His Dork Materials.
Jul. 6th, 2006 03:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swestrupI just finished the "His Dark Materials" trilogy by Philip Pullman.
I found the novels engrossing due to the characterization and the imagination shown in the settings (and by the fact that I've been reading far too few novels lately), but I had many problems with the narrative. Firstly, having one character spend most of two novels bleeding for no readily discernible reason seemed unduly grotesque.
I also had trouble with ancient beings of immense wisdom and intellect which seem to have been written as petulant, arrogant, stupid and foolish. I kept having trouble trying to decide if the author was trying to depict angelic beings as idiots, of if that really was the best he could do.
There were also major problems when (what I suppose the author intended to be) a poignant (but neccessary) parting of new lovers for the rest of their lives, is clearly shown to be completely uneccessary. An angel reveals that all of the natural and artificial passages between the universes will be sealed, so that the harm the artificial ones cause will be averted. Even if one buys this argument (which I found difficult, because the description of the magnitude of the problem made no sense mathematically), the reason for closing the natural (and therefor harmless) passages was so that the hero wouldn't spend his life searching for one in vain. How about oh I don't know, maybe telling the heros where these natural passages are so they can be together when they want to be?
For an angel that claims it would do anything in its power to prevent this separation, and then does something needless to cause it seems to be both incompetant and vindictive.
Frankly, I would have been much happier with the entire series if the author had bothered to work out the plot in a little more detail. While he's at it, he should also learn something about evolution.
Stating that a carefully-tuned symbiotic relationship suddenly sprang into existence 33,000 years ago makes very little sense, especially when its revealed that one of the partners in the symbiosis can't reproduce without the other. Having two species form a symbiotic relationship in just 33,000 years would be hard enough to swallow, but having them already in their current form and suddenly 'discover' the possibility of the symbiosis is absurd.
I found the novels engrossing due to the characterization and the imagination shown in the settings (and by the fact that I've been reading far too few novels lately), but I had many problems with the narrative. Firstly, having one character spend most of two novels bleeding for no readily discernible reason seemed unduly grotesque.
I also had trouble with ancient beings of immense wisdom and intellect which seem to have been written as petulant, arrogant, stupid and foolish. I kept having trouble trying to decide if the author was trying to depict angelic beings as idiots, of if that really was the best he could do.
There were also major problems when (what I suppose the author intended to be) a poignant (but neccessary) parting of new lovers for the rest of their lives, is clearly shown to be completely uneccessary. An angel reveals that all of the natural and artificial passages between the universes will be sealed, so that the harm the artificial ones cause will be averted. Even if one buys this argument (which I found difficult, because the description of the magnitude of the problem made no sense mathematically), the reason for closing the natural (and therefor harmless) passages was so that the hero wouldn't spend his life searching for one in vain. How about oh I don't know, maybe telling the heros where these natural passages are so they can be together when they want to be?
For an angel that claims it would do anything in its power to prevent this separation, and then does something needless to cause it seems to be both incompetant and vindictive.
Frankly, I would have been much happier with the entire series if the author had bothered to work out the plot in a little more detail. While he's at it, he should also learn something about evolution.
Stating that a carefully-tuned symbiotic relationship suddenly sprang into existence 33,000 years ago makes very little sense, especially when its revealed that one of the partners in the symbiosis can't reproduce without the other. Having two species form a symbiotic relationship in just 33,000 years would be hard enough to swallow, but having them already in their current form and suddenly 'discover' the possibility of the symbiosis is absurd.
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no subject
Date: 2006-07-06 02:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-06 02:50 pm (UTC)I found the depiction of God in the third book, in particular, to be extremely mean-spirited. I'm pretty anti-Christianity, but Pullman's presentation of it devolved into cheap shots by the end.
I'd have warned you when you took the books, but enough people love them that I didn't want to be a spoiler. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who disliked it.