Just a short li'l post to note that I've started reading Philip Pullman's "new" trilogy, "The Book of Dust." The first book, La Belle Sauvage, is a prequel to His Dark Materials. I read those books many years ago and loved them a lot, and more recently was impressed by the very good HBO adaptation (featuring my favorite Ruth Wilson).
I'll probably pop in a longer post once I finish the trilogy, but for now I'll observe that I'm enjoying it quite a bit. It's fun to return to this "world", but it's also been a surprisingly fresh experience so far.
MINI SPOILERS
Sequels and prequels are really hard to do well. Usually people love the initial works because of how creative and original they are. Star Wars is a great example: space magic, wow, so cool! And the Empire Strikes Back with betrayal and family drama, how surprising. But then, when you want to make more Star Wars, you either keep repeating the same tropes as before - more space magic, yawn. More betrayal and family drama, yawn. Or maybe you do something genuinely innovative, as with Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi: corrupt arms dealers in the Republic! Slavery and oppression! That rekindles some of the original surprise and exhilaration of watching the movie for the first time; but fans tend to hate those new entries as they don't have the things they had decided they want. That isn't the space magic I like!
All that long preamble to say, La Belle Sauvage is set in Lyra's world, not another alternate dimension, and builds on the worldbuilding we've already seen: daemons, the Magisterium, witches and Dust. But it also mixes in what feels like an entire new strain of storytelling, one which feels more folkloric than fantasy. The peak of the novel comes as the hero Malcolm and his frenemy Alice rescue the baby Lyra in the midst of an apocalyptic flood, their canoe hurtling them down the Thames as they flee those who are trying to kidnap or murder her. Once the flood starts, though, things get very strange in England... or Albion, as it is increasingly referred to as. There's a lot of fairy-logic, glimpses of strange realms, riddles and challenges. It feels like a lot of Neil Gaiman's work, or really just folktales in general.
Prequels are also challenging because we already know the future, which necessarily limits that available tension. We know that Lyra won't die because she has to be the main character in the future books. Again, though, Pullman does a good job here. Lyra is present, but she's just a baby and won't remember any of this. I don't think we know either of the main characters Malcolm or Alice at all, so we still feel a lot of concern for them: will they survive or won't they? Lyra will definitely end up at Jordan College in Oxford, but will she be delivered there by her rescuers, or by someone else?
Finally (for now), I'll say that Bonneville is a REALLY creepy villain, probably the scariest one I've read in some time. He's deeply charismatic, and even the omniscient narrator seems to be taken in by him. He seems friendly and charming and harmless, but the presence of his deformed and blasphemous hyena daemon immediately casts a feeling of ominous concern around him. But he's so convincing that we find ourselves wondering about him: maybe this is the one case in this world where a good man is joined to a bad daemon. Much later, when Bonneville croons and attempts to seduce the children, it's scary and frustrating to see them falling under his spell; but we've also experienced his spell, so we can't blame them too much.
Bonneville is also another aspect where this feels like something mythic or folkloric. In a normal fantasy novel, once he was killed, he would just stay dead, or else there would be some systemic prophecy thing about the rules around his resurrection and final death. Here, it's just unexplainable. He keeps coming back, like the monster in a story told around a campfire. And he's finally killed for good, because that's where the story ends. You get the feeling that if he had been killed before the flood he would have just stayed dead; but once the flood started, he was lifted along with the others into the realm of dream logic. Which feels pretty different from His Dark Materials, and fresh and fun to be carried along for that ride.
END SPOILERS
So far, so good!
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