La Belle Sauvage

Book Title: La Belle Sauvage

Author: Philip Pullman

Series: The Book of Dust #1

Date Started: March 28th 2021

Date Completed: April 2nd 2021

Genres: Adventure, Fantasy, Mystery

Quality Rating: Four Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Five Star

Final Rating: Four Stars

Review:

La Belle Sauvage builds on the original His Dark Materials books as a prequel but lets its protagonists be their own heroes and have their own story. While very much in the vein of its predecessors with its whimsical adventures and secret organisations, it was definitely a lot of set-up for what will presumably come later in the Book of Dust series.

The two halves of the book have very different vibes; we have a murder mystery thriller with science and secret agents at the beginning, and then we have a more traditional adventure to fantastical islands in a biblical flood during a cat-and-mouse chase to escape the baddies in the second chunk. While I enjoyed both, it was a bit of a weird pivot that left quite a few threads hanging untied by the end of the novel.

Pullman has once again written good characters to frame his narrative. My personal favourite was Dr Hannah Relf, who mirrors Mary Malone from His Dark Materials. In hindsight, there are a lot of similarities with the character roles in the two trilogies, but each has their own personality in this new instalment that it's only looking back that I'm noticing all the structural crossovers. Maybe it's deliberate, maybe not.

I do have to admit that the cliffhanger ending was a bit of a let down for me, especially since I know that The Secret Commonwealth (the next book in this series) doesn't directly follow on from the events of this one. While the goal of the book was achieved, there's very obviously something else to be done - I trust Pullman enough as a storyteller to know it'll be solved eventually, but I'm not a massive fan of narratives that jump around their own timeline to withhold information just to make you read the next one.