I found this His Dark Materials review, by EQwomen
"As an avid reader, the discovery of a new author whose work you simply love is sublime. An impulse purchase in a supermarket introduced me to Philip Pullman, an author compared to Tolkien by highly respected reviewers such as those of the Times in the UK. Two of the books in this trilogy have been recipients of awards, the Whitbread book of the year for one."
Read more below.
For some reason various reviewers have labelled the trilogy as belonging to a "young adult" genre. I don't quite follow this except for the lack of graphic sex and the fact that two of the principal protagonists happen to be 12 years old. They certainly don't come across as having been written with a 12 year old audience in mind anyway! If they belong to a genre, I suppose they lurk somewhere between science fiction and fantasy, but there are healthy doses of theology and philosophy thrown in! It's probably the philosophical/theological angle that allows anything smelling like a fantasy to get good reviews from the Sunday Times, which is normally the type of newspaper to dismiss anything from that genre as pulp... I found the book an un-put-downable damn good read, and finished the lot in 3 days flat.
Of the three books, I would have to say I most enjoyed the first, Northern lights (The Golden Compass in the US), which tells of the adventures of Lyra, an urchin brought up by scholars in an Oxford of another dimension, where people's souls are visible and accompany them around in animal forms they called daemons. The second two novels continue following Lyra and introduce Wil, a 12 year old from a familiar modern day Oxford with a mentally unstable mother and missing father. The two of them traverse several parallel worlds in search of Wil's father and the secret of Dust, a dark matter which appears to be the elementary particles of consciousness itself. The incidental cast includes witches, angles, harpies and a few scientists.
The sheer originality displayed is probably what caused quite a few of the reviewers to have gone off on hysterical and predictable "better than Tolkien" raves. I don't personally find the comparison apt, the books are completely differing in style. For Tolkien plot is all really, but for Pullman character development is interwoven in the fast paced story-line.
Here is a small excerpt from the second novel, The Subtle Knife.
Will had to crouch and take two or three deep breaths and put his left hand under the other arm before he could go on. But he was intent on it; he stood up again after a couple of seconds, the knife held forward already.
This time it was easier. Having felt it once, he knew what to search for again, and he felt the curious little snag after less than a minute. It was like delicately searching out the gap between one stitch and the next with the point of a scalpel. He touched, withdrew, touched again to make sure, and then did as the old man had said, and cut sideways with the silver edge.
It was a good thing that Giacomo Paradisi had reminded him not to be surprised. He kept hold of the knife, and put it down on the table before giving in to his astonishment. Lyra was on her feet already, speechless, because there in the middle of the dusty little room was a window just like the one under the hornbeam trees: a gap in mid-air through which they could see another world.
[EQWomen.co.uk]
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