philip pullman new book of dust volume 3

In Malcolm’s Oxford there are no free libraries any more teachers are being bullied into dreary box-ticking dissenting voices publicly humiliated and disappeared. Pullman is a powerful voice for many endangered features of postwar society, which gave his (and my) generation so many chances. One night, as Malcolm is watching great crested grebes nesting by the river, he accidentally observes a spy drop going wrong, and after that “everything just then seemed hung about with an unhappy air of suspicion and fear”. As for Alice, she is seen, early on, working as a barmaid when a customer pinches her bottom, she smashes a beer tankard and flings the handle at the offender.

He is an ordinary lad in some respects, but a golden boy over all – like Pip and Oliver in Dickens, with a dash of Kim, and of Emil from another classic Pullman admires, Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives. The hero, Malcolm, a red-haired, good-natured, savvy and inquisitive 11-year-old, works as a potboy in his parents’ pub, The Trout at Godstow, and helps out the nuns living in the priory on the island across the way. The action takes place 10 years before Northern Lights, and unfolds how Lyra, the once and future heroine of His Dark Materials, will come to grow up in the Oxford college called Jordan. To begin with, La Belle Sauvage feels old-fashioned and comfy, set in a picture-book Oxford redolent of stewed cabbage, meat pies and generous helpings of pudding, lit by naphtha lamps and warmed by brandwijn. But whereas the Thames offered Carroll’s Alice an idyllic, pastoral meander, a very contemporary apocalypse explodes around this older Alice. In this longed-for opening volume of the new trilogy, Pullman faces his lineage without apology: his young heroine is even called Alice, and the story follows her as she is swept down the Thames in the eponymous canoe of the hero, Malcolm. While JK Rowling carried on the tradition of jolly school adventures and gripping supernatural yarns, he has chosen the pilgrim road of fantastic metaphysical allegory, and his new book nods to Spenser’s The Faerie Queene in the same way as His Dark Materials took on Milton and Paradise Lost. Philip Pullman is the living heir of Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald and, yes, CS Lewis – in spite of Lewis being his chief bugbear, whom he attacks furiously for his religiosity and misanthropy.

Philip pullman new book of dust volume 3