saving ink

After four straight days of spending all of my non-sleeping, non-working hours reading, I’ve finished the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. Those who enjoyed the Harry Potter books but found their morality too black and white, those who loved escaping to Tolkien’s world but found it too foreign, those who grew up on C.S. Lewis but now find him too preachy: you need to read His Dark Materials. Now.

Why? An excerpt:

“When I first saw you, in your Oxford,” Lyra said, “you said one of the reasons you became a scientist was that you wouldn’t have to think about good and evil. Did you think about them when you were a nun?”
“H’mm. No. But I knew what I should think: it was whatever the church taught me to think. And when I did science I had to think about other things altogether. So I never had to think about them for myself at all.”
“But do you now?” said Will.
“I think I have to,” Mary said, trying to be accurate.
“When you stopped believing in God,” he went on, “did you stop believing in good and evil?”
“No. But I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that’s an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.”

- Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

Though written as children’s literature, the writing itself approaches a level of sophistication largely absent from modern popular fiction, and the story poses philosophical, religious and scientific questions usually reserved for belles lettres. And best of all, just because Pullman’s audience is children, he doesn’t sugarcoat reality in any way: The heroes mess up, badly. People die - a lot of them, in fact, even main characters. Good and evil switch sides in a pirouette that doesn’t finish until the very end. And OK, I must admit a huge part of me loved the books because so much of their mythology is based on real theories in quantum physics.

The first book, Northern Lights, was made into a film called The Golden Compass a couple of years ago. Don’t see it - it’s a Disney-fied fantasy that forces good guys to be good and bad guys to be bad and endings to be happy. While these kinds of films rarely live up to the books they are based on, that film completely distorted the book’s message, and turned it into the same mindless drivel the books rally against.

So just read the books. You will not be disappointed.