Phillip Pullman Now Officially "Culture"

Ed and Maud got me all excited for this one: Michael Chabon in the New York Review of Books. Truer words than this were never spoken: "The goddess of writers was smiling upon Philip Pullman on the day he came up with the idea for daemons." Chabon does an excellent job of revealing how the His Dark Materials trilogy plants one foot in epic fantasy and the other in "literature." It's a bit synopsis-heavy, but then maybe we can't expect NYRB readers to be up on their YA literature. And just when you might get broed with the plot summary, Chabon tosses off another gem of an observation, e.g. "it is Byrnison the bear and not Scoresby the Texan who plays the Lee Marvin role in this novel." Even better, he's honest about the weak elements of the third volume, when Pullman allows his themes to overtake his characters:

...Lyra has lost nearly all the tragic, savage grace that makes her so engaging in The Golden Compass; she has succumbed to the fate of Paul Atreides, the bildungsroman-hero-turned-messiah of Frank Herbert's science fiction novel Dune, existing only, finally, to fulfill the prophecy about her.

And how cool is it to have references to Herbert, Michael Moorcock, and Jack Vance in the NYRB, while avoiding the apt-but-easy comparisons to Ursula K. LeGuin or Madeleine L'Engle? Pretty damn cool.