His Dark Materials

[Gordon Freeman]

Just trying to stimulate some discussion here...

The BBC His Dark Materials trilogy recently concluded with the third
season. I have never read the books and couldn't seem to get into
the first series as the new Lyra, Daphne Keene, just didn't match up
to the Hollywood Lyra, Dakota Blue Richards, who was convincing as a
silvertongued liar whereas Daphne, as some reviewers noted, simply
came across as a petulant teenager. (OK so the Hollywood version
mascaraed the plot but they got the personalities right, even Philip
Pulman admits that, saying the Hollywood Lyra was brilliant).

But in the third series, which involves Lyra stubbornly insisting
that she needs to go the Land of the Dead, a place that you can only
go to if you are dead, to save her dead friend Roger who she
unwittingly led to his death by taking him to her uncle^H^H^H^H^H
father Lord Asriel .... at this point I was asking myself, DOES SHE
EVEN KNOW WHAT "DEAD" MEANS!!!!???? .... well anyhow Daphne came
into her own at this point because her emotive obsessive
recalictrant Lyra finally came into its own.

And somehow the BBC filmed the story many said was unfilmable, about
a girl who thought she was an orphan only to disover she had a
mother after all -- who was murdering children in despicable
experiments -- and a father, who no sooner than she found out who he
was, declared war on God by murdering an angel ... does any story
get more epic than that?

So right, in the end I did get into the story, though I still think
the vacant woman wandering round various realities in search of Lyra
was a total fail (I didn't even twig until I read a review that the
tinted piece of glass she kept looking at things through was the
fabled "amber spyglass" that the 3rd book takes its name from).

[Jeff Layman]

I also haven't read the books. I read a lot of science fiction and
fantasy in the late 60s to the late 70s, but found a lot of the fantasy
repetitive in its ideas. To be fair to Pullman, the trilogy appears to
have very novel ideas.

I almost gave up watching the first series as I found it most
uninteresting. For reasons beyond me I persevered, and thought the
second series much better. The third was reasonable, but really the
whole lot was a CGI-fest, with the story (if there was a story...)
coming second.

The problem with "unfilmable" books is that I believe they depend a lot
on the reader's interpretation and imagination as to what is going on,
rather than concrete facts. Other than the usual, and fairly clear
battle between "good" and "evil" (although it was an interesting idea to
have an angel as "evil"), much of it was - to say the least - strange.
What was the point of those elephant/tapir-like things who moved on
wheels? The whole thing seemed disjointed to me, and one episode didn't
necessarily appear to follow another.

if you want a truly unfilmable book, try "Dhalgren" by Samuel Delany.

--

Jeff

[NY]

"Jeff Layman" <Je...@invalid.invalid> wrote in message
news:ttpo81$8g7u$1...@dont-email.me...

I've read all three books and watched the first two series so far - we need
to start watching the third series.

My wife, who can remember the plots of the books better than I can, was
confused when certain parts of the TV story were moved around from one
book/series to another - the character of Will Parry was introduced a lot
later in the books than in the TV version, and there were other
rearrangements of events. We both commented that Series 1 and 2 rather
overdid the Magisterium - there were lots of "oh no, not the Magisterium and
it persecutions again". It's a fine line between overdoing it, and not
explaining sufficiently well how all-pervasive the Magisterium was and what
a group of utter bastards they were.

It will be interesting to see what Series 3 is like. We were utterly
captivated by the description in the book of the elephant-like creatures
which travelled around by gripping spherical seed-pods between their claws
and moving on "wheels". I do hope the CGI team have done justice to those
creatures.


Philip Pullman came in for a lot of flak from people who believed in
religion that it painted religions (plural) in a very bad light. I loved his
response, in a biography of him: "I think what I would say to the people who
criticise me for besmirching their religion and telling children that they
should all go out and be Satanists is simply this. What qualities in human
beings does the story celebrate and what qualities does it condemn? And an
honest reading of the story would have to admit that the qualities that the
story celebrates and praises are love, kindness, tolerance, courage,
open-heartedness; and the qualities that the story condemns are cruelty,
intolerance, zealotry, fanaticism. Well who could quarrel with that?"

[Max Demian]

On 01/03/2023 22:58, Gordon Freeman wrote:

> Just trying to stimulate some discussion here...
>
> The BBC His Dark Materials trilogy recently concluded with the third
> season. I have never read the books and couldn't seem to get into
> the first series as the new Lyra, Daphne Keene, just didn't match up
> to the Hollywood Lyra, Dakota Blue Richards, who was convincing as a
> silvertongued liar whereas Daphne, as some reviewers noted, simply
> came across as a petulant teenager. (OK so the Hollywood version
> mascaraed the plot but they got the personalities right, even Philip
> Pulman admits that, saying the Hollywood Lyra was brilliant).

I liked the film, but found the TV series confusing with the daemons
changing form. Easy to describe in the books I suppose.

--
Max Demian

[Gordon Freeman]

"NY" <m...@privacy.invalid> wrote:

> My wife, who can remember the plots of the books better than I
can, was
> confused when certain parts of the TV story were moved around from
one
> book/series to another - the character of Will Parry was
introduced a lot
> later in the books than in the TV version, and there were other
> rearrangements of events.

Apparently the problem was the actors were underage (I think Dafne
Keene was only 13 in the first series?) and so they had limited
hours they were allowed to work. By running Lyra and Will's stories
in parallel they doubled the available acting hours. They said that
if their plots had been done sequentially, each series would have
taken twice as long to film. That could also be a reason they added
a lot more stuff about Asriel since of course his hours were not
subject to a curfew, though more likely it was the need to flesh out
the other characters when telling the story from a viewpoint other
than Lyra's. I noticed the same thing being done in the Worst Witch
- Jill Murphy's books show everything from Mildred Hubble's POV
which is too blinkered for a visual rendition of the story, whereas
the ITV series shows the teachers in the staff room etc, fleshing
out their characters (her best friend Maud doesn't even have a
surname in the books!! ITV had to invent one). I think that is why
we see so much more of the relationship between Asriel and Mrs
Coulter in the TV series, they couldn't get away with just showing
Lyra's POV of everything, it's not a vlog.

[NY]

"Gordon Freeman" <Gor...@freeman.invalid> wrote in message
news:XnsAFBCA6...@127.0.0.1...

I read somewhere that Philip Pullman said he actually preferred the way that
Lyra's and Will's stories were run in parallel for the TV series, to the way
he'd originally written it.


I certainly preferred the TV series to the film, though I might have
slightly reduced the number of Magisterium-being-right-bastards scenes.


I wonder if Philip Pullman's sequel(s) to His Dark Materials will be filmed,
when he has written subsequent books. At present he's left adult Lyra
stranded in a desert in "cliffhanger territory".


Talking of authors stopping half-way through a trilogy, the worst offender
has to be Patrick Rothfuss who has written two of his planned three books
about Quothe (Wise Man's Fear, Name of the Wind) and hasn't done any more
for about 10 years. There's a great deal of story still to be resolved,
which is alluded to (infuriatingly) in the earlier books, but is still to be
resolved. The perils of starting to read a trilogy before the author has
written all the books...

I wonder if Rothfuss's books will be dramatised for TV?