★★★★★ I enjoyed this book, as I have His Dark Materials and the first two volumes of the trilogy.
I must say that Philip Pullman came up with many wonderful ideas, and I'm thrilled by his streaks of Romanticism; the dying art of imagination; inspiration; the daemonic and other forgotten, rejected, or forbidden knowledge; the Secret Commonwealth of the "Otherworld"; heresy ("free thinking"); and, like J.R.R. Tolkien, his critique of capitalism and the love and corrupting influence of money and power.
I enjoyed what he has to say about imagination and consciousness, though I can't help but think that he was, even at the end of the books, still struggling to understand them, propped-up every now and again with important sounding authority borrowed from quantum physics. Of course, if we're the type who are interested in such matters, we're all pretty much feeling the elephant in the dark: one of us who feels its trunk declaring it a hose; another feeling its leg thinking it a stout pillar; a third feeling its ear and adamant it is a fan; and so forth.
