Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass

I have always been a sucker for sad and bittersweet endings, and landing on my list of stories with pretty and bittersweet endings, if not on top of it, is The Amber Spyglass.

The Amber Spyglass is the concluding volume in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. If you found the first two volumes, The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife, full of action, you will get dizzy with it in this the last volume. The book continues the story of Will Parry and Lyra Belacqua, dubbed Silvertongue, and it begins with the search of Will for Lyra, who was kidnapped by her mother, Marisa Coulter. With some force, Will solicits the aid of two angels, Baruch and Balthamos, in his quest to find Lyra. But in this quest, he is not alone. Lyra’s father, the Lord Asriel, is also looking for Lyra because she may be important in his attempt to challenge and perhaps overthrow the Authority, one we know as God Almighty, among many other names. The Church of Lyra’s world, on the other hand, also seeks to find Lyra, but this time to kill her for the danger she represents not just to itself but to the Authority whom they serve.

Where is Lyra? While the world outside is at chaos, Lyra is kept in drugged sleep by her mother in a cave at the Himalayas of Lyra’s world. Mrs. Coulter had discovered that she is capable of tremendous and overflowing love for her own daughter; when she found out exactly what the Church that she served wanted to do with Lyra upon finding her, she hid her away.

With the help of the king of the armored bears, Iorek Byrnison and the village girl Ama, Will finally finds Lyra. In the midst of cutting a doorway into another world with the subtle knife, however, Will is distracted and enchanted by Mrs. Coulter, and he breaks the knife. They escape nonetheless while the forces of Marisa Coulter’s Church and Lord Asriel’s men duked it out just outside Mrs. Coulter’s cave.

Will and Lyra manage to convince Iorek Byrnison to repair the subtle knife even if it was against the bear-king’s will to do so. Once the knife is fixed, Will and Lyra then travel to the land of the dead, where they free the ghosts of the dead – including those of Roger, Lee Scoresby and John Parry – from the prison they are in, thus allowing them to dissolve into oblivion with their essences absorbed back into everything that is living. It is in the journey to the land of the dead that Lyra commits the prophesied betrayal, which is leaving her daemon Pantalaimon behind while she travels through the land of the dead. (I thought it was the deliverance of Roger into death in the hands of Lord Asriel that was the great betrayal; I was wrong.)

In the meantime, the forces of Lord Asriel and the Authority engage, with many casualties. Marisa Coulter, who ended up siding with Lord Asriel, had managed to stop the Church from killing Lyra, but the process ended up in a great explosion that created cracks in the fabric of the worlds, causing more of the Dust to seep through these cracks. Aside from this, Mrs. Coulter had also chosen to use her innate deceitfulness in the service of her daughter: to buy Lyra more time for her tasks and to help Lord Asriel, Mrs. Coulter played the temptress to Metatron, the Regent of the Kingdom of Heaven and the right hand man of the Authority. The three of them fell into the abyss and were destroyed.

Meanwhile, Dr. Mary Malone, who traveled to the land of the mulefa, which are elephant-like creatures on wheels, crafted the amber spyglass that enabled her to see the Dust. It was through the mulefa that she learns of the true nature of the Dust. However, it was not this knowledge that made her play the snake to Lyra’s Eve; rather, it was her knowledge and experience of how it is to love, to be loved and to choose to be loved that opened Lyra’s eyes and caused her to change.

With this change is the realization that Lyra and Will are in love, but they cannot be together. All the windows to other worlds that the subtle knife opened have to be closed because it lead to the birth of the Spectres – all except for the opening to the land of the dead. This meant that while Lyra and Will love each other dearly, they cannot be together because they have to stay in their own worlds. If one attempts to live in the other’s world, his/her daemon will die and so will his/her body. They were charged to build the Republic of Heaven in their respective worlds; to give in to the love they have for each other is to defeat this purpose and waste their lives, knowing that if one dies, the other will certainly follow.

The Amber Spyglass affected me in a big way, partly because the way it portrayed the Church echoes my own belief about it. It is also interesting the way Philip Pullman depicted the Authority – a decrepit and senile angel who deceived all into believing that he is the creator and left all of his work to his churches and to his archangel Metatron. In the end, he just wanted death, like everyone else.

But as I said, I am a sucker for sad endings. I keenly felt the despair of Lyra and Will; I’ll go ahead and say that it struck a sore nerve in me. The situation is so desperate and so pitiful. In a way, Lyra and Will’s situation is comparable to that of Lord Asriel and Marisa Coulter. Where the love between Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter had to be sacrificed to their own personal ambitions out of their own choice, the one between Lyra and Will had to be set aside because there is nothing else that can be done.

In all honesty, I did not expect The Amber Spyglass to turn out into a love story. It is a perfectly fine and fantastic adventure book; the love angle just added a pleasant layer into it. I may gush at this love angle, but that is not the point of the entire trilogy. It is not even about religion, I think, for all that it calls the concept of God a lie. It is about the choices you make and how each choice that you make should be your own. It is not supposed to be something that is pounded or indoctrinated into you by any church or authority or anything else.

Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass

The Golden Compass is the first book of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. This book is set in a parallel world so like Earth, an Earth where the notions of a medieval Church exist side by side with Victorian mores and 21st century science. In this world, humans are paired with creatures called daemons, and these daemons are thought to be like one flesh with their human partners.

The trilogy itself is said to be the modern response to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and to C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. The title His Dark Materials is taken from a line of Milton's Paradise Lost, a verse of which is quoted in The Golden Compass.

The main characters are:

• Lyra Belacqua - a young girl who grew up in Jordan College, who is prophesied to be the second Eve, and who is fated to fulfill a destiny without knowing that her actions are leading her to that destiny. Should she be guided or directed as to what she should do, she would fail.


• Lord Asriel - the man Lyra thought to be her uncle but who is actually her father. A cold and cruel man who seeks a way to the other worlds in search of the source of the Dust, thought to be proof of the original sin as said in the Genesis.


• Marisa Coulter - the leader of the Oblation Board, a group that seeks to experiment on ways to prevent the Dust from settling on children once they attain puberty. A beautiful and charming, yet cunning and deceitful woman. She is also Lyra's mother, who bore her through an extramarital affair with Lord Asriel.

The story begins with Lyra sneaking into the Retiring Room of the Scholars of Jordan College in Oxford out of curiosity. While in hiding in the room, she becomes witness to an attempt by the Master of Jordan College to poison Lord Asriel, whom Lyra knew then as her uncle. The poisoning is thwarted, and Lord Asriel commands her to be his eyes in that meeting with the Scholars. In so doing, Lyra first learns of the Dust, which interests her greatly. Lord Asriel had come to the College to ask the Scholars for funding for his study of the Dust.

Long after Lord Asriel's meeting with the Scholars and after the events of that night have transpired, Lyra starts hearing stories about Gobblers, people who snatch children and take them to the far North. What exactly these Gobblers are, Lyra was not to discover for herself until much later. However, her best friend Roger from the College is also taken by the Gobblers; on the same day that Roger was found missing, Lyra was sent to live with a Mrs. Coulter. Before she left the College, the Master entrusted to her care a device called the altheiometer, and was instructed not to let Mrs. Coulter know that it is in her possession.

While at Mrs. Coulter's, Lyra was pampered and trained to be a sort of personal assistant to Mrs. Coulter. It was at a party that Lyra learns that Mrs. Coulter is actually one of the people behind the Gobblers, and so she runs away, to be found by the gyptians. From the gyptians, Lyra learns her true identity, that she is the child of Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter.

With the aid of the gyptians, Lyra travels to the far North herself in search of her father, whom she heard was imprisoned by the armored bears. In her journey, Lyra learns to read the altheiometer. She also meets Iorek Byrnison, an exiled prince among armored bears and whom Lyra helps to regain his rightful throne. Through a misadventure, Lyra also finds her way through the facility of the Gobblers where they severe the link between children and their daemons, where she also finds her friend Roger. And then she finds her father, only to commit the one betrayal that the Master of Jordan College had foreseen Lyra would do, a betrayal that only Lyra was destined to do.

The Golden Compass is a magnificent, thought-provoking book, worthy of the epithets it has earned. I am at a total loss for words on how to describe how I feel after reading this book. To compare it to other fantasy books that are popular at this time, like the Harry Potter books, is travesty. One cannot help but admire Lyra for her pluck and courage, for the way she just follows her emotions without heed. But she is a child, and it is her courage and innocence that makes the final betrayal in this book so heartbreaking.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

I expect to be stoned for this, but I will go ahead and say it: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows landed lately in the list of the most disappointing books I have ever read.

The Harry Potter series is without a doubt one of the biggest best-selling fantasy series of this age. The franchise certainly made J. K. Rowling a rich woman, what with the movies and the video games and the other goodies that her books spawned. With a series this big, one cannot help but expect that the last book will not just tie all the loose ends left all over the first six books but will also leave the reader with bittersweet pangs about a well-loved story coming to an end.

But no. Reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is like going to an eat-all-you-can buffet dinner where the the dishes served are all bland. There is a lot on offer, but none of them are really satisfying. There is enough material in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to fill around three books more, and I just think that J. K. Rowling would have done a better job if she extended the series a bit more just to make it more filling.

Unfortunately, the impression I got from reading the book is that J. K. Rowling is tired of writing about Harry Potter and his gang of misfit students from Hogwarts that she just decided to end it then and there. The book has a rushed and haphazard feel to it that makes me think just so.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is disappointing. I think that Harry and his friends deserved a better conclusion to their story.