Product Description

The Amber Spyglass brings the intrigue of The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife to a heart-stopping end, marking the final volume of His Dark Materials as the most powerful of the trilogy.

Along with the return of Lyra, Will, Mrs. Coulter, Lord Asriel, Dr. Mary Malone, and Iorek Byrnison the armored bear, come a host of new characters: the Mulefa, mysterious wheeled creatures with the power to see Dust; Gallivespian Lord Roke, a hand-high spymaster to Lord Asriel; and Metatron, a fierce and mighty angel. So, too, come startling revelations: the painful price Lyra must pay to walk through the land of the dead, the haunting power of Dr. Malone's amber spyglass, and the names of who will live--and who will die--for love. And all the while, war rages with the Kingdom of Heaven, a brutal battle that--in its shocking outcome--will uncover the secret of Dust. Philip Pullman deftly brings the cliff-hangers and mysteries of His Dark Materials to an earthshattering conclusion--and confirms his fantasy trilogy as an undoubted and enduring classic.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2976 in eBooks
• Published on: 2001-11-13
• Released on: 2001-11-13
• Format: Kindle Book
• Number of items: 1

Amazon.com Review
From the very start of its very first scene, The Amber Spyglass will set hearts fluttering and minds racing. All we'll say here is that we immediately discover who captured Lyra at the end of The Subtle Knife, though we've yet to discern whether this individual's intent is good, evil, or somewhere in between. We also learn that Will still possesses the blade that allows him to cut between worlds, and has been joined by two winged companions who are determined to escort him to Lord Asriel's mountain redoubt. The boy, however, has only one goal in mind--to rescue his friend and return to her the alethiometer, an instrument that has revealed so much to her and to readers of The Golden Compass and its follow-up. Within a short time, too, we get to experience the "tingle of the starlight" on Serafina Pekkala's skin as she seeks out a famished Iorek Byrnison and enlists him in Lord Asriel's crusade:

A complex web of thoughts was weaving itself in the bear king's mind, with more strands in it than hunger and satisfaction. There was the memory of the little girl Lyra, whom he had named Silvertongue, and whom he had last seen crossing the fragile snow bridge across a crevasse in his own island of Svalbard. Then there was the agitation among the witches, the rumors of pacts and alliances and war; and then there was the surpassingly strange fact of this new world itself, and the witch's insistence that there were many more such worlds, and that the fate of them all hung somehow on the fate of the child.

Meanwhile, two factions of the Church are vying to reach Lyra first. One is even prepared to give a priest "preemptive absolution" should he succeed in committing mortal sin. For these tyrants, killing this girl is no less than "a sacred task."

In the final installment of his trilogy, Philip Pullman has set himself the highest hurdles. He must match its predecessors in terms of sheer action and originality and resolve the enigmas he already created. The good news is that there is no critical bad news--not that The Amber Spyglass doesn't contain standoffs and close calls galore. (Who would have it otherwise?) But Pullman brings his audacious revision of Paradise Lost to a conclusion that is both serene and devastating. In prose that is transparent yet lyrical and 3-D, the author weaves in and out of his principals' thoughts. He also offers up several additional worlds. In one, Dr. Mary Malone is welcomed into an apparently simple society. The environment of the mulefa (again, we'll reveal nothing more) makes them rich in consciousness while their lives possess a slow and stately rhythm. These strange creatures can, however, be very fast on their feet (or on other things entirely) when necessary. Alas, they are on the verge of dying as Dust streams out of their idyllic landscape. Will the Oxford dark-matter researcher see her way to saving them, or does this require our young heroes? And while Mary is puzzling out a cure, Will and Lyra undertake a pilgrimage to a realm devoid of all light and hope, after having been forced into the cruelest of sacrifices--or betrayals.

Throughout his galvanizing epic, Pullman sustains scenes of fierce beauty and tenderness. He also allows us a moment or two of comic respite. At one point, for instance, Lyra's mother bullies a series of ecclesiastical underlings: "The man bowed helplessly and led her away. The guard behind her blew out his cheeks with relief." Needless to say, Mrs. Coulter is as intoxicating and fluid as ever. And can it be that we will come to admire her as she plays out her desperate endgame? In this respect, as in many others, The Amber Spyglass is truly a book of revelations, moving from darkness visible to radiant truth. --Kerry Fried

From Publishers Weekly
In concluding the spellbinding His Dark Materials trilogy, Pullman produces what may well be the most controversial children's book of recent years. The witch Serafina Pekkala, quoting an angel, sums up the central theme: "All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity. The rebel angels, the followers of wisdom, have always tried to open minds; the Authority and his churches have always tried to keep them closed." Early on, this "Authority" is explicitly identified as the Judeo-Christian God, and he is far from omnipotent: his Kingdom is ruled by a regent. The cosmic battle to overthrow the Kingdom is only one of the many epic sequences in this novelAso much happens, and the action is split among so many different imagined worlds, that readers will have to work hard to keep up with Pullman. In the opening, for example, Lyra is being hidden and kept in a drugged sleep in a Himalayan cave by her mother, the beautiful and treacherous Mrs. Coulter. Will is guided by two angels across different worlds to find Lyra. The physicist and former nun, Mary Malone, sojourns in an alternatively evolved world. In yet another universe, Lord Asriel has assembled a great horde of otherworldly beings-including the vividly imagined race of haughty, hand-high warriors called GallivespiansAto bring down the Kingdom. Along the way, Pullman riffs on the elemental chords of classical myth and fairy tale. While some sections seem rushed and the prose is not always as brightly polished as fans might expect, Pullman's exuberant work stays rigorously true to its own internal structure. Stirring and highly provocative. Ages 12-up. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Grade 6 Up-This book starts where The Subtle Knife (Knopf, 1997) left off. Lyra has been hidden away by her mother, and Will is determined to find her. Meanwhile, Lord Asriel is preparing to fight the forces of the Church's Consistorial Court, as well as the God-like Authority's Lieutenant, Metatron, who hungers for ultimate power over all worlds. At the heart of this discord is Dust, the mysterious substance that is linked irrevocably to consciousness; it is streaming away at an increasing rate, causing havoc in its wake. It is Lyra and Will's destiny to determine the outcome of this situation. Knowledge of the previous books is an absolute necessity in order to understand this one. Even so, it will take dedication and passion to unwind the extremely convoluted plot with its numerous characters. Lyra and Will are as noble, grand, and yet as utterly believable as any characters in children's literature, and they are surrounded by a host of memorable personages. The many facets of the story are so encrusted with tiny and arcane details that the narrative occasionally slows down, and the transitions between worlds and plot lines are often hard to follow. Organized religion is portrayed bleakly; the Church is essentially a dictatorship and the afterlife is a "concentration camp" world set up by the Authority. However, the message of the book remains clear and exhilarating; it is vital to use wisely the divine gifts of consciousness and free will. This is a subtle and complex treatment of the eternal battle between good and evil.
Eva Mitnick, Los Angeles Public Library
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Customer Reviews

I just couldn't get into it...

I couldn't get into this series. It took me forever to read the entire trilogy because I just couldn't engage myself with it. I read the three books a couple of pages at a time with large breaks in between. I finished it out of pure stubborness.

Its not that the books were bad. Because the idea behind them was quite interesting.

My problem was that I didn't like any of the characters. The only one I vaguely liked was Will and even then... after two books, I felt like I didn't know him any better than the moment he was first introduced.

That's my problem with the trilogy. There is no 'personal' moments where you feel you can really understand and identify with the characters. They are just soldiers. Shadows. They couldn't possibly be anything else because Pullman never told us what they were thinking. Lyra for example was on this amazing journey, but we were never told what she thought about it. Will was given this huge responsibility to wield the knife, but once again, we never heard a word about how this made him feel.

I'm a very character driven person.I like books where I feel I know the characters on a personal level and feel like I'm there in the story with them.

This trilogy was just all events... no emotion.

Falling Apart
Okay, I have to admit that I'm not the greatest fan of the series; Pullman has an axe to grind, and hearing someone grind an axe in narrative is painful (see Atlas Shrugged). However, I really have to say that especially the second book was well written. There was a focus and narrative drive that made it probably the most coherent of the books. Along with this, the characters are most developed in the second volume.

And then we get to The Amber Spyglass. First off, the name of the book comes from an item that barely factors into the story, and if then, only near the end and tangentally. Certainly not items like the Alethiometer and the Subtle Knife that actually have a plot centered around them (Yes, I know that The Golden Compass was Northern Lights in the UK). It was as if Pullman decided that he needed to continue the pattern of an object being central to the story, but just couldn't figure out how, so he just shoved something in there.

And shoved something in there is something that you'll hear a lot of in this book, especially as far as theology goes. So many times you have Pullman take snipes at religion in the weirdest places. When Mary is having this amazing experience that she's only had before, Pullman has to add that the experience was not of her taking her vows as a nun. When Father Gomez thinks of evangelizing to the mulefa, he thinks he has to first abolish the "Satanic" seed-wheels, ignoring that the Catholic Church has been one of the greatest co-opters of "satanic" rituals, holidays, and lifestyles that the world has known (Jesuits taught that Confucious was a proto-Christian like Aristotle when evangelizing in China). There are dozens of places like this when it just became too much to not take a swipe at religion and Pullman just shoves a odd remark like that in there that makes the reader go "WTF?" In fact, pretty much any religous person is portrayed as a crazed zealot, certainly not the characterization that he imbues most of his other characters with. Even if he wants to write a novel about "killing God", you can't make the antagonists and the side characters so simplisticly bad that you wouldn't believe most of these people exist.

And then comes Mary. Mary is usually portrayed as an interesting character: her work, her observations, her life. Every so often however, you just get her turning into the mouth of Pullman about how evil the Church is. Her speech near the end about how God doesn't exist because she felt love was mind-boggling bad-- and worse, it didn't sound like something the Mary that we had started to get to know. She basically says that God doesn't exist because no God would want her to not indulge her senses in love, ignoring for the fact that monastic (and celebate) life is a vocation that isn't for most! In addition, Pullman's view of love is mere sensuality (not bad, but certainly not the high love that it's protrayed to be) so it becomes pitted against the life of contemplation. This takes another swipe when the harpies are allowed to torment those that haven't lived lives with enough stories.

Tacked on to all of that is a plot that comes crashing down with multiple characters doing things that and saying things that make no sense: Lyra never makes reference to Asriel killing Roger (and she always uses the passive tense with his death), Will Parry breaking his promise without much fanfare, multiple characters just showing up and then leaving, the love of two people healing the cosmos (uh, what?), Lord Asriel lying about destroying dust, Coulter shifting in such a way to be unbeleivable (remember her first reaction when she found out Lyra was to be the new Eve), and generally everything as it collapses into a gigantic mess.

Oddly enough, Pullman falls into the same trap as C.S. Lewis (who's work he hates) when trying to tie everything up. However, let it be said that at least Lewis respect his opposition more as he was an atheist for quite awhile. Hell, I'm not even a theist here, but I find Pullman's hashing plot about killing God as clumsy.

And in the end, that's what this book ends up being: clumsy.

Book 3 worth getting to
I though Book 2 (Subtle Knife) was a bit slow, but book 3 takes it (and its characters) all the way to an exciting end, if not a brave new world.