andygates

I thought I'd catch up with the rest of the world and chug back some Pullman recently.  I have thoroughly enjoyed all bar the last couple of chapters of Northern Lights, and before I forget, here's a bijou review-ette: Me likey.

I like the pacing of the story - cracking along at a heck of a rate with no pauses for boredom.  I like the clarity of the storytelling - yes, it's a YA book but that restriction has only helped.  I've read enough adult fantasy with similar themes but baggy, indulgent, flatulent prose to know pacing and clarity when I see it, and this is clear enough for the characters all to have distinct voices and, well, character. 

(Compare China Mieville, who is baggy and indulgent but writes in a sort of mood-poetry that needs big wallows of words, or Anne Rice, who just needs a good hard editing for her baggy and indulgent wurbling.)

So it's a cracking yarn.  And it's full of fun stuff to spot, and the richness of ideas you expect from fantasists (let's face it, "a triumph of the imagination" on the back-jacket is as predictable to find as an ISBN).  It is most definitely a book you could read aloud, a chapter at a time, at bedtime. 

And for a kid who grew up in Oxford, and knows intimately the streets he's nearly-describing, it's actually quite agonisingly nostalgic.  I did my paper-rounds in Jericho; hunted for discarded newsagents' smut on the claypit flats, and my favourite bike shop was in the Covered Market, right next to where that little girl was got by the Gobblers.  Maybe it's a sign that he's got his childlike-perception-of-place right that my childlike memory of place is triggered so strongly.

And Lyra rocks.  She kicks arse.