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Books His Dark Materials

Strictly speaking, the three novels […] are children’s books, but their ideal reader is a precocious fifteen-year-old who long ago came to find the Harry Potter books intellectually thin. It’s possible that as many adults now read the trilogy as do children… The Amber Spyglass won the 2001 Whitbread Prize for best children’s book, then went on to win the Whitbread Book of the Year award, too—the first children’s book to do so.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New Yorker Laura Miller New Yorker 2005
… he gives his readers precisely the satisfactions they look for in a novel: well-made, absorbing characters, supreme elegance of style and tone, a richly inventive imaginative landscape, and, finally, some very big ideas fearlessly explored. It’s not too much to ask, but it’s rarer than hen’s teeth.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at The Observer Robert McCrum The Observer 2000

…His Dark Materials ends not as a riposte to Lewis or a crushing indictment of authoritarian dogma but as an invocation of the glory, and a lamentation for the loss, which I fear is irrevocable, of the idea of childhood as an adventure, a strange zone of liberty, walled, perhaps, but with plenty of holes for snakes to get in.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Michael Chabon New York Review of Books 2004
Needless to say, Philip Pullman’s parallel purposes are hard to reconcile. The author as God must lean from his heaven and direct affairs in the way he requires them to go, and we mortal readers must erect small gantries from which to suspend our varieties of disbelief.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New York Times Brian Alderson New York Times 2000