Het Noorderlicht

Novel, Fantasy by Philip Pullman

Blurb

Het Noorderlicht is het eerste deel van de trilogie Het gouden kompas, geschreven door de Britse auteur Philip Pullman. De Engelse titel van de trilogie is His Dark Materials.
Het Noorderlicht werd voor het eerst uitgegeven in 1995. In Engeland heette het boek Northern Lights, maar deze titel werd veranderd in The Golden Compass voor de Amerikaanse markt. In 2007 is een film verschenen over dit boek, onder de titel The Golden Compass. Naar aanleiding hiervan heeft de Nederlandse uitgever de titels van het eerste boek en de trilogie omgedraaid.
In Engeland heeft het boek Het Noorderlicht in 1995 de Carnegie Medal, een Engelse prijs voor kinderboeken, gewonnen.
Het verhaal gaat over Lyra, een in Oxford wonende wees. Zij vlucht in het boek uiteindelijk van het Magisterium.

First Published

1995

Member Reviews Write your own review

Jon.lessner

OK prose, but terrible plotting and characters. So many of the ostensibly critical characters (in the world) are either deus ex machina for some specific threat the characters are facing, or blatant ego-stroking for the completely self centered mains. The story is written in third person, but from such a skewed perspective and rationale that it sometimes seems it's a mythical tale told after the fact by the mains about themselves. Besides this, some of the morality is just bizarre and inconsistent. The Church is self-evidently evil because they're subtly censoring scientific institutions (which is only demonstrated once in the whole series) and they sponsor a creepy, child-exploiting antagonist. Fair enough. But the main character sees the distant messiah (her father) kill her best friend for a remarkably similar "scientific" purpose, then he time travels and starts amassing a secret army, and she STILL sees him as a hero. WTF is going on in this story? The whole thing is riddled with motivated reasoning. "We're good, so the insane things we're doing are good." A truly disturbing book if the heroes were not written ironically. Every major event and decision screams #raisedbynarcissists.

0 Responses posted in January

Gambit4348

A very creative and funny adventure in an alternate universe with a lovely character named Lyra. The author successfully creates a fantasy in a universe where reality is very distinct from ours. The tone of mistery is balanced with action and intrigue and very amazing characters and their "deamons". This book has the correct pace to display the events in the storyline, not being too fast, not too slow! A real accomplishment!

0 Responses posted in January