The Subtle Knife: Philip Pullman Brings Will and Lyra Together Across the Worlds
The gripping sequel to Northern Lights continues the epic adventure, catapulting readers between worlds and towards a devastating discovery. Will has just killed a man. He is a fugitive. His flight will take him far beyond his own world, into the eerie unease of a deserted city, and to a girl called Lyra.
Author: Philip Pullman (born 1946, Norwich)
Title: The Subtle Knife (1997), His Dark Materials 2
Format: English paperback gift edition (Scholastic), 352 pages, illustrated by Melissa Castrillon
Scope: Middle book of the trilogy, between Northern Lights and The Amber Spyglass
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/070230168X (ASIN 070230168X)
Two Destinies Bound Together
Lyra’s destiny is strangely linked to Will’s, and together they must find the most powerful weapon in all the worlds: a knife that can cut windows between universes. The book moves between our Oxford, the haunted city of Cittàgazze and Lyra’s world, where witches and Lord Asriel are preparing for a war against the Authority.
The Author
Philip Pullman was born in Norwich, England, in 1946. Although his beloved grandfather was an Anglican clergyman, Pullman became an atheist in his teens. He graduated in English from Exeter College, Oxford, and spent many years as a teacher while publishing his early books and stories.
He has received many awards for his writing, including the Carnegie Medal for Northern Lights and, in 2007, the ’Carnegie of Carnegies’, voted the best of all Carnegie winners in the medal’s first seventy years. He is famous above all for His Dark Materials, a fantasy trilogy for young adults.
Will Parry
Will is one of Pullman’s finest creations: a twelve-year-old boy from our world who has spent years secretly looking after his mentally ill mother and hiding her condition from the authorities. His father, John Parry, an explorer, vanished on an expedition when Will was a baby, and Will’s search for him drives the book. Where Lyra is a gifted liar who acts on impulse, Will is serious, self-reliant and quietly fierce, and the partnership between them is the emotional centre of the rest of the trilogy.
Cittàgazze and the Spectres
The deserted city of Cittàgazze, a sunny Mediterranean town where only children remain, is one of the book’s most haunting settings. Its adults have been consumed by Spectres, invisible creatures that feed on the souls of grown-ups and leave them empty, while children are untouched. The Spectres, we learn, were let loose by the very invention that gives the book its title: the subtle knife, made by the city’s philosophers centuries ago, which can cut through anything, even the boundaries between worlds.
Mary Malone and Dark Matter
The book introduces Dr Mary Malone, a physicist in our Oxford who studies dark matter and discovers that the particles she calls Shadows are conscious and can communicate. She is Pullman’s way of linking Lyra’s Dust to real scientific questions, and her role becomes crucial in the final volume. Meanwhile, in Lyra’s world, the aeronaut Lee Scoresby searches for the shaman Stanislaus Grumman, a quest that leads to some of the saddest pages in the trilogy.
The Knife-Bearer
Will wins the knife at a terrible cost, losing two fingers in the fight for it, and learns from its old keeper that the knife chooses its bearer. The image of a boy with a wounded hand and a weapon too dangerous to use carelessly captures the book’s darker tone.
Why Read It
The Subtle Knife is darker than the first book, and it widens the story from a single adventure to a battle over the nature of the universe. Read it straight after Northern Lights; the cliffhanger ending will send you on to The Amber Spyglass.
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