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I try a book review – The Golden Compass, et al
January 15, 2008 | 2:14 am
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By Paul Biba
David had mentioned to me that he would like some book reviews on the site, so I thought I would give this a shot. My first time!
When I left for CES I needed to take some books with me and decided to use my Sony 505, more about which later, as I read pretty fast and carrying a lot of paper books is a pain. I settled, among others, on Pullman’s Golden Compass series because I had read such great things about the books. I haven’t seen the movie, but the reviews indicated that the original source was well worth my time. I bought all three books in the series from the Sony Connect store – the price was cheap enough that it overcame my distaste for DRM. On to the review.
There are certain pieces of music that affect me, and I presume others, profoundly. Bach’s B Minor Mass, Handel’s Dettingen Te Deum, Beethoven’s Ninth, Brahms Variations on the Theme by Haydn – when I listen to them I can’t do anything else. (So you don’t think I’m a pedant, I would also include Dave Matthews, Blues Traveler, Brubeck and some others.) My attention is riveted. I actually feel chills and sometimes the tears flow. The ears and the intellect merge and the body becomes the music itself.
This can actually happen with prose, but it is very, very rare. The best example I can think of is Gibbon in his Decline and Fall. The quality of the prose is such that it approaches music. You are so carried along by his language and phrasing that you have to devote extreme attention to the meaning – the music of his language can cause you to miss the meaning. Churchill has this rare musical capacity in his speeches, and Pullman has it in his Compass series. I was shocked by the tone, flow and musical nature of his prose.
There are good story tellers such as King and Tolkien and Trollope and Dickens, but there are few who can sing the music of words. At one point half way through the second volume the tears were running down my face. I put the book down and whenever I thought of the phrasing of that sentence (I won’t tell you what it was and spoil the suspense) the music of the words kept recurring to me and the tears would flow again. Amazing prose.
The series is dark and profound. It deals with issues that are intellectually far more important that the simple good and evil of Tolkein or Potter. Many of the major characters are profoundly unlikeable, even if they are “good”. As a matter of fact, the protagonists don’t even know what they are doing most of the time. It’s a dark series with serious philosophical and theological implications. No point in trying to summarize the plot, you can get that anywhere. But what I’m here to tell you is that you need to read the prose and revel in an author who is one of the few who can make music out of the English language.
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Comments:
Compelling review. I have the collected series sitting in a 20 kilo hardback somewhere that I could never bring myself around to reading. Perhaps I should ebay it and put the money towards the e-books.
The ebook versions are only about $4 each, so I’m not sure it would be worth the effort
Well, maybe I’m tone-deaf, but I didn’t hear much Mozart in Pullman.
I did find gaping, huge plot holes, logical inconsistencies, and philosophical gobbledegook.
Comparing Pullman in interviews talking about what he believes and what he wanted to do in the “His Dark Materials” story, and what is in the story, made me weep for the quality of English education.
Pullman enters the battlefield on C.S. Lewis and John Milton’s home ground, and savagely beats himself to a pulp.
Meanwhile any reader who can think risks having his brain explode trying to wrap his consciousness around such scenes as an immaterial fleshless angel getting his throat ripped out by a leopard while a woman yanks hard on the said angel’s immaterial hair.
Seriously, Paul, did you pay any attention to the story beyond the individual phrases that so moved you?
I suggest you were suffering from exhaustion, dehydration, and jetlag.
I enjoyed the first book enough to go check out the next two from the library and read them also.
I certainly don’t think Pullman is as terrible as Mr. Pond up there suggests. On the other hand, Pullman is nowhere near the skill level you suggest. The idea of powerful, musical prose that paint pictures with words and have the ability to literally stun the reader brings writers like Edgar Allen Poe to mind (though I am biased, as Poe is my favorite author). In fact, I can’t think of any contemporary authors who match your description of writing “musical” prose.
I did enjoy Pullman’s books, though, and I do think he’s a good writer. But he’s a good writer on the level of JK Rowling, not Dickens. I also happen to think that Tolkien’s LOTR series is much more nuanced than an oversimplification of “good vs evil” permits. Although, I’d say by the end of the series, Harry Potter had become about more than that, as well (but most ideas in HP are fairly unoriginal and thus the books fail to meet the caliber of Tolkien’s trillogy) .