Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I just finished reading this grand trilogy to my kids, aged 8, 10, and 12. My wife ended up sitting in on almost the entire series, and all of us were riveted from Oxford to the World of the Dead and back again. These books are incredibly ambitious: they set out to stitch together a religio-political history of the multiverse with deep, informed reference to physics, religious history, adolescent psychology, Nietzschean heroism, etc. etc. etc. The result, as I read it, is one of the most compelling indictments of church and state ever written for a broad audience. Author Philip Pullman concludes, without didactic hamfistedness, that the first purpose of churches and governments is self-perpetuation through maintaining the ignorance of their adherents and citizens. The greatest wisdom and joy, in Pullman's worlds, comes of full, mortal, bodily engagement with the physical world per se: with domestic comforts, food, sex, art, aesthetic involvement, work well done, craft, cleverness, etc. The well-earned consciousness of a human adult, earned through Blakean experience, is the crowning moment of all creation. Antithetical to this wisdom and consciousness is dogmatic narowness, asceticism, monasticism, self-denial, narrowness of experience. That this idea is dramatized through the adventure stories of children is remarkable. One could do worse than to say that the weakness of fictional biography is its narrowness, its dependence on the particular, the local, the kind of detail that is very difficult to universalize or even generalize. And the weakness of allegory is its didactic tendency, its broad-stroke enmity to personal meaningfulness except in the most abstract terms. What Pullman has done is to weave a sharp, poignantly-rendered, intimate set of psychological dramas into grand, almost scriptural allegory. As though Charles Dickens were setting Tiny Tim against the backdrop of the Old Testament. In this way, which should not be attempted by lesser writers, the touchingly naive and personal actions of a 12-year-old girl take on universal importance. Every minor petulance, every petty preference, every whim shakes creation. In this setting, in which cataclysm feels immanent and everything hangs in pre-apocalyptic balance, our little heroin's encounter with God himself feels simply a natural step in the narrative. How Pullman pulls this off, I don't know. By all rights this should be embarrassing, overblown stuff, but it isn't. It is emotionally raw, heartbreaking, and lovely. Just like life. I highly recommend these books for children with good vocabulary and their fixed-Daemon authority figures.