Guides to bestselling book series are a dime a dozen, as limited-use books like What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7 attest to, but this was no ordinary guide: this one was co-written by Lance Parkin, whose Doctor Who thoughts I have avidly enjoyed on a number of occasions, so I decided to give it a spin.

The book is divided into four parts. The first is a biography of Philip Pullman, which I was initially unexcited about, but it actually turns out to be a pretty insightful little piece, warning against the dangers of biography-based criticism and also discussing the way the popularity of the His Dark Materials novels came to be.

The second part is a guide to "the stories". This is lead off with some fairly lengthy synopses (30 pages in all) of the novels, which I found pretty pointless: who is going to buy this book that doesn't already know this information? We also get a brief write-up on Lyra's Oxford. More interesting are the parts on the audio versions of the story (both talking book and radio drama) and stageplay, though the latter seems to have been written by someone who hasn't actually seen it. The section on the film suffers from the fact that this book came out a full two years before the film (I guess it was supposed to cash in on the stageplay?) and is thus full of guesses, many of which turned out not to be the case.

I was initially unexcited to realize that the third part, which at 185 pages takes up two-thirds of the book, was an "A-Z", a series of encyclopedia-like entries detailing every character, place, object, and concept to appear in the novels. Entries like "ALLAN - Lord Boreal's chauffeur in Will's world [SK, 161]" do not exactly scintillate. However, hidden between these examples of mundanity are actually some rather sharp little mini-essays. The entries on Lord Asriel, atheism, the Authority, and William Blake, among many others, chart quite well the way these ideas or people pop up throughout the trilogy, examining their uses, meanings, and potential contradictions. The nice thing about the A-Z is that it doesn't discriminate, pulling in information from the audio versions (such as pronunciations) and the stageplay (such as background on the church), though this information doesn't always gell, as the book is quick to point out. Also nice are the articles that provide comprehensive guides to things, such as the list of all known alethiometer symbols and meanings (across all media) or the list of all visited alternate worlds (though it's missing at least one that I can think of). It can be a bit boring to read through in order, as you have to slog through some short and uninteresting entries to get to the good ones, but then again, I suspect you're not supposed to read it that way!

The book's last section is a chronology of Lyra's world, piecing together the various historical references we get throughout the trilogy. The best part of this is that Parkin and Jones have done a day-by-day breakdown of all the events of the trilogy itself: the passage of time in those books is something I've always been a bit fuzzy on. The Golden Compass (or Northern Lights as it is consistently referred to, given this book's country of origin) spans a much longer period than I'd expected, from September 30th, 1996 to January 5th, 1997, a whopping ninety-six days! On the other hand, the last two books take much less time than I'd figured: The Subtle Knife runs just a week (from January 6th to 12th), while The Amber Spyglass takes fifty-five days (from January 13th to March 8th), though that includes the three-weeks-later epilogue. Hard to believe that such a massive war is waged so briefly! (This is something the authors themselves point out in the A-Z.) It's a nicely done piece of work, and probably the highlight of the book to me.

I don't think I've ever read a guide to a novel series before, but I have to imagine that this is among the higher end. It's occasionally a bit humdrum, but the moments of insight more than make up for this. It's a shame it couldn't have come out two years later, though.