The Golden Compass

The series begins with The Golden Compass (published in the UK as His Dark Materials I: Northern Lights).

The heroine is young Lyra, a girl growing up wild in Oxford. Only it's not quite 'our' Oxford, but a parallel one. Here technology has progressed at a slightly different pace from our world, and electric (anbaric) lights are new. It is a Victorian kind of world, and Lyra is (she thinks) an orphan, growing up under the almost non-existent control of various Oxford dons, with a 'guardian' who oversees her from afar.

The Golden Compass is set in world similar enough to ours to make the differences unsettling...Science and magic are inseparable here, and are studied as 'experimental theology'. Religion is oppressive and omnipresent, and in the oddest variation from our universe, every human being has a 'familiar' called a daemon, an animal-shaped being that is always with them and to which they are tightly bonded. When young, one's daemon can shapeshift to a variety of animal shapes, but as one grows older, the daemon settles on one animal form.

Lyra gains possession of a strange device, the Golden Compass of the title. By manipulating the 'hands' to point to a variety of symbols, one can get the answer to literally any question. Of course, interpretation is a matter of intuition and skill; oddly, Lyra has an affinity to the artifact and seems to know how to operate it instinctively.

The plot of The Golden Compass involves church scientists studying 'dust', a sort of subatomic particle. Since 'dust' isn't interested in young children, it is assumed that it is associate with original sin.

The established church does not appear in a very good light in this series; it is the church, in an inquisatorial mode, that evolves a set of obscene experiments on children, severing ties to their daemon familiars to study the effects on their affinity to 'dust'. Since one's daemon is a physical instantiation of one's soul, these experiments are Nazi-esque in their cruelty.

Lyra discovers children are being used in some heinous way and mobilizes some friends to attempt a rescue. Along the way they meet and recruit an Armoured Bear, one of the series' most inventive and endearing characters.

The stakes are enormous, the enemy implacable, and the children ultimately indominable. Lyra escapes through a hole in the barrier between worlds cut by her father (whom she thought was her guardian), and the stage is set for book 2.

The Golden Compass is planned for release in '07 from New Line Cinema. In August '05, Anand Tucker was named as director; casting is currently unknown.

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