We look at the power of human love, not just once, but twice, thrice and more, of love between old lovers, between mother and daughter and father and son, between old friends and new, between young lovers, and love for the world and for humanity at large.
We study the three-part nature of humanity, of body, soul and death. In this story we witness a mission to travel to the world of the dead to deliver comfort and apologize for a betrayal. Then let’s look at the sheer power of the themes address. We meet creatures the size of a hand with poisonous spurs upon their heels, and angels who are creatures of pure dust and light, and even the great city of God himself, as Pullman imagines it. We see too a universe of a tranquil beauty in which intelligent creatures are quadrupeds who ride upon wheels and communicate with a combination of speech and swaying trunks. Here we get to see the world of the dead, a brilliant creation based on Greek mythology (I’m guessing), full of ideas that made my heart ache with their simple truth, and also horrific wonder, to see ghosts and harpies and what it might mean to be dead and trapped. Click on the links for reviews to Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife. The rest of this review does contain spoilers for the first two entries in His Dark Materials, so don’t read on if you want to avoid them.
What is the theme of this book? Merely innocence and experience, the question of God and of consciousness, the question of what it means to be a human being. The scale of this story is so grand, the stakes so high, the questions so profound. His trilogy is not straightforward stylistically, and in fact one has to accept a certain sense of the fable in his writing, that sometimes characters are motivated to do something because that’s what is needed in the story. But now, The Amber Spyglass vies with Northern Lights as my favourite of Pullman’s works.
0 kommentar(er)
