Lyra and her daemon return as she and 12-year-old Will Parry are in a desperate flight for Will's life. They are drawn closer to Will's father and to the Subtle Knife, a deadly, magical, ancient tool that cuts windows between worlds. Through it all, the pair are drawn deeper and deeper into a fierce battle they may not survive.
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 d?mons 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 d?mon, 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 dmon, 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
Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy now appears in sophisticated trade paperback editions, each title embossed within a runic emblem of antiqued gold. The backdrop of The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials, Book I sports a midnight blue map of the cosmos with the zodiacal ram at its center. The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass carry similarly intriguing cover art, and all three titles offer details not seen in the originals: in Compass and Knife, for example, Pullman's stamp-size b&w; art introduces each chapter; Spyglass chapters open with literary quotes from Blake, the Bible, Dickinson and more.
--Publishers Weekly
长篇原版小说,不知道什么时候能看,但是慢慢看吧。
评分当你孤独寂寞时读书,它就像佳人乍到,给你送来了清新的问候和舒适的抚慰,
评分读书对于不同的人有不同的乐趣,对于从事体力劳动来说,读书一种休闲;对于从事脑力劳动的人来说,
评分说、读、写等交际活动的能力,即 “四会”。从学习的角度来说,“读”是其它“三会”的基础,因为在国内学习英语的环境中,听、说、写的机会较少,我们通常是通过大量阅读各种英语书报杂志来丰富我们的“ 语感”(Speech feeling)(即对英语的感性认识),扩大英语词汇量,提高英语理解和表达能力。
评分不错
评分或对某一个问题似有所闻的时候,打开书一看,你就会发现早已有人对这个问题做了充分的论述,
评分黑暗物质系列的,孩子非常喜欢。
评分正好骚到了你的痒处。这种“柳暗花明又一村”的感觉你那么舒服,那么的自在。
评分知识是开启理想之门的钥匙;知识是无价的宝贵财富,知识只有靠读书才能获得。
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