The Amber Spyglass

Editors Note: Behold our first negative review!

Creepy. I was in over my head. – JStar

In Phillip Pullman’s first two books in the His Dark Materials trilogy, are fantastic. I enjoyed the ending of the first book and loved the second the whole way through. However, The Amber Spyglass starts to twist into themes off evil, death, and sin.

There is also a great deal of violence in the third book. Mrs. Coulter attempts to kill Lyra with poison that puts her to sleep, Mrs. Coulter whispers, “Shh, Shh, sleep my darling. Drink this.” Creepy. Violence occurs again when The Church (Jordan College) locks men in their basement to torture and kill them,

“In the cellars the man from Bolvangar, dressed only in dirty white shirt and loose trousers with no belt, stood under the bare light bulb, holding the trousers with one hand and his rabbit daemon with the other.”

In his story Phillip Pullman sculpts a mystical wonderland that explodes in a non-religious allegory. In Lyra’s dreams she is in a world of dead children, which is a way of saying she is in Hell. For example, “they were imprisoned. Someone had committed a crime, though no one knew what it was or who had done it or what authority sat in judgement.” This quote illustrates people being mistreated by God or “The Authority” because they weren’t perfect.

In conclusion I would not recommend this book to the religious or the fragile because the book has stark non-religious elements which the religious would find offensive.