YOUNG ADULT

LA BELLE SAUVAGE: THE BOOK OF DUST VOLUME ONE (BOOK OF DUST SERIES)

by Philip Pullman, Penguin Random House Children’s and David Fickling Books, hardback £20 SINCE the final book in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series in 2000, we’ve been hoping that the author would return to Lyra Belacqua’s world, one that swirls with suspicion and Dust, and is filled with colossal armoured bears, mercurial witches and daemon confidants.

La Belle Sauvage is the first in a three-volume collection, The Book Of Dust. He calls it an ‘equel’ – it kicks off 10 years before the events of Northern Lights – and considers it a new story to slot alongside his earlier trilogy.

Astute, logical and endlessly fascinated by how things work and why, 11-year-old Malcolm and his daemon Asta, live at his parents’ pub, The Trout Inn near Oxford.

Between serving punters, helping the nuns at the nearby priory and sliding across the river in his beloved canoe, La Belle Sauvage, Malcolm can’t help but notice things: an inscrutable grey-coated man who drops an acorn; the toxic, insidious League of St Alexander transforming his schoolfriends into informers; when a baby called Lyra (yes, that Lyra) needs him.

That watchfulness sees him swept up by a great flood, and the troubling eddies provoked by the totalitarian Magisterium – which is intent on stifling dissent and free-thought – and its inquiring opposition.

At times, La Belle Sauvage is absolutely – and supernaturally – terrifying. Pullman brilliantly tackles the intimidation and dread inherent in living under a murky, 1984-esque, religious regime, while dealing with physical and sexual violence, and the strangling sense of being hunted.

There is a ferocity and a timely uneasiness that haunts La Belle Sauvage, but friendship and hope corkscrew determinedly through it.