The title of this book turned out to have a didactic intent. Now that I get where he was going, I think the piece works decently well as a (young writer's early) Grand Allegory, which is a genre that does not necessarily overlap with the novel. The moral of the allegory was essentially that, in this futurey world, what matters is what is seen and done; the appearance of things has become more important than the things themselves and in fact is, in a way, more real. I find this point of view sort of smacks of Young Man Who Knows Everything, especially since part of this moral undercuts the idea that love has any intrinsic merit. The fact that the narrative relies somewhat heavily on the reader's permission for the author to use a crapton of allusions and Very Clever Devices also points to Young Writer Syndrome. I'm not dissing Pullman; he wrote this book in 1976, when, in point of fact, he was a Young Writer. He survived and flourished. I am fascinated with this older work mostly because I like to think about how particular writers get from inchoate to justifiably celebrated. ( )