HisDarkMaterials.org

This is one of the oldest articles about The Amber Spyglass. It's nice to read such an article after you've read it...

Julia Eccleshare hails heretical fantasist Philip Pullman in his final part of the Dark Materials trilogy, The Amber Spyglass.

One of the most eagerly awaited events of the children's publishing year will happen next week, when the third volume of Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy finally hits the bookshops. Publication of The Amber Spyglass completes Pullman's radical three-volume reworking of Paradise Lost. Readers who - noticing that it has taken him an extra year to publish the final volume - thought he might have lost the trail he took up in Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife need not have feared.

Rating: ☺☺☺☺☺

A remarkable conclusion to an incredible series

Summary:
This installment picks up right where the second book left off. Will has just met his father and witnessed his death, but while he was witnessing this, Lyra was kidnapped by her mother, Mrs. Coulter. The book opens with Will realizing that Lyra has been taken by her mother. He then sets out to find her.

With the help of a number of individuals, including Iorek Byrnison, Will finally does find Lyra and free her from her mother, but all of this coincides with the arrival of rival armies - some from Lord Asriel's army and some from the Church of Lyra's world.

"The Amber Spyglass" brings the intrigue of "The Golden Compass" and "The Subtle Knife" to a heartstopping close, marking the third and final volume as the most powerful of the trilogy. Along with the return of Lyra, Will, Mrs. Coulter, Lord Asriel, Dr. Mary Malone, and Iorek Byrnison the armored bear, "The Amber Spyglass" introduces a host of new characters: the Mulefa, mysterious wheeled creatures with the power to see Dust; Gallivespian Lord Roke, a hand-high spy-master to Lord Asriel; and Metatron, a fierce and mighty angel. And this final volume brings startling revelations, too: the painful price Lyra must pay to walk through the land of the dead, the haunting power of Dr. Malone's amber spyglass, and the names of who will live -- and who will die -- for love. And all the while, war rages with the Kingdom of Heaven, a brutal battle that -- in its shocking outcome -- will reveal the secret of Dust.

In their forest cabins, blowing smoke rings, the veteran students like to recall the suspense that attended their encounter with the early chronicles of Middle Earth. Several months separated the publication of the first and second volumes, and there was then a further delay, almost too tense to bear, before the fate of Frodo Baggins was disclosed in the third.

Followers of Philip Pullman's cosmological adventure ''His Dark Materials'' have had to wait a good deal longer. The high school student who found the first book, ''The Golden Compass,'' in 1995 may now be finishing college with the arrival of the third. Nor has the nature of this elongated suspense been the same. Frodo Baggins was on a simple enough journey; we needed to know if he made it. But Lyra and Will, the 12-year-old main characters of ''His Dark Materials,'' were facing an unguessable conclusion when the second book of the trilogy, ''The Subtle Knife,'' ended.

Another good old review of The Amber Spyglass.

A book that I, along with tens of thousands of children and other adults, have been waiting for with great impatience for three years, has just appeared. I have it on my desk; the fact that I have been able to get hold of it a little before its publication next week is one of the few ways in which I have been able to impress my 13-year-old son.

It is called The Amber Spyglass, and is the final volume of a trilogy by Philip Pullman, called His Dark Materials. The first two books were called Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife. Supposedly children's books, they have a cult following among adults as well as children. Indeed, if it hadn't been for the (to me inexplicable) Harry Potter phenomenon, I feel sure they would also have had a mass following. Even so, Northern Lights has sold more than a quarter of a million copies in Britain and The Subtle Knife nearly 100,000.

Philip Pullman's novels are already significant landmarks on the horizon of contemporary fiction, though perhaps for the wrong reasons. Since the inclusion of The Amber Spyglass in the Booker long-list, there has been a sudden inversion of the usual snobbery that relegates books for children to positions of relative unimportance, and Pullman has become news for being the first children's writer to be taken seriously by the literary establishment, often likened - quite wrongly - to C.S. Lewis and Tolkien as the creator of an enduring children's classic.

Pullman shares with Tolkien a vision of a world on a grand scale, and the generosity not to underestimate his readers' intelligence - his story is crammed with literary allusions, mythical references, science and philosophy, and his chapters are headed with quotations from Blake, Coleridge, Milton. But, unlike either of his predecessors, he is unafraid to imagine a world where good and evil are not absolute and mutually exclusive, where traditional Christian values are inverted with relish and humour, and children are allowed to grow into a self-knowledge and sexual awareness denied to the heroes of Lewis's allegories.

Once again, a review about The Amber Spyglass:

The third and final book of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy, and winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year in 2001, The Amber Spyglass, has received much praise from both children and adults. The adventure and thrilling, edge-of-your-seat excitement of the first two books, Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife continues in The Amber Spyglass where the adventures of Will and Lyra continue as they face the looming threat of war between the two great forces of good and evil in the many other universes around our own.

Another review about The Amber Spyglass, though quite a critical one:

The task of an author of epic fiction parallels that of his central characters, however many hurdles they pass through, however far along the road they travel, the analogy of Odysseus' return, of Frodo's casting the ring into the fire, can always find a parallel in the author's achievement of a satisfying and truthful culmination.

Here´s another review of The Amber Spyglass.

A recent thread in our forum made me think about the passage where Mary is supposed to play the serpent and to tempt Lyra.

Remember that this is my personal interpretation but certainly it has some truth in it.

Metatron was considered by the Kabbalists to be at the crown of the Kabbalah, or Tree of Existence as the Angel of the Lord. In this role he was siad to have given the Kabbalah to humankind, He was considered to be closest to the throne of God. Metatron is also known as the first and last of the Archangels and is variously called that Chancellor of Heaven, the Angel of the Covenant and the King of Angels.