Northern Lights

Some books improve with age–the age of the reader, that is. Such is certainly the case with Philip Pullmans heroic, at times heart-wrenching novel, The Golden Compass, a story ostensibly for children but one perhaps even better appreciated by adults. The protagonist of this complex fantasy is young Lyra Belacqua, a precocious orphan growing up within the precincts of Oxford University. But it quickly becomes clear that Lyras Oxford is not precisely like our own–nor is her world. For one thing, people there each have a personal d??mon, the manifestation of their soul in animal form. For another, hers is a universe in which science, theology, and magic are closely allied:
As for what experimental theology was, Lyra had no more idea than the urchins. She had formed the notion that it was concerned with magic, with the movements of the stars and planets, with tiny particles of matter, but that was guesswork, really. Probably the stars had d??mons just as humans did, and experimental theology involved talking to them.