The Amber Spyglass
No. 3 in the His Dark Materials series
by Philip Pullman
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Alfred A. Knopf (New York): 10 October 2000. Hardcover: 544 pages. ISBN-10: 0-67987-926-9 ISBN-13: 978-0679879268 Suggested retail price: $20.00 (US) Tags: Adam and Eve; alternate universes; angels; bears; dark matter; evolution; Fantasy; knives; metaphysics; spirits; trilogy; witches Tactical strength: [5/10] |
More than most trilogies, you really cannot make any sense of The Amber Spyglass without having first read The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife. Pullman picks up Spyglass right where he left off in The Subtle Knife. Still reeling from his father's murder just minutes after finding him, Will determines that he must find and rescue Lyra from Mrs. Coulter. Two angels -- intent on getting Will and the knife to Lord Asriel -- guide Will to the cave where Mrs. Coulter has kept Lyra in a drugged sleep.
While Lyra sleeps, she has vivid "dreams" where she communicates with Roger in the world of the dead. Lyra still feels guilty about leading Roger to his death at the hands of her father, and she vows to enter the world of the dead and rescue Roger. Forces from all sides converge on Mrs. Coulter's cave. Will sneaks into the cave using the knife while Iorek the bear creates a distraction. At the same time, forces from Lord Asriel and the Church Magisterium start to battle over access to the cave. Will tries to open a window to carry Lyra to safety, but he gets distracted by Mrs. Coulter and the knife breaks. Will would have fallen into Mrs. Coulter's hands, but two of Lord Asriel's spies -- Galivespians who look like humans but only a few inches tall -- attack her with the poison that the Galivespians produce in the spurs on their heels.
Safely away from the battle, Iorek agrees to mend the knife so that Will can help Lyra rescue Roger. Will takes Lyra to the staging area for the land of the dead, and they take the boat into the land of the dead. Lyra feels terribly torn because she must leave Pantalaimon, her daemon, behind, but she feels bound by her promise to rescue Roger.
Meanwhile, Mary, the physicist from Will's world, has consulted her computerized version of the Alethiometer and travels to a very strange world where evolution has produced quite a different set of animals. Mary makes friends with the intelligent being who live in a symbiotic relationship with a forest of giant trees. The beings rely on the trees for the wheels that allow them to travel quickly over their planet's surface, and the trees rely on the beings to wear down the wheels to release the seeds of the giant trees. Mary learns the being's language and discovers that the beings can see dust. Mary creates a device (the amber spyglass) that allows her to see the dust as well. Normally, the dust would fall directly onto the trees' and help with some sort of pollination process, but through the spyglass, Mary sees that a sort of wind blows the dust away from the trees. Mary knows that somehow she must be ready to help Will and Lyra, and we know from the witches' prophecy, that Lyra must make a choice similar to that of Eve.
In this final volume of the triolgy, Pullman seems to have lost some control over his story. When you get to the end of The Amber Spyglass, you can sort of see where he was trying to take you, but he certainly didn't take a direct route. The story also becomes less about the characters we have followed for three books and more about the metaphysical events surrounding them. We learned in The Subtle Knife that in Pullman's universe, conscious thought creates dust, but that dust also has its own sort of consciousness. In a way, the entire series describes the battle between dust and the church. The church doesn't like dust, because it represents free thinking. The church wants to control all thinking and have all people think the same -- sinless -- way. Such an existence would stifle the creation of dust, and dust like almost any conscious entity doesn't want to die. So, dust takes up its own cause by guiding Lyra and Mary to a situation where dust can survive.
I would liked to engage in a more concrete discussion of the philosophy of the His Dark Materials series, but the haphazard events of The Amber Spyglass leave you with something like a glimpse of the shadow cast by his philosophy. You can say that by promoting the survival of dust and showing the defeat of both "the Authority" and the church, Pullman seems to advocate a personal morality represented by Lyra rather than a directed morality represented by Mrs. Coulter and the church's Magisterium. Lyra never gives up once she makes a commitment, but when not fulfilling a promise, she enjoys self-directed rambunctious play and even a little bit of devious fun. I could easily see religious groups not liking Pullman's message, since he seems to promote individual freedoms and puts down the idea of organized religion. But the symbolic meaning of creation, Eve, daemons, deaths, specters, angels, and multiple universes gets muddled in the rushing about between all the factions in the book. The exposition does give you a sense of urgency and importance about the events, but the rushing narrative leaves little time for the characters to explore the meanings behind the events surrounding them.
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