Philip Pullman revisits his great fictional universe with this captivating first sage of a recent trilogy,The Book of DustLa Belle Sauvage – the name of the boat in which Philip Pullman’s hero Malcolm navigates a flooded Thames valley – was also the name of the pub in Ludgate Hill where Pocahontas and her brother Tomocomo stayed when they first arrived in London. The landlord cashed in on the Algonquian princess’s presence by using her portrait as a pub sign. Tomocomo had decided he would count the number of people he met in England by making a notch in his tally stick for each recent face. By the time he left Plymouth dockyard the stick was a handful of splinters. The world turned out to be bigger than Tomocomo could imagine.
The sign of a great fictional universe is that it is bigger than the sage, that there is something beyond the map in the endpapers. I remember getting that Tomocomo feeling when I first opened CS Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and saw that there were islands and unknown lands beyond Narnia. La Belle Sauvage opens with an even greater surprise. There are nice nuns in Pullman’s Oxford!Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk