An Announcement: I'm Rereading the His Dark Materials Trilogy

Hello, dear readers!

As most of you may have gathered from that uncomfortable juxtaposition of just-a-little-too-chilly office AC and constant film of sweat over anyone outside, it's summertime. And if you're a longtime reader of my blog, you'll remember that for a couple of years there, it was an unofficial tradition of mine to have some sort of summer blogging project. Back in 2014, there was the AFI 100 Years... 100 Movies series, and in 2015, I blogged through The Chronicles of Narnia. Both of those events were enormously popular (at least by the standards of a blog whose post views normally number in the dozens), and I had a lot of fun doing them, too. I missed last summer because... well, no good reason, I guess. But this year, I'm doing it! I'm doing another project! Yay! (Is this mic even on?)

Anyway, I've decided to do a sequel, of sorts, to my Narnia project (which remains the work on this blog that I'm most proud of, to be honest), and that's this: I'm going to blog through Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.

His Dark Materials is nowhere near as popular as The Chronicles of Narnia [1], so for the uninitiated: between 1995 and 2000, acclaimed YA novelist Philip Pullman released three fantasy novels geared toward teens: The Golden Compass in 1995 [2], The Subtle Knife in 1997, and The Amber Spyglass in 2000. All three received rapturous critical acclaim as well as significant commercial success (albeit the pre-Harry Potter type of YA-fantasy money), while also drumming up some controversy as well. Because Pullman hadn't just written any YA fantasy trilogy; he'd written a YA fantasy trilogy with the explicit purpose of confronting the narrative choices and religious themes of The Chronicles of Narnia and in doing so, arrived at some very surprising and contentious places.

So when I say this project is a sequel to my Narnia project, I'm talking both in format and theme here. Not only will I be doing the same structure—a post for each book—I'll also be writing on a work that's very consciously borrowing from and deconstructing the ideas from The Chronicles of Narnia. And I'm pumped. I haven't read these since the 10th grade, when they both blew my mind wide open and made me intensely uncomfortable, and as I was with Narnia, I'm interested in seeing how these books read for an adult. Based on my memory of them, I consider these books some of the most important fantasy literature (YA or not) of the past 20-ish years and without question the most intellectually challenging YA lit I've ever read—there are beliefs and trains of thought I have today that I can trace directly back to His Dark Materials. Regardless of how you feel about Pullman's religious stances, I don't think (provided I'm remembering correctly) there's any getting around that this is a towering work of imagination, and I'm looking forward to re-experiencing it and thinking through it a bit more deeply.

We'll see how this goes; the Narnia series ended up being more of a narrative and thematic analysis of those books, and that may be where I go with my His Dark Materials series, too. But I'm also thinking that, given the content of the books, it might be a neat opportunity to make these posts a little more personal, bringing in some of my own beliefs and how they fit (or don't) with what Pullman's doing. I'm very much a layman, but if ever there was a time to stretch my theological wings, this is probably it. I guess we'll see how this works.

Anyway, I'll wrap this up so that my introductory post isn't quite so long and rambling as the official three will be (you've been warned). Just one more thing: these reviews will not be coy about spoilers for the trilogy. In fact, they'll be positively spoilertastic. One of the chief pleasures of His Dark Materials is the sense of revelation and unfolding mystery (and the shocking audacity of Pullman's plotting), so if you haven't read these books yet, you've been warned. Also, if you haven't read these books, go out and do so. They're really something.

I've just finished rereading The Golden Compass, so I'm hoping that the first post will be up before the end of the week (if not then, definitely next week). After that, I'll write them as soon as I get through them. They're a bit longer than the Narnia books, though, so don't expect one a week like I did with the old project.

Until the first post!

Edit: Read the entire series now with the Table of Contents for Posts

1. The Golden Compass here.
2. The Subtle Knife here.
3. The Amber Spyglass here.

1] Though both of their respective movie franchises have stalled after particularly bad entries, though Narnia's post-Dawn Treader cancellation is much more of a mercy kill than the box office starvation The Golden Compass endured

2] Released originally in the UK as Northern Lights, although I'll be referring to it by its American title throughout this series, both because it's the one I'm used to and also because I like the parallelism with the other series's titles (which you lose if you go with Northern Lights)