Why You Should Be Watching 'His Dark Materials'
There's an air of reverence surrounding Philip Pullman and his bestselling trilogy 'His Dark Materials.' It's ambitious and beautifully crafted--a masterpiece, styled after Dante's Inferno and Paradise Lost. It's about young Lyra Belacqua who's accompanied by her daemon, a talking, shapeshifting animal named Pantalaimon. Everyone in her world has one. It's a facet of their soul that follows them around. Children's daemons change shape until they take their final form during adolescence. They could have a dog trailing behind them, a monkey on their shoulder, or a toad resting on the arm of their chair. Whatever form their daemon took said something about their personality or who they were as a person. It could denote class, temperament, vocation, and of course, danger. The story starts off cuddly. In the first book, The Golden Compass, Lyra lived in an alternate universe version of Oxford College. There she explores crypts, sneaks wine, and goes to war with the other children in the neighborhood. She starts to hear rumors about kids going missing--kidnapped by a group known as the Gobblers. Her friend Roger is taken and she goes off on a journey to the arctic to find him. Along the way, she meets a talking polar bear, pirates and witches. She flies above the snow in a hot air balloon, marveling over the Aurora Borealis. It sounds like the quintessential children's book, and it was. It spread throughout the UK and abroad rather quickly.
