Matthew Kimberley

I’m sick. Whilst I’m well enough to lie down and mope about, the minute I start to think about anything too hard, it bites me in the bum. The number one choice of illness for the indolent, it would seem.

Sick-leave is normally a great excuse to catch up on reading, but this time I wasn’t up to my normal (dick?)heady intellectual standards, and I tucked into a handful of kids’ books I’ve been meaning to tackle for a while.

My mother-in-law, perhaps presciently, bought me a copy of Isabel Allende’s Kingdom of the Golden Dragon earlier in the year. It’s written for young teenagers, which is probably why I loved it. Straightforward storytelling, heroes, baddies, Yetis and the Himalayas.

But what I really got my teeth into, albeit belatedly, is Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.

Three excellent books – the Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and Amber Spyglass – which met with no small amount of controversy when published.

Depending on who’s doing the reading, they’re either about a young girl who lives in a fantasy world, talking animals, magic doorways, witches, angels and snowy environments (so far so Narnia), or they’re about the role that organised religion plays in stifling free will, curiosity and accumulation of wisdom (ha! Narnia, take that!).

The books are both of these things. A cracking story, effortlessly written and absorbing, and simultaneously far-from-subtle essay on what the author perceives to be dangerous shortcomings in theism, which will be lost entirely on the younger reader.

When I was fifteen, my geography teacher used to read us Winnie the Pooh stories. He said they were so much better the older you get. My reckoning is that the His Dark Materials trilogy is the same, and should figure in your kids’ libraries, if only so that you can read it when they’re not.