the Subtle Knife

This book is the second instalment of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. As I said in my previous post, as I always do for serieses I will be reserving my fuller thoughts on the whole for the final post & here will simply give a rough, spoiler-free sketch of the story's gist.

   Will Parry, a teenage boy from our world, whose chief concern in life is caring for his mentally-ill mother, accidentally kills a man who has broken into the house. Naturally, he leaves his mum with his piano teacher to keep her safe while he runs away - then, almost immediately, he finds a magical window into another world. This other world, called Cittágazze, is a crumbling coastal city, deserted by everyone but children. While exploring, the first other person Will encounters is a girl slightly younger than him who introduces herself as Lyra Silvertongue (aye, the very same heroine from the first book - she was renamed by Iorek Byrnison), who tells him that great things are afoot. Together they start travelling back and forth between Will's universe & Cittágazze as Lyra searches for her father for clues as to where her path leads & Will in turn seeks his own father, an explorer who went missing on a mission in the far north when Will was a baby. Their hunt soon leads them into contact with a pair of notable adults - the seemingly helpful museum-enthusiast Sir Charles Latrom & the bewildered dark-matter research scientist Dr Mary Malone; mysteries begin to resolve somewhat into focus & conspiracies continue to plod inexorably along, and soon the duo find themselves seeking the eponymous subtle knife, an item of immense cosmic power that people from many worlds would kill to possess. I will discuss it along with the alethiometer (and Dust! I haven't mentioned Dust in either post yet, oops) in the post about the final book in the trilogy, coming soon. Oh, forgot to mention, Lee Scoresby is still hanging about looking for a shaman, and Serafina Pekkala (a witch-queen) is here too.