Saturday, January 05, 2002

golden compass again

We have about 50 pages to go in "The Golden Compass." Natasha has given up on glaring when I read the name of Lyra's mother as "Ann Coulter." We have concluded that Lucy Pevensie from "Narnia" would not have made it even half as far as Lyra has, and while we do see some similarities between Lyra and our children, I don't think either of them is capable of the wholesale devastation Lyra wrought at the Arctic facility.
The panserbjorne king, Iofur Raknison, seems pretty unlikely and hastily thrown-together as a character, but aside from that, the story has been incredible.

I suspect the reason for my disquiet over Raknison is that he is a bear who wants to a human, when Pullman is merely using the bears as a representation of one Icelandic race or another in a pagan state that is crossing over to Christendom for political reasons, as surely was the case for some courts as the Catholic Church expanded into predominantly pagan areas in Northern Europe.

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