The Golden Compass

Written by Phillip Pullman
Alfred A. Knopf, $20

ISBN 0-679-87924-2

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Also available in audio from Random House Audiobooks, $16
ISBN 0-679-45164-1

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True north

Review by Eve Zibart

Imagine you had not one soul but two, and that the second soul, your "daemon," was animal-like, shape-shifting, something beloved as a pet but strong as a witch's familiar. Imagine the world jangling between the 16th century and the 19th, with its laboratories and universities controlled by a Pope-less, arcane, and omnivorous church. Imagine an instrument called an alethiometer, a truth measure, that is a half-mechanical, half-magical cross between a Tarot deck and a pocket watch. And finally imagine that the Aurora Borealis is not merely a fantastic explosion of electrons but a particle flow of some finer and more powerful energy, perhaps the stuff of life itself and the bridge to an infinity of other universes.

The Golden Compass supposes all this and more: warrior bears in armor of meteoric ore, clans of witches, "gyptian" families who traverse a labyrinth of canals in their barges, and one child of fate, Lyra, who must make allies of them all to save the earth from darkness.

Written by Philip Pullman, a teacher and playwright who has written both adults' and children's novels before, The Golden Compass is one of those lyrical suspensions like Alice in Wonderland and The Lord of the Rings that crosses all age lines and intertwines mythologies and legends with seamless beauty. Lyra's saturnine father, who discovers the energy burst that accompanies the psychic "severing" of a child and its daemon, is named Lord Asriel, after the angel of death who separates the body and the soul. His rival/lover is a veritable Snow Queen, stealing the souls of small children and carrying them to the frozen north (also, intriguingly, where Dr. Frankenstein's meddling with the soul ended). Lyra's own name recalls the lyre, the instrument of the gods. Such intriguing allusions enrich the unfolding tale.

Pullman, like Lewis Carroll (Arthur Dodgson), C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien, is an Oxford man, and part of the book is set among the catacombs of an ancient university town. The "compass," however, points relentlessly upward through a series of astonishing and glorious battles that swirl around the intrepid heroine Lyra, pitting Tartars and zeppelins against bears and witches, shape-changing daemons against one another and light-the truth-blazing at the far end. And, happily, beyond: This is Book 1 of a trilogy called His Dark Materials.

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