The Subtle Knife

Image credit: Pinterst

The second installment in the His Dark Materials trilogy this is the book where things start to get a lot darker and complex. Themes overlap and fuse together to form the true foundation of the narrative -its underlying allegory- and new characters are introduced to flesh out the adventure and make it even more exciting than the first book.

The Subtle Knife begins with introducing readers to Will, a twelve year-old boy forced into adulthood as he’s had to spend much of his life taking care of his mother. When two sinister men break into their house to find something in relation to Will’s father: an explorer who mysteriously disappeared, Will’s life thrown into complete chaos as he accidentally kills one of them, hides his mother with a friend, and slips through a window into another world. There he meets a strange girl named Lyra and the two’s journeys become entwined as Lyra promises to help find Will’s father while learning as much as she can about Dust and what her Father Lord Asriel is planning to do with it.

The themes that were hinted at in The Northern Lights get fleshed out much more in this book with blasphemy, rebellion against a Creator, and the fusion of science and theology cementing hard to form the ground on which the characters travel. Religious fanaticism and its dangers are scarily –but effectively- depicted as children continue to have the run of the narrative and the book takes a dark turn as childhood innocence and purity gets corrupted and starts to decay.

Lyra’s character moves into the passenger seat, sharing the narrative limelight with Will. Despite being introduced in the smallest book of the series, Will’s character and back-story is beautifully fleshed out and he’s made into a rich character very quickly, but successfully.

Image credit: Phillip Pullman.com

Despite featuring a series of different worlds that need their own processes of development, The Subtle Knife doesn’t skimp on the adventure and excitement that the first book gave us a taste of. Part spy thriller, part fantasy adventure it chronicles an exciting –though sometimes confusing- story about rebellion, mankind’s arrogance and stubbornness, as well as children’s purity and naïve innocence. While the bridge between the two gets partially gapped in this book, it furthers the narrative really well while simultaneously reflecting the awkward and dramatic transition from child to adult.

Again, it’s a little slow to start and during the first hundred pages one can be tempted to put the book down and do something else, but once the richer meanings of the story sink in and the quest part of the narrative kicks off, it’s a page-turner.

The Subtle Knife is the second book in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, written in 1997 and published by Scholastic.