The Golden Compass / Northern Lights by Philip Pullman

Brief Description

A small girl teaches a bear how to dress for battle.

Actual Review

I know this book really well. I read it many, many times as a kid and when I came back to doing it again, the pages just flew by.

I’m thrilled that this made it to the Guardian’s top 100 books list.  Philip Pullman wrote a children’s book that raised some of the largest questions I was asked to cope with as a kid and I’m still grateful for it.  Equally importantly, he asked those questions to the backdrop of talking, armoured polar bears fighting to the death!  Tell me there isn’t some tiny part of you that doesn’t want to know what a bear would go to war for.

Our young protagonist Lyra is a girl that’s been haphazardly raised by the stuffy scholars of Jordan College in a parallel universe, slightly steampunk Oxford.  Her only family, Arctic explorer Uncle Asriel, both awes and intimidates her.  She overhears him explaining his discoveries of “Dust” one night and immediately decides she’s going to learn all about it. Lyra’s keen like that. Something about this strange, forbidden, otherworldly substance that affects people after puberty kindles an obsession within her.  From then on, it’s a whirlwind of action and betrayal full of intriguing characters like the sinister Mrs Coulter, a clan of witches and a Texan balloonist. He’s pretty cool, too.

“So, what’s the big deal?” you scream at me.  Well, it’s this: The Golden Compass had a message that isn’t really told to children very often, and I think it’s an important one. We are all inherently flawed and tempted by sin every day. It’s part of our fabric and there is no shame in that temptation. Granted, it teaches that lesson by portraying puberty as this cosmic, biblical level catastrophe but wasn’t puberty exactly that for all of us?

The Golden Compass is not a book I would recommend to, say, a bishop or other devout religious person. Pullman pretty much dropkicks the idea of God and angels right out of the window before he whirls around and right hooks a child in the face with the idea of its own mortality, but he does it with such style.

All right, there’s a prophecy and if there’s one thing I hate, it’s a prophecy. The moment there’s a prophecy, you just know the mission’s in the bag. If I were a book character and I were told I was chosen by an ancient prophecy, my reaction would be something like “Phew! Great! Thought we were in trouble.” Aside from that, though, I absolutely loved it. Children lie and steal and cause trouble but it’s predominantly innocent. There’s a kind of purity to a small child’s ignorance, even when it’s being cruel. Lyra is excellent at making up stories on the spot. This is one of the few books where a child’s ability to lie is actually one of her greatest strengths, because it’s not done with malice, just childish play acting or to get out of trouble.

Adults, though, are driven by multiple, complex reasons that don’t always make sense to anyone else and aren’t always pure or just or even well-informed. And one day, somehow, something gradually clicks and some awareness is activated so every child eventually joins those ranks. All of us sin and, after a certain point, we know we’re doing it.

Go on, that’s good stuff to give a kid to think about. All the cool talking animals and adventures in the snow aside, the message of this story is deep, man. Way deeper than any other book for that age-range I ever came across. It’s roughly the same effect as telling a child “Honey, don’t worry, one day you’ll grow up… and you will feel soul-crushing SHAME and GUILT for your actions, just like Mummy and Daddy do every day!” Blew my mind at the time.

Over to you:

• What would your Daemon or, I guess, spirit animal be?
• Have you ever encountered a real bear?
• Are you a good liar? What is your main reason for lying?
• If you read this book as a kid, did it scare the crap out of you?

Next time, it’s Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte!

A long break

All right, so it’s been close to forever since this started. Unfortunately, I chose the longest possible form of entertainment to review.

Reading takes commitment and concentration. There are pages and pages of this stuff to go through, and for a long time, life decided not to let me. Don’t ask why, just suffice it to say, it wasn’t happening. Thankfully, we’re back up and running with Northern Lights aka The Golden Compass review being posted tomorrow. It’s a doozy.

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Brief Summary:

The story of an eye stranded at the top of a tower that desperately wants to regrow a finger so it can wear its favourite ring.

Review:

First off, I do not understand how this constitutes one entry on a list of 100 books.  Granted, Tolkien was supposedly against chopping it into a trilogy, until someone pointed out that it’s impractical to print an anvil.  Hence, 3 books, not one.

Anyway,  I’m slightly unsure how to broach this.  The Lord of the Rings is a masterpiece, it feels like you’re reading a masterpiece and Tolkien was undoubtedly a mastermind.  Such a vast, wonderfully crafted world with an entire mythology driving it is astonishing.  If you need proof, Wiki any name from the series and enjoy the almost endless string of links for enough Middle-earth lore and legends to make you feel like you’re actually an Elf or a Hobbit on a history course. It’s seriously that long.  In a nutshell though, Ents are great, Gandalf is a legend and Orcs definitely need killing.  Awesome.

That being said, I had the strangest problem where every now and then it seemed like the pages were getting closer and closer to my face and the font was inexplicably growing larger.  I would blink, baffled, until I realised I was unintentionally leaning forward to desperately tear out the pages of another song with my teeth. They’re so long.  No matter how hard I tried, every rousing speech was done as a long Peter Jackson style voice-over in my head during a montage of everyone prepared to die heroically for their ancestors/king/race of Men and there was no escape from Elijah Wood’s extraordinary range of FML facial expressions.

Therein lies the guilt.  Virtually everyone I know has seen the movies.  Many have seen them multiple times but only a fraction have read the source material.  The problem is, as far as book-to-film translations go, The Lord of the Rings is very good.  You can watch all 3 in far less time than it takes to read and pages of exhaustive description are quickly condensed in an actual shot of the place. Tired of the “spike of pearl and silver” descriptions of Minas Tirith? Boromir says it once in the movie, then we see it and move on, allowing us to skip happily between epic battles with only the pain of a few songs and absolutely no Tom Bombadil. Incidentally, no Tom Bombadil is a very good thing. He’s a silly little guy in a brightly coloured waistcoat and suit ensemble that doesn’t ever shut up. He’s also the oldest living being in Middle-Earth as far as I can tell. He pops up in The Fellowship of the Ring and has a look at the One Ring. Do you know what happens to him when he puts on the ring? Fuck all! Tom Bombadil has precisely 0 shits to give about the lure of the ring. At all. He laughs at it. Just knowing this guy existed drove me crazy for the rest of the trilogy. I don’t care how ancient Galadriel is or how noble Aragorn is, there’s a ridiculous little man living in the woods near the Shire that would have just skipped through Moria wearing the ring and sung Sauron a really boring song about all the rivers he’s seen or some bullshit and the whole thing would not have been a problem. What is he? Why was he written? Is he a joke? Tell me, please!

That crazy character aside, I didn’t find anything new in the books or missing from the films that I particularly cared about and I’d be lying if I said that didn’t affect my reading experience.

I desperately wanted to love this as much as it deserves, which is a lot, but I couldn’t quite muster that “benchmark for all fantasy books” awe that I wanted to.  With the exception of the odd asshole here and there, all the good guys were similarly honourable, dutiful, brave and capable of wonderful, spur-of-the-moment monologues.  I could feel my enthusiasm for the story and characters dampening somewhere in Rohan.  In an ultimate good versus ultimate evil war of this scale, you’re left with very few complications, politics and character contrasts.  Everyone loves their king and everyone’s had it with that eye.  Aside from Gollum, the whole war and the majority of characters began to feel very 2-D in a vividly 3-D world.

That could be quite unfair and I have no doubt a lot of people would disagree strongly and should those people love the books, that’s excellent.  As far as accessibility goes, they are a daunting read in what now feels like quite a waffly writing style and, terrible as it is, I understand why I haven’t met many 20-somethings that have read them.  Perhaps we’ve been tainted by the immediate gratification of film or perhaps we have rapidly deteriorating attention spans.  Maybe Peter Jackson did a good enough job that many don’t feel it necessary to follow up with the books. After watching the movies, I can imagine a lot of fans opening the first book, yelling “NOPE!” and going back to Game of Thrones.

Whatever it is, I have nothing but respect for Tolkien and subsequent fantasy writers can probably all thank him for breaking that ground.  If you love Middle-earth enough to read about it, I have full respect for that.  If, however, you feel like maybe 8 hours of footage was enough for you and even that started to get tiring, I also wouldn’t blame you for putting the book down. It’s really long. In case you missed that.

Questions for you:

• Who was your favourite character?
• What would actually happen if Sauron got the ring? Would an orc just sort of throw it at the eye and the body would regrow? How does that work?
• What would you do for all eternity if you were Sauron and you won? Play poker with orcs?
• If you didn’t enjoy the books, have you ever argued with a major fan, and what happened?

Next up, The Golden Compass aka Northern Lights by Philip Pullman…

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Here we go!

Quick summary:

A girl inspires generations of drug addicts to try and beat her craziest day. None have managed.

Review:

How is anybody supposed to review this? It’s madness!

First off, I will say that Alice is the ultimate heroine.  Had Mr Carroll written a true-to-life reaction from Alice, she would have run around in circles, screaming and bouncing off furniture and walruses, until someone knocked her out with a flamingo.  Instead, she takes the whole thing completely in stride, and her reactions are just as entertaining as the whole train of wacky shit that relentlessly hits her.

This is a girl whose reaction to suddenly swelling in size to a house, looks down and goes “Goodbye, feet!” She is the epitome of just rolling with it. One of my favourite moments is when she’s being swept down a river of her own tears as you do and sees a mouse swimming along. We get, “Would it be of any use, now,” thought Alice, “to speak to this mouse?  Everything is so out-of-the-way down here, that I should think very likely it can talk; at any rate, there’s no harm in trying.” When the mouse doesn’t say anything, it’s not because it’s a mouse, she just reckons it might be French.  That’s how cool Alice is.

I could tell you more about the caucus-race, a chapter straight out of a dehydrated drug addict’s lucid dream or the infamous queen, maybe one of the most unhinged, baffling villains to date, but I’d actually rather people read it.  It won’t take you long and no, I’m not going to talk about the movie, that’s a whole other kettle of fish.

Starting this book, I have to admit that I wasn’t sure about it being on a top 100 novels ever written list.  It doesn’t really have a plot, nothing’s coherent and I spent the whole time reading it with my head cocked to one side like a dog that’s just seen a mirror.  Although, reflecting back on it, I can’t thinks of a single other book like it. It’s short, it’s funny, has completely permeated popular culture and it has to take credit for the amount of Victorian children’s minds blown.

Overall, I recommend you give it a go because you definitely won’t be bored. If you are bored, that’s a good sign that it’s time to lay off the mushrooms. If nothing else, it’s given us the perfect meter for how many hallucinogens it’s feasible to take. If reading Alice in Wonderland makes you say “yeah, that reminds me of this one time..” you should stop. Immediately.  So yeah, I feel I’m off to a good start so far.

Hit me with it:

• If you had to pick between being a giant, or shrinking down, which would you choose?
• What’s the closest you’ve ever felt to being like Alice?
• Have you ever seen or played a game of croquet?

99 books to go, I can feel it!

P.S. I have no idea how to use this site yet.  I’ve been poking around a bit and decided to just wing it.  #learningbydoing for people that use Twitter. Which I don’t.

Next up, Lord of the Rings….

The Objective

In writing this blog, I’m sharing a completely overstretched, vaguely masochistic mission to read and write down my thoughts on every book in The Guardian’s 100 best novels list (The Guardian’s list because it was the first link I found).

The idea started based off a few comments I’d heard and been told over time that young people don’t read anymore, usually by smug friends of my parents in a standard “young people are hopeless at anything that involves not being able to hit a Like button or using a brain for longer than 10 minutes” kind of dickish way.

It occurred to me: Hey, I can look at words.  I can look at as many words as the best of them. I can definitely look at more words than this guy.  In fact, I’ll write words about those words.  So, here we are.

These “reviews” aren’t going to be professional and they might not be informative. In fact I may not even enjoy half of these.  Metaphors and 18th-century jokes may pass me by, but I’ll get there.  With or without people reading this blog.