If I were to be unkind, I could summarise The Subtle Knife really quite adequately by simply saying, ‘Some people go some places – and this boy finds a knife’. Because that is basically all that happens. No wonder I didn’t remember anything about it from the first time I’d read it! Yes, Lyra was very sweet, even if she seemed to be regressing rather than growing up, and yes, it’s good to see a wound that actually bothers someone properly in a children’s book, but it really wasn’t especially interesting.
And to be honest, the links to Paradise Lost and the story of the Fall, as well as almost all the cod-philosophical musings on Dark Matter and puberty are inelegant and really rather arbitrary.
Still, it’s better than almost any children’s literature out there, and I had a pretty enjoyable read. I’m not going to complain.
No comments:
Post a Comment