The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

Synopsis: Lyra is rushing to the cold, far North, where witch clans and armored bears rule. North, where the Gobblers take the children they steal--including her friend Roger. North, where her fearsome uncle Asriel is trying to build a bridge to a parallel world.

Can one small girl make a difference in such great and terrible endeavors? This is Lyra: a savage, a schemer, a liar, and as fierce and true a champion as Roger or Asriel could want--but what Lyra doesn't know is that to help one of them will be to betray the other.

Review: Oof, it has been 10 hot years since I wrote my original review for The Golden Compass. I’m not going to delete it, but it was real bad. It’s only a paragraph. Hot damn. Anyways, I’ve read The Golden Compass 3 times now, so it’s safe to say that I enjoy this story. We follow Lyra who lives in Jordan College in a similar world to ours. The biggest difference is that there’s magic and everyone has a daemon, an animal companion. I adore Lyra because she’s young, but she’s always eager to learn. She loves being a part of Jordan College and the scholarly setting. After an enccounter with her uncle, Lord Asriel, she learns more than she bargained for and is thrust into an adventure looking for her friend Roger who has been kidnapped.

I don’t think I’ll ever get sick of this first book. I loved seeing how people work with their daemons and learning more about those relationships. The Golden Compass has a lot to unpack. The daemons can change form at will until the humans hit puberty. Then they settle into a final form and they stay that way until their human dies. This, alone, speaks to the flighty nature of children and Lyra certainly proves this point. The Golden Compass is also negatively talked about in religious communities because it’s pretty negative towrads organized religion. As a Christian, I actually enjoyed this perspective. I have a complicated relationship with religion, but I liked that Pullman showed adults who are for and against this organized power, and they were all pretty evil. It allows us to take what Lyra learns as a child, and see if she prefers either of these sides.

I highly enjoyed this re-read of The Golden Compass. I watched season 1 of the HBO adaptation as well, and it was fairly well done. They changed some things, and I’m not entirely sure why, but it’s still a solid adaptation.

4 howls