The Golden Compass

Title: The Golden Compass [amazon]
Author: Philip Pullman
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers; 1st ed edition (April 16, 1996)
Pages: 416
Book Number: 18

This is a book that had been on my shelf for years - literally. I received it as a Christmas gift when I was 16 or 17. At the time, I shelved it because it was a “young adult” book, and I was going through a peculiar phase in which I thought I was too “mature” for such things. The irony, of course, is that I was a young adult then, and now that I finally got around to reading it, I’m an adult - at least on paper, anyway.

So, how was it? It was a good book, and while I didn’t find it as great as many people have found it, I did enjoy reading it. There were two things in particular that I loved about it: the daemons that all of the humans had, and the panserbjørne, or armored bears. The idea of having my own daemon intrigued me - what would it be like to have part of my soul, essentially, represented by a creature I could talk to? A creature that could change shapes (at least until I grew older?) What shape would my daemon ultimately take, when it could no longer change?

The armored bears were… well, here, let me let an image speak for the panserbjørne:

Do I really need to explain that that’s cool? That image, by the way, is as far as I can gather, a concept image from the movie adaptation of the book, which is coming out in December of this year. Here’s the movie site.

I found it interesting how the book is suitable for children to read, but from an adult’s perspective, a lot of it can be seen as quite violent and morbid. Bolvangar, the “Experimental Station”, reminded me an awful lot of the “medical” facilities at places like Auschwitz. At Bolvangar, children had tests ran on them relating to Dust, but some children also had their daemons “severed” from them. After this operation, some of the children started losing their minds, because the daemons were a part of them, a part of their mind and soul; others died from the shock. The morbidness of the severing is lessened because there is no blood, no physical injury, etc. - the severing is a severing of the “link” between daemon and child. However, if you look at it a bit closer, it really is a disturbing idea.

The only problem I had with the book was that the main plot, regarding Dust - what it was, how it worked, etc. - just didn’t seem very fleshed out. Bits and pieces of information about the substance was sprinkled throughout the book, but by the time I finished the book, I still felt that I didn’t know much about it. Perhaps on a later reading I’ll pick up more on it. Someone I know who has read the whole series told me that the idea of Dust is fleshed out a lot more thoroughly in the second book of the series, The Subtle Knife, which I’m reading now.

One last note: I’ve seen quite a few reviews, both at amazon.com and in the front of the book, that say that The Golden Compass is on par with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. While I liked The Golden Compass, I’m going to have to flat out disagree with that. It’s a good book, but it’s not that good. Perhaps that’s just my long-standing biases popping out, though - I started reading The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings when I was 9 or 10, and haven’t stopped since. I obviously like it a little bit.