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Reading: La Belle Sauvage
Oct. 28th, 2017 12:14 pmI wasn't originally planning to pre-order the first volume in Philip Pullman's new companion trilogy to His Dark Materials, The Book of Dust; I thought it could surely wait until the price of the ebook dropped when the paperback came out, but then about a week before publication I decided to pre-order it after all, and when I woke up last Thursday to find the email telling me it was available to download I realised that it was exactly the book I wanted to read.
La Belle Sauvage is set about ten years before the start of Northern Lights, when Lyra is a baby (I gather that the second and third volumes of the trilogy will be set ten years after the end of His Dark Materials). It's a book of two very distinct halves. The first part is a Le Carré-esque spy thriller set in a wintry Oxford in a world dominated by a darkly authoritarian theocracy; there are secret police who are feared and hated, schoolchildren are encouraged to spy on their parents and teachers and report any transgressions, and a secret network of agents works to counter the influence of the Magisterium. Eleven-year-old Malcolm Polstead, son of the landlords of the Trout Inn at Godstow, finds himself drawn into this world when he witnesses a man being arrested by the secret police one day while birdwatching on the Oxford canal in his canoe, La Belle Sauvage; at the same time, he is also fascinated by a baby girl who is being cared for at Godstow Abbey, where he often helps the nuns with odd jobs.
The second part of the novel is an almost dreamlike fantasy of a flooded Thames Valley, as Malcolm and Alice, who does the washing-up in the Trout, are swept towards London in La Belle Sauvage with the baby Lyra, encountering a range of characters both real and supernatural and fleeing a deadly and psychopathic enemy as well as the secret police, who are looking for Lyra.
It's an incredible read. I haven't re-read His Dark Materials since first reading it fifteen or more years ago, and had forgotten how much I loved it at the time; La Belle Sauvage broadens and deepens our knowledge of Lyra's world, giving readers a new perspective on some of the minor characters of the first series and concentrating more on the scientific and theological debates that provided a background to the first story but weren't explored in detail as they were of less interest to Lyra. I also know Oxford and the Thames Valley in general much better now than I did when I read His Dark Materials, and that certainly didn't hurt, as there's a very strong sense of place, both the Oxford of the first part, like and unlike ours (I'm not sure why Oxford in an alternate universe would stick so closely to the same plan as the real Oxford, with the same streets and houses and pubs, except where Pullman wants there to be a difference - Jordan College for Exeter College, and no locks on the Thames - but I'm willing to accept that that's just how this multiverse works) and the flooded landscape of the second (one of my favourite bits was the description of Malcolm and Alice being swept on the flood down St Giles and right through the centre of Oxford).
I'm glad I did decide to pre-order it in the end, though having finished the book a week after it was published I now have a frustratingly long wait for the next one to come out.
La Belle Sauvage is set about ten years before the start of Northern Lights, when Lyra is a baby (I gather that the second and third volumes of the trilogy will be set ten years after the end of His Dark Materials). It's a book of two very distinct halves. The first part is a Le Carré-esque spy thriller set in a wintry Oxford in a world dominated by a darkly authoritarian theocracy; there are secret police who are feared and hated, schoolchildren are encouraged to spy on their parents and teachers and report any transgressions, and a secret network of agents works to counter the influence of the Magisterium. Eleven-year-old Malcolm Polstead, son of the landlords of the Trout Inn at Godstow, finds himself drawn into this world when he witnesses a man being arrested by the secret police one day while birdwatching on the Oxford canal in his canoe, La Belle Sauvage; at the same time, he is also fascinated by a baby girl who is being cared for at Godstow Abbey, where he often helps the nuns with odd jobs.
The second part of the novel is an almost dreamlike fantasy of a flooded Thames Valley, as Malcolm and Alice, who does the washing-up in the Trout, are swept towards London in La Belle Sauvage with the baby Lyra, encountering a range of characters both real and supernatural and fleeing a deadly and psychopathic enemy as well as the secret police, who are looking for Lyra.
It's an incredible read. I haven't re-read His Dark Materials since first reading it fifteen or more years ago, and had forgotten how much I loved it at the time; La Belle Sauvage broadens and deepens our knowledge of Lyra's world, giving readers a new perspective on some of the minor characters of the first series and concentrating more on the scientific and theological debates that provided a background to the first story but weren't explored in detail as they were of less interest to Lyra. I also know Oxford and the Thames Valley in general much better now than I did when I read His Dark Materials, and that certainly didn't hurt, as there's a very strong sense of place, both the Oxford of the first part, like and unlike ours (I'm not sure why Oxford in an alternate universe would stick so closely to the same plan as the real Oxford, with the same streets and houses and pubs, except where Pullman wants there to be a difference - Jordan College for Exeter College, and no locks on the Thames - but I'm willing to accept that that's just how this multiverse works) and the flooded landscape of the second (one of my favourite bits was the description of Malcolm and Alice being swept on the flood down St Giles and right through the centre of Oxford).
I'm glad I did decide to pre-order it in the end, though having finished the book a week after it was published I now have a frustratingly long wait for the next one to come out.
