The Subtle Knife

Philip Pullman

Pullman continues the His Dark Materials trilogy by opening in our own world, and shifting back and forth during this shortest of the three novels, weaving two parallel stories. The first concerns Will, a boy from the Oxford of our universe, whose sick mother has been pursued by some rather nasty men for a good five years. (Her sickness is never really spelled out, but it sounds quite a bit, from this layman's perspective, liek chronic paranoid schizophrenia.) Will stumbles onto a hole between universes while fleeing said nasty men, and when he pops through, he runs into Lyra. The second story involves some of the other characters in The Golden Compass, who are off looking for a chap who's supposedly dead, but is supposed to be playing an important part in the events in which they're all caught up.

Once again, Pullman manages to avoid most of the conventinos and pitfalls of the normal fantasy series (ever notice how in trilogies the middle novel drags a bit?). Oddly, he does it by doing what most fantasy series do in book one: setup. It becomes obvious that Iorek and Lee seeking out the mysterious and supposedly dead Dr. Grumman is setup, and if you've read more than three mystery novels in your life, you know what Dr. Grumman's role in it all is by a hundred pages into this book, but it's still fun to watch. Pullman also subverts the genre stereotypes by revealing some of the more concealed setups early on in the book. (When Pullman maps Dust over into our world, you realize just how well you've been played, and the true genius of this series starts to come out...) By the time you've gotten through this installment, you should be onto Pullman's style well enough to see what he's setting up for book three, but by this time, that's less an issue than just watching a master at plotting a work this large doing his thing. And trust me, there are still a few surprises left.