book review: golden compass
in related news, i read a book!
i mostly wish i would have read a different one, sadly. the world that philip pullman created has some interesting elements (ice bears, daemons, general steampunkness) but i found both his writing style and the story he told to be a bit … disappointing.
in order to combine baby-caring and reading, i read some of the book aloud to charlotte. reading aloud highlighted his really awkward sentence structure. although there was nothing grammatically wrong, he crammed too many layers of information into too tight a space to follow without re-reading. i don’t think that a “young adult” novel should be simplistic, but this was a bit too convoluted for my taste.
the movie based on this book has been getting a bit of press due to it’s apparent anti-religious/pro-atheist theme. i wouldn’t go to quite that extreme, but it certainly didn’t care for organized religion that preyed on fear to control the population. another thing he does poorly is weave those themes into the story. it comes and it goes, and when it’s there, he’s bashing you over the head with it. At least Nathaniel Hawthorne used names and ribbons and things. When the climax was upon us and the secrets were finally being revealed, the action ground to a complete halt so characters could lecture each other about the evils of organized religion. yawn. and poorly done.
and then there was the story itself. none of the characters really intrigued me (save the ice bear), and while there were a few unexpected twists, much of it was obvious. i think much of it would have been obvious to any reader who’s picked up a story or two about a young orphaned child who appears to have a magical gift or a special destiny. there’s more i disliked about the story (pro-atheism aside), but the specifics of the choices that he made are so close to the core of the plot that it’d be mean to ruin things.
it’s an easy read, thanks to being a young adult book, so read it if you come across it. enjoy the ice bears. imagine how cool it would be to have your own little animal soul-mate and live in such a gilded world. it’s part of a trilogy and i hear the second book is better. the cliffhanger wouldn’t have been enough to get me to read on without that recommendation.
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