Saturday, May 14, 2011

His Dark Materials

Golden Compass is the name of a Philip Pullman fantasy trilogy I've read recently, the books are
1-Northern Lights (Golden Compass)
2-The Subtle Knife
3-The Amber Spyglass

the main plot based on parallel universes theory you probably heard of it, a young orphan girl named Lyra lives in Jordan college of Cambridge in a different world from this world with talking bears, gypsies , witches ... accidentally hears about "dust", mysterious sub-particles that filling the universe and between them (later in book two when Lyra meet a boy from this world we learn that we call it dark mater or shadow particle), in a quest to find her kidnapped friend (Roger) and her imprisoned uncle (Lord Asrael) she eventually finds out that she is the one that prophecy talks about, someone that should make a very hard decision in order to save life, a job so important that make her the new Eve.

the first book is good, good enough that made me to read other books and watch the movie, the second book is bad and the third is worst, I am glad they didn't continue the movie sequences. the writer (that is happen to be a known atheist) do his best to drive the story to anti-God shores, specially in book 3 you will loose the main line of story to hear how evil & miserable the authority and church are.

the most amazing thing about people in Lyra's world is that they have daemons, that means every single human has a spiritual animal shaped things that connected to them (not by a wire or pipe or something but spiritual), males have female daemon & vice versa (unless they were, you know... homo).
Sometimes I think how it will be felt to have such a thing, something of your soul that represents your inner side and you can communicate with it, like the relationship between soul reapers (Shinigamis) and their Zanpakto in the "Bleach" series.

in conclusion I recommend reading book one, not the others. you may find it's name different based on which version you are reading (American or British) but the series name is the same "His Dark Material"