatment of religion until I read the other two books, though, so I’m going to have to hold off on that discussion.
