Volume 51, Number 5 · March 25, 2004
Dust & Daemons
By Michael Chabon
His Dark Materials Trilogy:
The Golden Compass
by Philip Pullman
Knopf, 399 pp., $11.95 (paper)
The Subtle Knife
by Philip Pullman
Knopf, 326 pp., $11.95 (paper)
The Amber Spyglass
by Philip Pullman
Knopf, 518 pp., $11.95 (paper)
Lyra's Oxford
by Philip Pullman
Knopf, 55 pp., $10.95
Pity those—adventurers, adolescents, authors of young adult fiction—who make their way in the borderland between worlds. It is at worst an invisible and at best an inhospitable place. Build your literary house on the borderlands, as the English writer Philip Pullman has done, and you may find that your work is recommended by booksellers, as a stopgap between installments of Harry Potter, to children who cannot (one hopes) fully appreciate it, and to adults, disdainful or baffled, who 'don't read fantasy.' Yet all mystery resides there, in the margins, between life and death, childhood and adulthood, Newtonian and quantum, 'serious' and 'genre' literature. And it is from the confrontation with mystery that the truest stories have always drawn their power.
Review, 5560 words
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