The Golden Compass

Before I even finished the Narnia books, I was looking forward to this series. Philip Pullman was allegedly the anti-Lewis and his books were supposedly the anti-Narnia trilogy. I was already a fan of His Dark Materials (the name of the series of which this book is the first one). But having just completed Book 1 of 3, I'm already a bit disappointed. I can pinpoint the problem, too: the book took way too long to get interesting. It's 400 pages long (thick for a fantasy piece without Harry Potter in its title) and 200 pages in I was bored to that point where you start neglecting character names and plot details. I needed some help from the Internet to remind me what had transpired to this point, and then last night I killed off the remaining 200 pages. Bad news - they were only slightly less boring. That is, until the final chapter or two, when shit hit the fan and twists and betrayals abounded. In fact, the book ended on a very exciting note that actually leaves me pretty interested to read the second one sooner rather than later. Now, if you plot "excitement" on the y-axis against "page number" on the x-axis, you're typically going to get a graph that looks like a normal distribution with negative skew. The Golden Compass, however, offers a much different graph - one that resembles an exponential growth curve. Flat at the beginning, still flat in the middle, and then rapidly increasing at the end with no slowdown whatsoever. That's just not how a book is supposed to be. In the days before readily available plot summaries, I'd have given up on The Golden Compass halfway through instead of giving myself a refresher course and moving on. So that's my big complaint with the book. Fortunately, there weren't many little ones. The story was solid and compelling, albeit not very interesting, and it certainly managed to hook me even though I had to get to the end before it did so. Now, the question on everyone's mind (or at least, on my own): how does the trilogy stack up to Narnia so far? To be honest, it's a tough comparison to make. Narnia had seven books that were like 220 pages long each but that each contained a separate story. It seems as though His Dark Materials is one gigantic tale, much like The Lord of the Rings, simply broken into three parts. Narnia had some duds, for sure, but there were two or three books that I remember fondly, and that's more than I can say so far for this series. Oh well - much like how you can't judge a book by its cover, you can't judge a series by its first title. I'll hold off until the next two books are done.