his-dark-materials

On THE AMBER SPYGLASS:"If this plotline was a motorist, it would have been arrested for driving while intoxicated, if it had not perished in the horrible drunk accident where it went headlong over the cliff of the author's preachy message, tumbled down the rocky hillside, crashed, and burned.

Imagine the same scene in HAMLET if Pullman had written it. Hamlet, using a mystic pearl, places the poison in the cup to kill Claudius. We are all told Claudius will die by drinking the cup. Then Claudius dies choking on a chicken bone at lunch. Then the Queen dies when Horatio shows her the magical Mirror of Death. This mirror appears in no previous scene, nor is it explained why it exists. Then Ophelia summons up the Ghost from Act One and kills it, while she makes a speech denouncing the evils of religion. Ophelia and Hamlet are parted, as it is revealed in the last act that a curse will befall them if they do not part ways.

He let her do it, then looked around for his fingers. There they were, curled like a bloody quotation mark on the lead. He laughed.

This is what__l happen,_ she said, __nd it__ true, perfectly true. When you go out of here, all the particles that make you up will loosen and float apart, just like your daemons did. If you__e seen people dying, you know what that looks like. But your daemons en__ just nothing now; they__e part of everything. All the atoms that were them, they__e gone into the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things. They__l never vanish. They__e just part of everything. And that__ exactly what__l happen to you, I swear to you, I promise on my honor. You__l drift apart, it__ true, but you__l be out in the open, part of everything alive again.