The Golden Compass Questions and Answers
by Philip Pullman

The conflict in The Golden Compass is simple, it is a battle between good and evil, with the fate of the universe at stake."This type of conflict between free-thinking freedom fighters and...

Lyra Belacqua is the novel's main protagonist. She is an 11 year old girl. She is incredibly brave and curious. Pantalaimon is Lyra's daemon. He is a shape shifter, but he will eventually...

The movie and book were both characterized as being un-Christian. The author, Philip Pullman, himself is a proclaimed atheist who claims to want to kill God and promote anti-authoritarian ideals....

As far as technology, Philip Pullman creates an interesting dichotomy in The Golden Compass. The technology employed by any inhabitants of Lyra's Oxford seems to be simultaneously crude, simple,...

Imagination is something that is dangerous for Lyra precisely because she lives in a dangerous world where she is part of the plans and machinations of dangerous characters, such as her father,...

Clearly, given that every human character in the novel has a daemon, there are lots of daemons in the novel and even the most superficial reading will reveal a wide range of daemons. However, here...

This story is a metaphor against organized religion, not against God. I know this sounds strange, but you should think about it in terms of how human beings apply the supposed principles of...

I think that this could be referring to the more sophisticated concepts that are hidden in fantasy. The story is about villains and animals, and it is easy to see how some people could be...

The Golden Compass is told in third person, not the second person, with omniscient narration. This means the author can move around among characters and places to get inside different characters'...

The title of Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials is a reference to John Milton's seventeenth-century epic Paradise Lost. Paradise Lost is a retelling of the story of the Fall of Man...