The Northern Lights

Northern Lights

Northern Lights, known as The Golden Compass across North America, is the first novel in English novelist Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Published in 1995, the fantasy novel is set in a universe parallel to our own and tells of Lyra Belacqua's journey north in search of her missing friend, Roger Parslow, and her imprisoned father, Lord Asriel, who has been conducting experiments with a mysterious substance known as Dust. Winner of the Carnegie Medal in 1996, the novel has been adapted into a Hollywood feature film, released in 2007 as The Golden Compass along with an accompanying video game. Both the trilogy and the film adaptation have faced controversy, as some critics assert that the story presents a negative portrayal of organized religion and religion in general.



Title

For some time during the pre-publication process, the series of novels was known as The Golden Compasses. The word Compasses referred to a pair of compasses—the circle-drawing instrument—rather than a navigational compass. Pullman then settled on Northern Lights as the title for the first book, and continued to refer to the trilogy as The Golden Compasses. Like the eventual title for the trilogy, the original title The Golden Compasses comes from a line in Milton's Paradise Lost.[1]

In the United States, in their discussions over the publication of the first book, the publishers Alfred A. Knopf had been calling it The Golden Compass (omitting the plural), which they mistakenly believed referred to Lyra's alethiometer, because the device superficially resembles a navigational compass. Meanwhile, in the UK, Pullman had replaced The Golden Compasses with His Dark Materials (a title that Pullman had taken from a line in Paradise Lost) as the title of the trilogy. According to Pullman, the publishers had become so attached to The Golden Compass that they insisted on publishing the U.S. edition of the first book under that title, rather than Northern Lights with the title used in the UK and Australia