tuckova

I finished "The Golden Compass" over the weekend. I had started reading it to Squire Tuck and then apparently wasn’t reading it fast enough, because he started reading it alone. Since I hadn’t already read it, I hopped to so we could talk about it.

I liked it a lot. It takes a certain amount of thinking for granted, which I particularly like in a children/YA book. It was well-written, and there was a decent flow to the plot. I liked that the end of a chapter was really the end of a chapter, and not always a cliffhanger. I liked how things progressed in a way that was exciting and possible to follow.

I also thought Pullman did a good job of telling you things about characters in a way that revealed his thoughts about them. For example, there’s a part when he says that Lyra has no imagination. This is hard to fathom because she’s a great on-the-spot liar, which to me requires an active imagination, but Pullman explains that in fact she is a good liar because she believes what she says… in a way, he presents something and explains it away at the same time. I wasn’t sure I agreed with him but it’s clear he thought about what he wrote.

He has a way of describing people through their behavior that I thought was really powerful. Mrs. Coulter only has a few complete scenes in the book, and each scene revealed more about her than a page of adjectives. I wish that he had spent less time using the adjectives later, because it felt a little screenplay to me, a little "stay with my visuals!" but he did so well describing action to reveal character that if he wants to be sure you see HIS character, that’s fair.

On the downside: He doesn’t always describe how people interact and how they got to feel the way they do about each other very well. Some relationships are clear in a sentence or two ("Ma Costa had clouted Lyra dizzy on two occasions but fed her hot gingerbread on three") but many of them fell short, for me. Lyra explains that she loves Iorek because he was kicked out of a country for murder, as was her father, except that no loving relationship ever seems clear between her and her father. Her quick affection for Iorek seems reasonably placed but the reasons given don’t line up. I had problems with her relationship with Lord Asriel, too, who spends quite a few pages threatening to kill her in the beginning, but is described later as always treating her as "an adult engaging a child in a pretty trick." Wha–? Her parents’ relationship was particularly difficult for me to understand: so passionate and so dead at the same time. Maybe I’ve never had relationships like these, so it doesn’t make sense to me, but I think the problem is that Pullman doesn’t really know how to describe these relationships himself. A relationship that should be key, Lyra’s parents are fierce and infinitely sad and passionate and dizzy and they don’t make sense, and it hurts the book that they don’t.

And… the alethiometer seemed a little too handy. It was not as handy as "because Dumbledore thinks so" (glargh!) but it really did seem almost too much. As if the book got written and then there were holes in the plot that had to be mended, and boom! they were. This is a minor complaint, though. It’s just — he did so well at describing other otherworldly things to a degree that made them seem really possible that I’m sorry he didn’t spend more time making the alethiometer seem as real, at least not to me. I finished and wanted to think for days about what form my daemon would take, but I never once considered what I would ask the alethiometer, if I could. Do you see what I mean?

Anyway. Good book, glad I read it, want to read the rest. Next up will be some non-fiction, I think. By the way, when people tell you Nora Ephron’s latest book ("I Feel Bad About My Neck") is "funny" what they mean is that they have never read a decent blog post, because there are at least 20 writers out there who make my ribs hurt, but Nora Ephron never even made me smile.