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Loading... La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust Volume One (Book of Dust Series) (edition 2017)by Philip Pullman (Author)
Work InformationLa Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. C+ (Okay). A boy protects a baby from conspiracies. I guess it's fine. I dislike prequels as a rule, and this spends a lot of the first half of the book doing extremely prequelly "but they didn't know about that yet" stuff. The second half is a respectably entertaining but unmemorable adventure. I might give Pullman another chance someday, but not with this series. (Jan. 2024) After a streak of disappointing audiobooks, I had to get an award-winner. This was a pretty great listening experience. Phew! The narrator did an excellent job giving the multitude of characters distinct voices. I was very caught up in this story until it became more magical and action-packed toward the end. Then I sort of lost the thread. Still, as a whole it left me excited to read the second book in the series. I am as invested in Malcolm and Alice as I was in Lyra and Will. In my opinion, this is more of a teen book than middle grade. Content includes mentions of pedophilia and child torture. I found it a little terrifying towards the end. It uses a specific horror movie trope that freaks me out:
I recognize that my expectations are impossibly high and that, in literature as well as in romance, you cannot return to the exact feeling you had before. I’d like to think that Pullman is biding his time, laying down the groundwork for what is yet to come. And even with its longueurs, the book is full of wonder. [...] It’s a stunning achievement, the universe Pullman has created and continues to build on. All that remains is to sit tight and wait for the next installment. The Greeks permeate his writing. Like Odysseus, his new hero, Malcolm, is on a self-appointed quest, fighting off enemies from his boat. (He’s also very unlike Odysseus, being 11 years old, ginger-haired and partial, like Pullman, to woodworking and meat pies.) “The Book of Dust” has other touchstones too: William Blake, the occult, ancient civilizations, East Asia and a eight-minute piece by Borodin called “In the Steppes of Central Asia.” Most of all, Edmund Spenser’s epic, 16th-century allegory, “The Faerie Queene.” Pullman copies the structure of “The Faerie Queene” — strange encounter after strange encounter — but thankfully not its style. When I admitted how I had struggled with the countless pages of archaic verse, Pullman shouted, gleeful, from his seat: “So did I! Couldn’t read it. Couldn’t read it at all until I was doing this.” His own novel is more readable, and earthier, locked into reality by character and geography, Malcolm and Oxford. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
When Malcolm finds a secret message inquiring about a dangerous substance called Dust, he finds himself embroiled in a tale of intrigue featuring enforcement agents from the Magisterium, a woman with an evil monkey daemon, and a baby named Lyra. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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In the world of these novels, each human being is accompanied with an animal “daemon”, a physical projection of the anima/animus ancients believed to exist as part of the human soul. Children’s daemons can change their form, but once adulthood is reached, the daemon becomes settled into a fixed animal shape, which can however vary greatly from person to person.
The society of this world is strictly controlled by the Magisterium, an organisation which represents the oppressive power of the Catholic Church, here depicted as an almost totalitarian force. It has branches which act as a secret police, and has begun to promote an organisation called “The League of St. Alexander” among school children encouraging them to join up and report any deviation from orthodoxy by their teachers or parents (you can see the parallels with the Hitler Youth). There is, however, a secret resistance movement.
In this novel we are introduced to Malcolm Polstead, a young pot-boy in his parents’ tavern, just across the river from a priory of nuns. A baby is brought to this priory for the nuns to look after. It turns out that this baby is Lyra from the novels of His Dark Materials, and several groups are trying to control what happens to her. Malcolm accidentally sees something which brings him to the attention of the resistance group, which he eagerly pursues.
Lyra’s fate hangs in the balance when a vast flood drowns most of Brytain. Malcolm and a teenage girl Alice find themselves responsible for the baby as they are driven down river by the surging waters of the flood. They are followed by a really nasty villain whose daemon is a hyena.
Exciting, nail-biting stuff. I’m really looking forward to the rest of this trilogy. ( )