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Here you will find older scratches, musings and other detritus that once were located on the front pages, but have now faded.

Filed away here to collect dust and cobwwwebs in perpetuity, links may break, facts may change and data may corrupt.

On occasion I may come down here to tidy, but for the most, I prefer to leave the past where it lies.

 

The Subtle Knife

Philip Pullman

Will had never been out of England, so he couldn't compare it wih anywhere he knew, but it was the kind of place here people came out late at night to eat and drink, to dance and enjoy music. Except that there was no one here, and the silence was immense.

The world of Cittagazze is an unsettling place: the silence, the empty streets, the threat of horrible death from the soul-eating Spectres, from which only children are safe...

Into this world comes Will, who has killed a man and is on the run. Almost at once he meets the strange, savage young girl called Lyra, and soon they discover thaat they haven't met by acident. Their paths will take them to the mysterious Torre degli Angeli, where they must somehow acquire Cittagazze's most important secret: an object which people from many worlds would kill to possess.

But Will has his own task as well,: he must find the father he has never known. Could it be that this quest, and Lyra's, are part of the same larger one?'

There is a brief introduction to a new character that takes about twenty pages, then its almost as if the first book, The Northern Lights has never finished. Having established the majority of characters in the first book, Pullman is able to launch directly into developing these whilst moving the story forward. Whilst his story telling and writing remains at the level of the first book, I found the plot somewhat stumbling for want of a better phrase. Again there were chance meetings and coincidences that I thought seemed to funnel the characters down sub plots, that helped the overall trilogy-story move on.

I do however look forward to reading the final book and seeing how this ties up.

Read first six pages at Amazon.

20 Jun 2005 18:35 | (0) comments | Books

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