the Golden Compass

The Golden Compass and its sequels were one of my favorite series when I was young (I think I read them when I was 12-14), and I think they had a profound impact on me. I had loved the Narnia books before then, as well, but the His Dark Materials trilogy (which were Pullman's direct retort to Narnia) affected me much more strongly.

First of all, Lyra is an incredibly strong character. She’s self-driven and self-motivated, clever, curious, brave, and loyal. She’s never forced to fit stereotypes of what girls should be. She lies to get herself out of trouble and is as fierce as any child could possibly be. As with many parents in YA fiction, her parents are not exactly ideal, and as a result of growing up practically as an orphan, she has learned to be self-sufficient. She later gains a positive paternal figure in the armored bear Iorek Byrnison, and perhaps maternal figures in the witch Serafina Pekkala and Mary Malone. They protect and support her, but never keep her from being independent.

Lyra usually has to rely on her cleverness to proceed through the story, and she often does this through trickery, such as when she tricks the bear king into a fight with Iorek for the throne. Ironically, she uses the alethiometer, a “truth measurer,” to aid her. She reads this naturally, by grace, but loses the ability when she becomes an adult.

The daemons were one of my favorite parts of the novels when I first read them. To have your soul manifest in a physical animal companion seemed so cool! It’s interesting, too, that the form the daemons took upon reaching adulthood reflected the nature of the person, and that children’s daemon’s could take any shape because children are malleable, and not yet set in their nature.

The His Dark Materials trilogy speaks pretty strongly against organized, dictatorial religion. It is not anti-spiritual, however, but anti-abuse of authority. And the war against heaven that takes place in the latter novels is not the children’s war, but the war of their parents and other adults. However, as in our world, they still have to deal with the effects of this war.