The Amber Spyglass

The third volume of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy scatters its characters across worlds that Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry are trying to reunite in. Lyra's mother, Mrs Coulter, hides her in a drugged sleep in a Himalayan cave to keep the Magisterium from killing a girl prophesied to become a second Eve, while Will, armed with the subtle knife that cuts windows between universes, searches for her with two rebel angels, Balthamos and Baruch. Once reunited, Lyra and Will travel into the world of the dead, a bleak harbor where every soul who ever lived waits in silence, and strike a bargain with the harpies who guard it: true stories in exchange for safe passage, so the dead can finally dissolve back into the world instead of lingering forever. Above them a war gathers around Lyra's father Lord Asriel and the ancient, exhausted being known as the Authority, and it ends in the Authority's death by simple exposure to open air after being found demented and powerless inside a crystal litter, and in Mrs Coulter turning on the angel Metatron and falling with him and Asriel into an abyss. Lyra and Will fall in love in the gentle world of the elephant like mulefa, then learn that every window cut between universes leaks Dust, the substance of consciousness itself, and that the windows must all close. The novel ends with the two of them back in their own separate worlds, meeting only in memory and in an annual promise to sit together, alone, on a bench in Oxford's Botanic Garden.

Pullman writes children capable of real theological argument, not shielded from it, and the trilogy's ambition, restaging Paradise Lost as a story children can carry, gives the ending its weight and its difficulty. It reads as the darkest and most demanding of the three books, slower through its middle stretch of parallel journeys before the ending lands as one of the bleaker conclusions in children's literature, a first love permanently and knowingly given up.