thedailychannel.com — recommended books

The Golden Compass
by Philip Pullman

This is an absorbing adventure book, but in the end it is both stupid despicable, and certainly not for young children. Lyra, a ragamuffin orphan, lives in Oxford in an alternate world. She plays with her friend Roger, and battles the gypsy children who live on boats.

One of the gimmicks of this alternate world is that each individual has a daemon-creature living associated with him, which is kind of an externalized soul and assistant and takes the form of an animal.

There is a theological/scientific elementary particle that no one really understands, called 'dust', which adheres to children after the age of puberty, causing their demons to settle down and assume one form, and equates to original sin. It's also associated with the Northern Lights and a barely visible outline of a phantom city from an adjacent alternate world., probably our own.. It's obvious they'll be connected by the end of the book, but it is not obvious how abhorrent and grotesque the mechanism of connection will be.

Very early on, the children start being stolen by a beautiful woman with a golden-monkey demon. They are sent off to the arctic circle for experimentation. Ominously, just after Roger and some other local kids disappear, Lyra is adopted by a beautiful woman with a golden-monkey demon. She escapes, joins the "gyptians", and journeys to the far north in order to rescue Roger and meet up with her murdering father, pursued by her controlling mother (the beautiful woman).

The experimentation on the children turns out to be this: they are somehow scientifically cut apart from their demons, which is hideously cruel and painful. And it kills them. The point? To prevent original sin. But Lyra's father has discovered something even more valuable. A huge amount of energy is released when the slicing occurs. Just what he needs!

So he slices Roger apart and the worlds are connected. His daughter Lyra realizes too late that she has been betrayed, arrives on the scene just in time to find her friend Roger lifeless as the daylight from the connected world lights up the arctic night.

Nasty.

The Golden Compass