And hastily his chains away she threw,
I finished The Amber Spyglass last night. It wasn’t as captivating as the previous 2 books; I think Pullman really opened things up too much in the final installment and as a result there wasn’t any one character to follow and so things didn’t seem as major or important. The climax of the entire plot actually happened about 90 pages from the end of the book and I didn’t notice it. A few pages later I had to say, “wait, huh”, and turn back and read it again. The entire enterprise was so secondary to the actions of the main characters that it hardly registered. In fact, the main character spends the first 1/3 of the book asleep.
I certainly enjoyed the book; he kept coming up with interesting ideas, and there’s a lot left over to think about once all of the major issues in the plot are taken care of. The denouement is very touching, finally making whole the various characters who have given up so much to heal the world, and then at the same time taking away from them all the things that let them do what they had to do. I think if I hadn’t been so bored of the whole enterprise from earlier I would have been very moved by the ending.
Now I’m reading Cold War in a Country Garden by Lindsay Gutteridge. It’s… well… We’ll see.
Hooray! I am not the only one who had problems with the plot finishing ~100 pages before the book does.