His Dark Materials

I read all three of these back to back, which I think is the wrong way to do it, because the seams show more that way. The Golden Compass on its own is close to great, Lyra in the Arctic looking for a missing friend and an imprisoned uncle, daemons as the best single fantasy conceit I’ve read in years, a world that trusts you to catch up on Dust and the alethiometer without a lecture. I was fully in by the gyptian voyage north.

Then the theology takes over, book two onward, and I felt the story get quietly replaced by Pullman’s actual argument, which is with organized religion and specifically Christianity, and I don’t need a writer to share my views to enjoy a book, but I do need the plot to still be driving. It isn’t, not consistently. Will and Lyra’s rescue of Roger in the third book is genuinely epic, real stakes, real movement, but it’s bracketed by long stretches where characters explain the cosmology to each other instead of living in it.

Lyra sleeps constantly through this series, which sounds like a nitpick until you notice how often a chapter just ends with her unconscious and the plot skipping ahead without her, and I never figured out if that was intentional pacing or just a structural habit Pullman leaned on when a scene got hard to write forward. The daemons alone would have carried a smaller, tighter book to a five from me. As a trilogy that keeps widening its scope right when it should be narrowing toward an ending, I landed on a three, respecting the ambition more than I enjoyed the last third of the ride.