The Golden Compass (book 1) by Phillip Pullman is a modern classic that ranks with stories like The Chronicles of Narnia, A Wrinkle in Time and The Lord of the Rings books. This is an impressive book for a number of reasons:
Concept
Plot
Lying for Love, not the romantic kind
Clever protagonist
Brave protagonist
Heart
World-Building
Soul, the high concept kind and the feeling kind
Human da'emons, although I don't know if I'm spelling that correctly for this book. In any case, this book shines an interesting pondering light questioning the reader's own demons - it makes you think.
With this in mind, I want to reflect on Pullman's own words a little, "As a passionate believer in the democracy of reading, I don't think it's the task of the author of a book to tell the reader what it means."
After reading a number of reviews on this story, I found this democracy to vary from one extreme interpretation to another extreme interpretation. For example, as a reader I did not see the main character, Lyra as Christ nor the Anti-Christ. I simple saw her as a young girl willing to do anything to save the people she loved even if it meant wicked lying. If anything she was only caught in the center of the polarities of good and evil. This idea stemming from Genesis, the original sin, "from dust you are to dust you will return". The idea of dust as good or bad is questionable. Dust almost seems like fairy dust giving flight to the birth of consciousness. In this way, it should be good because it makes us aware of good and evil and without knowing one we cannot know the other. This is where C.S. Lewis quotes like this come from, "Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.”
― C.S. Lewis. My interpretation of dust in this is that free will. Of course, that is only my democratic input along with a huge shout out: Read this book!
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