It's been years since I read Pullman's spectacularly imaginative trilogy, His Dark Materials, but it's still as memorable as ever. With its parallel, if familiar, universes, clever reworking of dark matter, epic (humanist) good vs. (religious) evil narrative, and it's unforgettable daemons, it's not a work that ever quite leaves you. Like The Lord of the Rings, its first world-building volume is its best, and like TLofR, it builds to a satisfying climactic good-vs.-evil showdown. But with less songs, thankfully.
So, it was with some trepidation that I picked up the first volume of a planned successor trilogy. But I needn't have worried - Pullman is as sure-footed as ever, and pulls off a great read even where the main destination of the tale is already known.
Set in "Lyra's Oxford", the version of Oxford in the parallel universe that kicks off Pullman's original trilogy, it centres around the everyday life of Malcolm, son of a publican. Into his life comes baby Lyra, entrusted in mysterious circumstances to a local convent where Malcolm performs odd-jobs. Her arrival sparks interest from both the Magisterium, the ecclesiastical wrong-uns of Pullman's universe, as well as Lyra's somehow distant father, Lord Asriel. Skirmishes between these forces steadily spill into Malcolm's world, ultimately forcing him to rescue Lyra in the face of an epic flood, and sending him and Lyra on a strange journey among the other forces underlying the world.
This latter journey is the only weak spot in what's otherwise a greatly enjoyable tale, and then only because it's arguably a tad too fantastical when set against the rest of the book (which is, of course, saying something). In every other way, La Belle Sauvage satisfies - it fleshes out Lyra's Oxford, and the daily life and politics within it, more completely; it makes Pullman's daemons even more intriguing; it gives the reader some enjoyable tradecraft when Malcolm becomes something of a spy; and it slowly and gently transforms Malcolm's ambivalent relationship with Alice, a seemingly surly girl working at his parents' pub, as they are swept down river with Lyra and forced to become her guardians. Also, while it shares HDM's antipathy to organised religion, here it presents religious characters who are genuinely good, principally the nuns, alongside non-religious ones who are not, making for a more nuanced and less antagonistic relationship with faith.
So, all for the good. Although making the down-river drift of Malcolm's canoe, La Belle Sauvage, a little less jarringly otherworldly might have made it even better for this reader.
In passing, amusingly, and echoing a joke made in the book, my phone autocorrects "La Belle Sauvage" to "La Belle Sausage".
