Why won’t Philip Pullman leave

They say you should never revisit old loves. Maybe someone should tell internationally bestselling authors that.

Seventeen years after the conclusion of his enormously successful and richly constructed fantasy novel trilogy His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman is to publish a continuation of the story. The additional trilogy is described by Pullman as neither a prequel nor a sequel but an “equel”, spanning time before and after the events of the first books.

Publishers, booksellers, journalists and readers have expressed delight that the already expansive world of Lyra, Will, Dust, daemons, the Magisterium and an alternateuniverse Oxford will be expanded even further by its author.

But some of us have every reason to be cautious. A few years ago, I would have been thrilled about the prospect of more of Pullman’s cerebral fictional-world exploration of theology and science (as well as more insight into his irresistible concept of daemons — always the most seductive part of the books to me).

Pullman described his novels not as fantasy, but as realism about another world, and he puts it perfectly: the books speak to their young readers seriously about all the philosophical and existential messes that adults project onto the process of growing-up.

Yet the news has actually filled me with a sense of once bitten, twice shy. This isn’t the only author’s announcement of a new addition to a beloved work in recent years, and it hasn’t always gone well.

It started with The Phantom Menace. George Lucas’s original Star Wars trilogy was a cinematic masterpiece, perfect and complete. Many years after the original sensation, when Lucas decided to create prequels and add new CGI technology to the originals, fans were initially excited, but many were quickly disillusioned when they saw the