The Elements of His Dark Materials : A Guide to Philip Pullman's Trilogy, and: His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman's Trilogy, and: Shedding Light on Philip Pullman's Trilogy His Dark Materials (review)

It seems safe to say that Philip Pullman is now a publishing and cultural phenomenon. A Google search using the terms "His Dark Materials" and "Pullman" produces more than 700,000 hits. A feature-length film of The Golden Compass, starring (among others) Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, will appear in November 2007. The production company is New Line Cinema, triumphant veteran of the filming of The Lord of the Rings. There are His Dark Materials Websites, fan sites, and blogs. Even the prestigious New York Review of Books, a periodical that pays scant attention to children's literature, devoted a major review article in 2004 by Michael Chabon to the trilogy and the separate, but related, Lyra's Oxford.

It is difficult to say exactly what has produced all this. Henry James famously said that "a writer's only obligation is to be interesting," and on his Website Pullman himself quotes Samuel Johnson, who said "the only aim of writing is to help the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it." But Pullman is being modest. It is clear that the His Dark Materials books possess what George Orwell called a "literary vitamin," something that makes them extraordinarily readable. It is too soon to settle the question of whether or not these books are "great literature." George Orwell borrowed from G. K. Chesterton the phrase the "good bad book," which is, Orwell tells us, "the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished." It may very well be that Pullman's work will remembered in this light. Or, like The Lord of the Rings, they may prove to have transcended their genre(s) and be considered literary classics. Not enough time has elapsed to make that judgment.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that literary works suitable to be taught in schools and colleges will spawn guidebooks, a kind of Vade Mecum for both the teacher and the student. Three of these are under review here: Laurie Frost's The Elements of His Dark Materials: A Guide to Philip Pullman's Trilogy (2006), Millicent Lenz and Carole Scott's edited volume His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman's Trilogy (2005), and Tony Watkins' Dark Matter: Shedding Light on Philip Pullman's Trilogy His Dark Materials (2004). Each of these books is somewhat different in what it sets out to do, and each provides thoughtful and helpful guidance for the reader, scholar, and teacher of His Dark Materials.

Laurie Frost, an Alabama-based independent scholar, has produced a valuable reader's companion to His Dark Materials. "I can't recommend it too highly to the reader who's found anything interesting or enjoyable in this story of mine. I know I've returned to it frequently during the writing of the book I'm doing now, and I know I'll continue to do so," writes Philip Pullman himself in an appreciative foreword to this compendious 542-page work that is clearly a labor of love. In a dozen chapters, Frost systematically and clearly presents information about the trilogy's characters, places and people, creatures, philosophy, metaphysics, science and technology, the social structure of the parallel worlds, languages, and other topics. A helpful reference section concludes the book. A mark of the care that has been taken to make this book user-friendly is the inclusion of page numbers for both the American and British editions of the trilogy. The book does not have an...