I’m reading Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series. I’m a quarter of the way through the third book, The Amber Spyglass. Don’t tell me how it ends.
When I was a kid I read a Tarzan book, Tarzan and the City of Gold which greatly impressed me at the time because it switched among three different groups of characters, probably a chapter for each, who would eventually find that their fates were intertwined. I had never read anything so complex before. The DaVinci Code is that way, also.
This book is like that, but even more so. This one seems like a three-dimensional chess board, with not only different groups of characters, but also different levels of reality and planes of existence with only limited ways to cross between them. It’s not really confusing to read, but it certainly is complex.
Now, for a review? I wouldn’t be up to the third book if I didn’t like them. I think they’re tremendous. It took me a very long time to get into the series, probably at least a third of the way through the first book, but then I was hooked. I think they’re way better than the Tolkien books. The characters are more interesting and more developed, not all just good or evil. The different kinds of monsters and non-human characters are more imaginative than Tolkien’s. The setting doesn’t rely on a map of a made-up world, but is in parts of our own world that you rarely read about and don’t know well — the Arctic north of Scandinavia and Russia, Siberia, the Himalayas, as well as alternative-universe England and Italy.
One thing I don’t like is that there are a zillion in-the-nick-of-time rescues. They are excused as not really coincidences but as happening because other characters have ways of knowing when help is needed. Not everyone is rescued in the nick of time, though; that at least adds a little versimilitude. Other than that, there are relatively few gimmicks. There are two gimmicks so far as I’ve read that do have phenomenal powers. The first two books are named for them, so I expect that there is another one coming up in the third book.