Ales Rarus

For about a year, people have been telling me that the Next Big Thing after Harry Potter was Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials," a young-adult fantasy trilogy consisting of "The Golden Compass," "The Subtle Knife," and "The Amber Spyglass." Now, this is definitely not a book review column, but I must say right up front that everything everyone says in praise of these books is true. Well, almost everything — it's not perfect, and not as good as the Harry Potter stories, in part because neither the trilogy nor any individual volume ever achieves a sense of wholeness, and the characters are not deep or even, ultimately, very interesting. Still, it's a rip-roaring adventure and it's well told and I wish I could recommend it to you. I can't.