Next February it will be twenty years since I first read Philip Pullman's trilogy. I'd already read the first couple of Harry Potter books and to be honest I was underwhelmed. (Not aimed at me of course, but they felt a bit like Jennings with added girls and magic). I'd been laid low with flu and while in bed I finished my first reading of Bleak House, which had taken me three months. I read Northern Lights in a day and a bit, The Subtle Knife in the rest of the second day, and The Amber Spyglass over days three and four. I was so bowled over by it that after a day's pause for breath I started the whole lot all over again. I read the whole sequence twice more that year alone. I even began writing HDM fan fics, mostly around the secondary characters but also playing with the possibilities of fiction in a universe with daemons. I even wrote a short Inspector Morse/HDM crossover pastiche.
It's been a mystery to me (maybe it's my autism coming through) that Harry Potter and not His Dark Materials is the great iconic book series of our time. It does seem to me that Pullman is clearly a more accomplished writer than Joanne Rowling, has the keener imagination and the greater originality. Reading HP after HDM feels to me like drinking Irn Bru after Veuve Cliquot!
But what do you think? What about your children back in the day? And grandchildren today?
