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Book Entry · Fantasy
by Philip Pullman · 2000 · His Dark Materials, book 3
The trilogy's full Miltonic machinery deploys: Lyra and Will descend into the land of the dead with the harpies (and strike the bargain — true stories for passage — that re-purposes an afterlife), Mary Malone plays serpent among the mulefa, wheeled creatures who see Dust plainly, and the Authority — ancient, senile, grateful — dissolves on the wind while the actual war passes him by. The ending Pullman had promised all along arrives as the Fall replayed and won: two children, a piece of fruit, and then the cruellest, kindest separation in children's literature, with the Republic of Heaven left as homework.
Whitbread Book of the Year 2001 — the first children's book ever to take the overall prize — and the most theologically audacious bestseller in the YA canon; the trilogy's capstone and lightning rod alike.
Lyra, Will, the alethiometer, the subtle knife and the war on the Authority: Pullman's Miltonic trilogy that retold the Fall as liberation and raised children's fantasy's ceiling for good.
In the Guide from His Dark Materials:
Carnegie Medal winner, later voted the 'Carnegie of Carnegies' — the public's favourite winner in the medal's history — and the launch of the trilogy that made children's fantasy a battleground of ideas; filmed in 2007 and serialised by the BBC/HBO.
One of the bestselling books ever written and the archetypal portal fantasy: the wardrobe is now a load-bearing structure of the entire genre, and the BBC and Disney adaptations renewed its franchise generation by generation.
Guardian Award winner and the launch of Chrestomanci: the wittiest of the great British children's fantasy sequences and a visible ancestor of the boarding-school-magic boom that followed two decades later.