gaudior

In the days of my youth, when I finished The Golden Compass, I immediately snatched up its sequel the The Subtle Knife and dived in. I zoomed through, finished it up, and set it aside with an impatient yearning for the next book to come out already, as surely the third book in the series would redeem this middle book, which was ever so slightly disappointing.

Upon rereading The Subtle Knife with littlerhymes, I still find it ever so slightly disappointing. I feel this review would have a stronger narrative arc if my opinions had changed, but actually they’re pretty much the same.

(Well, okay, there is one difference. As a child, I don’t think I noticed the creepy instrumentality of Asriel’s forces in his fight against the Authority, most prominently the two angels who let Stanislaus Grumman/John Parry get shot because “his task was over once he’d led you to us.” Just catastrophically failing at the Kantian maxim to treat people as ends not means. This may be something that Pullman will unpack in The Amber Spyglass; I genuinely don’t remember.)

First of all, I’ve just never loved Will like I love Lyra. The best parts in The Subtle Knife in my opinion are the bits where Lyra goes off on her own and does her Lyra thing, like the bit where she goes to meet Mary Malone and makes the dark matter machine talk to her like the alethiometer. (I also loved the bit where Mary Malone has a chat with the dark matter machine and follows its directions through a door to another world, and one of the reasons I MOST wanted the sequel to come out, like, yesterday, was that I really wanted to know what would happen to her next.)

The bits where Lyra and Will work together to solve problems are also fun. The bit where they confront Lord Boreal about stealing the alethiometer and his snake daemon pokes its little head out of his sleeve? Iconic. The part where they use the subtle knife to get back into his house by cutting windows back and forth between worlds, culminating in Will hiding behind Lord Boreal’s couch and Lyra crouched beside him, but in another world? Amazing job leaning into the premise.

When it’s just Will doing his Will stuff? Eh. He’s fine I guess. I don’t dislike him, but he’s just kind of there taking up time we could be devoting to Lyra.

I had also pretty much forgotten everything that focused on the adult characters, possibly because as a child I simply didn’t care about adult characters (with the exception of Mary Malone) and therefore didn’t bother to read those parts. They are not bad parts! They just weren’t what I was into at eleven. I probably appreciated them more now.

But I think the bigger problem with The Subtle Knife is that it just can’t live up to The Golden Compass. In The Golden Compass, Lyra moves through many different worlds-within-worlds in her own world, and they’re all fascinating, almost all places that the reader would love to visit. Who wouldn’t want to have a glass of Tokay in the Jordan College Retiring Room, attend one of Mrs. Coulter’s cocktail parties, ride in a gyptian boat, see the bear’s fortress at Svalbard?

At the end of The Golden Compass, Lyra walks into the sky to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, etc. etc., and what does she find? The world of Ci’gazze, which starts out vaguely promising - an abandoned city, that’s cool, right? But it turns out to be completely full of Spectres that will suck out your life the second you hit puberty, and it appears to have no other characteristics, none of the richness of any of the places Lyra visited in her own world.

But the next book, my child self was sure, would get us back on track. We would visit more worlds, and these worlds would be INTERESTING worlds, and maybe Will would just kind of disappear.

I was all set to write a post about how there aren’t that many SFF books that won Newbery honors or awards, but then I actually totted them up and realized that this is a classic case of a sampling error. The problem is not that few SFF children’s books won awards, but that I didn’t read most of those books specially for this project. I read a bunch of them just as part of my general reading as a child, because the Newbery SFF books, it turns out, include an extremely high percentage of absolute bangers.

(For the purposes of this post, I’ve excluded nonsense books (which after all had their own post) and also most books about talking animals, just because I tend to see those as their own genre with its own concerns. There are a couple that in my opinion stray over into more general SFF territory, and I have included them here.)

It’s also true that the SFF Newberies tend to cluster in the more recent years, so as I’ve been working backward there have been fewer and fewer, in part perhaps because nonsense books and folktales were more heavily represented in the earlier years. The first indisputably fantasy book to win a Newbery Honor is Dorothy Lathrop’s delightful The Fairy Circus in 1932. There are just a few in the 1940s, but these include Julia Sauer’s Fog Magic (which I read and adored as a reprint in fourth grade), as well as Ruth S. Gannett’s still popular and beloved My Father’s Dragon.

But in the 1960s and 70s, the Newbery Award got on a fantasy roll, and honored classic after classic. Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Lloyd Alexander’s The Black Cauldron and The High King, Sylvia Louise Engdahl’s Enchantress from the Stars (another reprint I loved in my early teens), Robert O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (my mom read this to my brother and me), Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan (I read this within the last couple of years and it 110% holds up if you come to it for the first time as an adult), Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising and The Grey King, and Elizabeth Marie Pope’s The Perilous Gard (another beloved favorite of my youth! I just couldn’t get enough of the 1970s books apparently).

This amazing streak continues in the 1980s and 90s with Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown, Nancy Farmer’s The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm and The House of the Scorpion, Eloise Jarvis McGraw’s The Moorchild and Lois Lowry’s The Giver and Megan Whalen Turner’s The Thief and Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted...

If someone asked for a reading list to introduce them to American children’s SFF from the latter half of the twentieth century, I think you could quite legitimately just hand them this list as a starting point. It hits many of the best authors and most famous and beloved books.

This winning streak continued into the 2000s with Kate DiCamillo’s The Tale of Despereaux (which I personally didn’t care for, but clearly many others do), Shannon Hale’s Princess Academy (also not a personal favorite) and Grace Lin Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (which I loved).

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon won an honor in 2010. In the fifteen years since then, the Newbery has gone a bit SFF mad (including three SFF honorees in 2024), but perhaps at the expense of its earlier all but unerring judgment. I’ve liked some of the work that has won in recent years (particularly Christina Soontornvat’s books), but I don’t think it’s as strong as the books from 1960 to 2010.

Now a skeptical reader might point out that I read many of the earlier books at an impressionable age, so perhaps the root of the problem is simply that I’ve aged out of the target audience. This is of course possible but also incorrect, as my taste is impeccable and my judgment 100% objective, but I think it also reflects changes in publishing.

First, the years around 2010 were the years of the explosion in YA publishing, which siphoned off a lot of books that would earlier have been published as children’s books. And the great YA explosion also changed the kind of YA books that were published: publishers were looking for the next Twilight, which (with all due respect to Twilight) is not likely to result in books as complex and meaty and uninterested in romance as, let’s say, The Tombs of Atuan.

At the same time, there was a wider swing back toward moralism in literature, the belief that the point of a story is to be a vehicle for good values. The values that modern-day moralists are different from the values of their Victorian forebears (very few people today are het up about the importance of keeping the Sabbath), but the basic instinct is the same, and it has the same deforming effect on literature. Not every book needs to be an expose of social injustice. Some people just want to write about fairies putting on a circus.