So here it is at last - the long-awaited conclusion to the His Dark Materials trilogy, which started with Northern Lights and continued with The Subtle Knife. Those two books won the Carnegie Medal, the Smarties Prize, all sorts of other awards, and an extraordinary list of critical plaudits as long as an orang-utan's arm, so expectations from this third book are bogglingly high.
So... does it live up to them? Well... the world is a bit of a different place now than it was when Northern Lights came out. It would be very difficult for any new book to make the same impact on the reader's imagination. The Amber Spyglass has a plot to conclude, and it concludes it capably, excitingly and satisfyingly. The characters we've been following continue to be handled well and find their appropriate resolutions. The metaphysical themes touched on in the earlier books are brought to the fore - we learn the true nature of the authority against which Lord Asriel is rebelling. You'll come away feeling that the trilogy has been nicely tied up, that the author has got his ideas across to you, and that you have a great deal to think about.
However... I do have some reservations about this volume as a book itself. For one thing, it's too long: getting towards twice as big as either of the other books. And a large part of this length is unnecessary. A new world is introduced, inhabited by a non-human intelligent race with a different biology to ours, which I think we could do without altogether: the amount of plot that gets resolved in this world is tiny compared with the amount of book it takes up. And for Pullman to be drawn into SF-speculative disquisitions on different evolutionary patterns is a bit of a distraction.
Perhaps more disturbingly, the moral questions in this volume are put in much cruder terms. The institutions of the Church, and those who follow them, are revealed as utterly villainous in every degree. God's power was usurped millennia ago by a greedy and tyrannical assistant, and God himself is senile, decrepit, and it turns out didn't actually create the universe, he just took the credit for it. This means that we can readily forgive Lord Asriel his own villainies, because he is standing up against what is portrayed as ultimate evil. I think this is rather disappointing. I don't think it's a given that children's fiction has to deal in moral absolutes: the first two books did a good job of portraying a conflict in which neither side apparently had large amounts of moral high ground, but in this book the enemy is revealed as having no redeeming features whatsoever. (Pullman's attitude towards institutional science also seems to remain unremittingly hostile.) I resent having a moral philosophy forced on me (cf. the Narnia books...) so I had to grit my teeth in places.
OK, I've gone on about what I think's wrong with the book, but do take this in the spirit of praising with faint damns. Basically it's a very good read, and anyone who's enjoyed the earlier books will enjoy this. Anyone who hasn't read them yet, do so as soon as you can! I think the series overall rates 9 out of 10, and I would give it a 10 were it not for the rather didactic nature of this third book, which I think by itself deserves an 8.
