La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust Volume One

By Philip Pullman Penguin Random House Children’s and David Fickling Books, £20

Since the final book in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series was published in 2000, fans have been hoping that he 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. And then he went and announced La Belle Sauvage, the first in a three-volume collection, The

Book Of Dust. He calls it an “equel” – it kicks off ten years before the events of Northern Lights – and considers it a brand-new story to slot snugly alongside his earlier trilogy. Astute, logical and endlessly fascinated by how things work and why, 11-yearold 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 canoe, La Belle Sauvage, Malcolm can’t help but notice things: an inscrutable grey-coated man who drops an acorn; the way the insidious League of St Alexander has been transforming his schoolfriends into informers; when a baby called Lyra (yes, that Lyra) needs him. All that watchfulness soon 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. Once again, Pullman brilliantly tackles the intimidation and dread inherent in living under a murky,

1984-esque religious regime, while also dealing with physical and sexual violence. Old favourites veer in and out of focus, including Lord Asriel, Mrs Coulter and her vicious monkey, and the gyptians. There is a ferocity and a timely uneasiness that haunts

La Belle Sauvage, but friendship and hope corkscrew determinedly through it.