The Book of Dust Volume One: La Belle Sauvage

As outlined in the epic-length His Dark Materials post I wrote years ago, after the publication of the His Dark Materials trilogy Phillip Pullman planned to put out three additional books. The first two—Lyra’s Oxford and Once Upon A Time In The North—were short stories (very short, in the case of the former), published in neat little hardbacks and with supplementary material that gave some little insights into the HDM setting. The third book, The Book of Dust, was intended to be a more substantial collection of short stories focusing on various characters and time periods.

Fans waited patiently for it. And waited. And waited. After well over a decade of waiting (and following the failure of the Golden Compass movie), most people had resigned themselves to the fact that it was never coming out, despite Pullman talking about it fairly regularly in interviews. Then something happened to reinvigorate the HDM fandom: the new BBC TV series was announced.

I don’t have any evidence that the show’s green-lighting had anything to do with The Book of Dust finally emerging from hibernation, but I find it interesting that the first volume was released a few months before the first wave of concrete details—like a cast—was announced.

Regardless of how it happened, The Book of Dust is finally making its way to us as a trilogy that takes place both before and after the first three His Dark Materials novels. As we all know, prequels and sequels to beloved franchises are always a sure bet, pleasing both the ardent fanbase and the pop-cultural landscape at large. Let’s see what the first one is like.

La Belle Sauvage takes place shortly after Lyra’s birth, a little over a decade before the events of Northern Lights/The Golden Compass. Our protagonist is Malcolm Polstead, an eleven year old boy who splits his time between working at his parents’ inn, exploring Oxford’s canals and riverways on his titular canoe, palling around with the nuns at a nearby priory and attending school, where he nurses a seemingly-impossible ambition to go to university and become a scholar.

Malcolm’s idyllic life is disrupted by a series of occurances. The first is baby Lyra, plucked from the scandal of her birth by government authorities and given into the nun’s care. The second is a curious incident involving a secret message and a drowned man that Malcolm witnesses while out on the river, which sends him into the middle of a quiet war between the repressive forces of the Church (which have been growing alarmingly powerful lately, including by inducting Malcolm’s classmates into a Hitler Youth/Red Guard-esque citizen spy organization) and an underground resistance. And it’s been raining non-stop—so non-stop that people are starting to worry about a flood…

With any prequel, I always ask one important question: did this need to be made? With La Belle Sauvage the answer to that question is, on balance, “no”, but it’s kind of a soft no.

Lyra’s world is one of the highlights of His Dark Materials and it’s great to see more of it. Reading about ordinary people going about their semi-ordinary lives (as opposed to the children of epoch-making destined religious figures, most of whom come from backgrounds of wealth and power) goes a long way towards making the setting feel like a more grounded, real place. The book drops some tantalizing details about the history and makeup of Lyra’s world without completely stripping away its mystery, which is in my opinion one if its biggest assets.

One common trap of prequels is obsessively drawing connections to the original work where none was needed, and La Bella Sauvage falls on both sides of that line. On one hand, some appearances by OG characters (like the bit where Lord Asriel recruits Malcolm on a late-night mission to the priory and complements his awesome boat skills, or Mrs. Coulter’s completely pointless involvement in the story) clearly feel crowbarred in as a nod to fans of the original books. On the other hand, it could have been a lot worse—Pullman could have had Iorek Byrnison or Lee Scoresby somehow show up in Oxford—and at times the book presents things that are clearly preludes to events of the core trilogy without lingering on them or making a big deal of them (my favourite being the fact that Mrs. Coulter is heading a vaguely-sinister office of child protection within the Magisterium; if you’ve read Northern Lights, you’ll know exactly what that’s leading to).

One of the most questionable links to the original books is actually Lyra herself, who is basically just a plot McGuffin here. Yes, she is a six month old baby, but the fact that the baby Malcolm has to protect is Lyra at all feels like a combination of setup for the next Book of Dust volume and a way to harp incessantly on how Lyra is super special and important, such destiny, much prophecy, wow. Yes Phillip, I know, I read the original books.

I was also irritated by how Malcolm more or less declares undying fealty for Lyra on sight. In the original trilogy people have a tendancy to do this a lot, but that’s mainly because of a combination of Lyra’s natural charisma and the fact that they encounter her doing legitimately brave and inspiring things. Here, she’s a small baby lying in a crib. This seems to suggest that Lyra’s knack for attracting loyalty owes itself to some sort of magic.

(Which, to be fair, it actually might. There are vague, unexplained hints throughout His Dark Materials that both of Lyra’s parents have unnatural abilities, with Mrs. Coulter’s taking the form of persuasion that borders on mind control; it’s entirely possible that Pullman intends addressing this in a later volume, and this is early foreshadowing).

Moving away from La Belle Sauvage’s status as a prequel and into how it fares as a stand alone book, it’s…mixed.

There’s a lot to like here—it’s a dense, complex novel with a lot going on that explores interesting themes, and it’s even more flagrantly age-inappropriate than the original novels which I find delightful (the things you can get away with when you’re a famous old man). But it’s also very slow-paced, to the point where I’d say the story doesn’t really “get going” until roughly the half way point, and the plot is focused on about five different threads without committing to any of them as much as it needs to. Malcolm spends a lot of time bumping into strange occurances that he doesn’t really understand, which was also true of Lyra in Northern Lights, but in that book she was facing down dangers and going off on exciting adventures from much earlier in her story. The thing that really gets Malcolm off his arse and doing something is the flood, which as mentioned happens 50% through the book, and which is something that occurs to him rather than being something he decides to engage with of his own volition.

Pullman introduces several adult POV characters, mostly in order to tie together disparate plot ideas and convey informaton to the reader that Malcolm wouldn’t have any realistic way of obtaining. There’s a scene early in Northern Lights where the head of Oxford has an expository conversation with a colleague that’s semi-infamous for a few reasons: it’s one of the only times the book moves away from Lyra’s point of view and feels noticeably incongruous because of it, it’s blatently only in there to deliver information to the reader, and for a children’s novel it’s kind of a snooze-fest that sticks a big road-block in the narrative. In La Belle Sauvage there are probably seven or eight scenes like this, all of them much longer.

I’ve sampled Pullman’s post-HDM writing a few times and came away every time with the conclusion that he’s either gotten worse, or just isn’t trying as hard anymore. La Belle Sauvage is by far the best thing he’s written since The Amber Spyglass (including Lyra’s Oxford and Once Upon A Time In The North), but it still falls far short of his glory days. The book often feels like a first draft that only got a brief polish before it went off to the printers: there’s too much going on, too much extranuous dialogue, too many unnesecary scenes, too many characters that don’t need to be in the story. The first three quarters of the story move far too slowly, then the book suddenly speeds into hyperdrive in the last stretch; the classic hallmark of an impatient author racing to get the story down on the page so they can start on their second draft. Or, in this case, shovel the book into the waiting maw of a massive marketing machine to widespread acclaim and weeks on top of bestseller lists. The publishing industry is many things, but it’s rarely a meritocracy.

His Dark Materials was widely praised for not talking down to its audience, which usually because they didn’t “feel” like novels written for children. La Belle Sauvage is perhaps even less suitable for its supposed target audience, but not just because it’s violent, deals with sexual topics and has a lot of swearing in it (and, incidentally, is easily the most overtly anti-religious thing Pullman has ever written). The main reason I’m not sure this is suitable for kids is because they’ll probably find it incredibly boring.