La Belle Sauvage (The Book of Dust #1), and my complicated relationship with prequels

Okay, so here's the thing you should know about me - I have a terrible memory for details. I read the original series His Dark Materials when I was in university, and let me tell you, it was definitely too long ago!

And, since we're confessing things, here's another one - I got given the hardback as a gift shortly after the book came out, but it took until the BBC adapted the original story for me to pick up the prequel. Why not earlier? It's a chunky volume. Lyra is a baby throughout all of it, and the main protagonist sounds like he'd be a one-book wonder. Why now? Seeing The Northern Lights come to life on screen reignited my interest in the universe Pullman created, and served as a refresher on the main beats of the HDM trilogy.

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For over 50% of the book, La Belle Sauvage is a 'travel' story, so if you have no patience for these, put the book down (and jump straight into the second one where they helpfully recap the key points). Even with this in mind, there's something to be said about the magic of a prequel - having lived in the timeline of the main series, we as readers now get a glimpse of the past, where heroes and villains alike are young and fresh and shaping the world which will become Lyra's playground for a game of cosmic proportions.

It also works well as a first in a series, for those new to Pullman's works who have decided to work their way through the story chronologically. After all, where we get tiny jolts of satisfaction from recognising the young versions of the characters we know, new readers will get to see them grow over the course of the story (in age if not in virtue).

Now, here's the catch. These loving callbacks only work if you have spectacular memory or you've re-visited the main trilogy imminently before picking up La Belle Sauvage. As someone who has neither the genius memory nor the limitless supply of time, I found myself missing out on the initial joy of recognising all these characters when they first appeared in the life of the protagonist, Malcolm Polstead. It wasn't until later on when I was wandering about the HDM Wiki that I spotted the entries for a number of characters and realised they'd been amended to include the events of the prequel.

Maybe I'm the only clueless goose who didn't make the connections by myself, and, admittedly, once I knew who all these people go on to become, it added a layer of enjoyment to the reading, but it did originally strike me as Pullman trying to be a bit too clever. But then again, it might just be me being put out by not making the connections. Anyways, back to the story.

As far as pacing goes, the book feels a bit uneven - there's a lot of setting up to begin with, then what feels like years of travel by boat in miserable conditions (I mean, we should have seen it coming, the whole novel is named after the damned boat!) and then a rapid-fire succession of encounters before a relatively satisfying conclusion.

There are also a lot of descriptions - in that sense, Pullman is very much a fantasy Dan Brown - which don't do the pacing any favours. Lucky for me, I ended up listening to the audio book version of the story, so I could tune in and out of the narrative as I please, but I imagine I'd find the descriptive passages tough to get through if I were reading a physical copy. Thank the Audible gods for Michael Sheen's narration! (Which, by the way, was one of my favourite parts of the whole La Belle Sauvage experience).

I cannot finish this review without briefly talking about the obsession Malcolm seems to have with baby Lyra. At first you think, oh maybe I've misunderstood, and he is just protective of a baby, which is relatively normal. But as the story goes on and Pullman continues drilling in how possessive our hero feels of the little baby girl, the whole 'connection' between them starts to feel more and more creepy, instead of endearing and potentially other-worldly.

If you've read the synopsis for The Secret Commonwealth, you may have an inkling about the author's intentions to set these two up as a potential item, and I've got nothing against age gap relationships per se. Provided they are between two consenting adults. The yuck factor grows exponentially when you make one of them an infant and the other a teenager at the verge of puberty. Gross, Malcolm!

Parting thoughts for the cross-media consumers like myself - I did enjoy the nod BBC gave to the ending of La Belle Sauvage at the beginning of the TV series. Despite the children not being present at the handover of baby Lyra, it was a nice little nugget of information about how she ended up in Jordan college that made the series that much nicer.

3/5 stars

(which is not to say I didn't pick up the second book in the trilogy shortly after)