Product Description

Here is the highly anticipated second installment of Philip Pullman's epic fantasy trilogy, begun with the critically acclaimed The Golden Compass. Lyra and Will, her newfound friend, tumble separately into the strange tropical otherworld of Cittàgazze, "the city of magpies," where adults are curiously absent and children run wild. Here their lives become inextricably entwined when Lyra's alethiometer gives her a simple command:  find Will's father. Their search is plagued with obstacles--some familiar and some horribly new and unfathomable--but it eventually brings them closer to Will's father and to the Subtle Knife, a deadly, magical, ancient tool that cuts windows between worlds. Through it all, Will and Lyra find themselves hurtling toward the center of a fierce battle against a force so awesome that leagues of mortals, witches, beasts, and spirits from every world are uniting in fear and anger against it. This breathtaking sequel will leave readers eager for the third and final volume of His Dark Materials.  

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #76222 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-22
• Released on: 2001-05-22
• Binding: Paperback
• 326 pages

From Amazon.com
With The Golden Compass Philip Pullman garnered every accolade under the sun. Critics lobbed around such superlatives as "elegant," "awe-inspiring," "grand," and "glittering," and used "magnificent" with gay abandon. Each reader had a favorite chapter--or, more likely, several--from the opening tour de force to Lyra's close call at Bolvangar to the great armored-bear battle. And Pullman was no less profligate when it came to intellectual firepower or singular characters. The dæmons alone grant him a place in world literature. Could the second installment of his trilogy keep up this pitch, or had his heroine and her too, too sullied parents consumed him? And what of the belief system that pervaded his alternate universe, not to mention the mystery of Dust? More revelations and an equal number of wonders and new players were definitely in order.

The Subtle Knife offers everything we could have wished for, and more. For a start, there's a young hero--from our world--who is a match for Lyra Silvertongue and whose destiny is every bit as shattering. Like Lyra, Will Parry has spent his childhood playing games. Unlike hers, though, his have been deadly serious. This 12-year-old long ago learned the art of invisibility: if he could erase himself, no one would discover his mother's increasing instability and separate them.

As the novel opens, Will's enemies will do anything for information about his missing father, a soldier and Arctic explorer who has been very much airbrushed from the official picture. Now Will must get his mother into safe seclusion and make his way toward Oxford, which may hold the key to John Parry's disappearance. But en route and on the lam from both the police and his family's tormentors, he comes upon a cat with more than a mouse on her mind: "She reached out a paw to pat something in the air in front of her, something quite invisible to Will." What seems to him a patch of everyday Oxford conceals far more: "The cat stepped forward and vanished." Will, too, scrambles through and into another oddly deserted landscape--one in which children rule and adults (and felines) are very much at risk. Here in this deathly silent city by the sea, he will soon have a dustup with a fierce, flinty little girl: "Her expression was a mixture of the very young--when she first tasted the cola--and a kind of deep, sad wariness." Soon Will and Lyra (and, of course, her dæmon, Pantalaimon) uneasily embark on a great adventure and head into greater tragedy.

As Pullman moves between his young warriors and the witch Serafina Pekkala, the magnetic, ever-manipulative Mrs. Coulter, and Lee Scoresby and his hare dæmon, Hester, there are clear signs of approaching war and earthly chaos. There are new faces as well. The author introduces Oxford dark-matter researcher Mary Malone; the Latvian witch queen Ruta Skadi, who "had trafficked with spirits, and it showed"; Stanislaus Grumman, a shaman in search of a weapon crucial to the cause of Lord Asriel, Lyra's father; and a serpentine old man whom Lyra and Pan can't quite place. Also on hand are the Specters, beings that make cliff-ghasts look like rank amateurs.

Throughout, Pullman is in absolute control of his several worlds, his plot and pace equal to his inspiration. Any number of astonishing scenes--small- and large-scale--will have readers on edge, and many are cause for tears. "You think things have to be possible," Will demands. "Things have to be true!" It is Philip Pullman's gift to turn what quotidian minds would term the impossible into a reality that is both heartbreaking and beautiful. --Kerry Fried

From Publishers Weekly
In a starred review, PW said, "More than fulfilling the promise of The Golden Compass, this second volume in the His Dark Materials trilogy starts off at a heart-thumping pace and never slows down." Ages 12-up. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Grade 5 Up-As he did in The Golden Compass (Knopf, 1996), the first volume of his trilogy, His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman winds the story of this second installment (Ballantine, 1998) very tightly and lets it rip. Following the accidental death of an ominous stranger making inquiries of his father who mysteriously vanished years earlier, 12-year-old Will Parry sets off on a quest to find his explorer father. In doing so, he slips through a gap into the hauntingly beautiful and silent world of Cittagazze where he meets The Golden Compass heroine, Lyra Silvertongue, and her ever shape-shifting daemon, Pantalaimon, who is in pursuit of her own mission to ascertain the nature of the arcane Dust with her wondrous truth-telling golden compass. As Will and Lyra join together, their journeys and fates become inextricably linked, subjecting them to marvelous subplots involving witches, soul-gorging zombies called Specters, nefarious agents from other worlds, and the grail-like subtle knife of the title. All of this unfolds against a looming cataclysmic religious/humanistic tilt between the Magisterium and Lord Asriel and his legions of Angels culminating, of course, with the obligatory cliff-hanging ending. Bruce Coville's excellent Words Take Wing company again provides the beautifully rich and textured 20-odd voices to support Pullman's Anthony Hopkins-like narration. This stunning achievement weds the best in contemporary fantasy with impeccable technical production values. A mandatory acquisition for all libraries.
Barry X. Miller, Austin Public Library, TX
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Good Job
I placed this oder as a birthday gift to my daughter, It took awhile, but it got rectified> Amazon responded to my email very quickly. I ended up with 2 books. So I instructed them to go ahead and charge me for the other book. Very good service and wouldn't have it any other way. My daughter is very happy.

At times it felt like the TV show, Lost
I read "The Subtle Knife" soon after having seen the movie "The Golden Compass" and I couldn't have realized that the story in "The Golden Compass" was just the tip of the iceberg. "The Subtle Knife" is supposed to be teen fiction, but I found it to be one of the heaviest books I've ever read. And thus, I'll be waiting a bit to read "The Amber Spyglass", but I will be reading it. "The Subtle Knife" and Philip Pullman have made that mandatory.

Much more focused and exciting than the first
If you're thinking to read this series, His Dark Materials, or were a bit put off by the first book, don't hesitate in starting the second, The Subtle Knife. This one is significantly more focused and interesting than The Golden Compass.

I am thoroughly looking forward to finishing the series off now with The Amber Spyglass.