Slacks for Ella Funt

I reread this in preparation for seeing the movie. It’s even better than I remembered, which makes me even more nervous that they’ll capture the book with any success in movie form. Pullman is telling a pretty sophisticated story about the human souls and original sin. But he also tells an exciting story. And best of all is his concept of daemons. Each person has an animal that is with them all the time, shares their thoughts, and cannot separate from them by more than a few feet. For children, the daemons change shape constantly. When children become adults, the daemons settle into a permanent form that represents the personality of their person. More than that, though, in Pullman’s world the daemons are people’s souls, externalized in the animals. So the daemons are fun animal companions, but they’re also a lot more than that.
In The Golden Compass, Lyra must stop experiments that the Magisterium (the church) are doing to separate children from their daemons. Essentially, the adults are separating children from their souls. In doing this, they hope to preserve the children in their sinless, childlike state.