Thursday, April 5, 2018

Review: La Belle Sauvage

La Belle Sauvage La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a book with two titles. On the one hand, it is part of the projected “Book of Dust” trilogy which, it seems, is supposed someday to constitute a single book. On the other hand, this is also La Belle Sauvage, a first volume that stands as a story in itself.

As engaging as each of those books is, Pullman seems never quite to reconcile them into a single project. This may be going somewhere extraordinary, but what we have so far is a terrifically fun adventure that’s garnished with not-quite-developed notions of philosophy and theology.

Like a lot of people, I was blown away by Pullman’s first book, The Golden Compass. Not only does that do as fine a job of bringing steampunk into the mainstream as any I know, it also attempts a real metaphysical inquiry within the fantasy tradition. As a stand-alone book, complete with its bold ending (worthy of George R.R. Martin for its sudden and sharp cruelty) it’s a landmark of the genre.

While I also really enjoyed The Subtle Knife, I was ultimately disappointed by The Amber Spyglass. I thought it diminished Pullman’s striking protest against religious faith hardened into dogma by turning into an almost adolescent assault on the possibility of faith itself. It simply never quite landed with the subtlety the first book(s) promised, and – unforgivably in my eyes – it allowed Asriel a redemption for his deep cruelty at the end of The Golden Compass. As much as I loved the first book in that first trilogy, then, I’d kind of put it all behind me.

Here we have Pullman revisiting that tangle of inspiration and disappointment. At least that’s how I understand “The Book of Dust.” We get enough tantalizing hints about the nature of ‘dust,’ a particle that reflects the stuff of consciousness in the same way that atoms reflect the stuff of the material world, that I’m back to being intrigued. In a world where souls live outside our bodies as daemons – animal creatures that accompany all people as manifestations of spirit – it’s compelling to think of the implications: how would we conceive of the soul if we could see it in ourselves and others?

(And Pullman does some brilliant stuff with the daemons here. I love the way the daemon of the infant Lyra constantly changes shape – as all children’s daemons do – in response to those giving her care. It’s an almost perfect image to see it become a kitten submitting to being held by another person’s cat-daemon.)

Still, most of such metaphysical thinking comes only indirectly or through hints. Our bete noir here, a brilliant and insane “historian” (as metaphysical scientists are called in Pullman’s universe) named Gerard Bonneville, has done deep research into the ‘Rusakov Field.’ We get to see reams of his notes, but they’re inscrutable, some in foreign languages and some in code. We get a few gentle explanations from Malcolm’s tutor, Dr. Hannah Relf, but they’re generally just shorter descriptions of principles made clear in the first trilogy.

So, my verdict on this as “The Book of Dust” is an incomplete. The hints here suggest Pullman may find a way back to his intriguing questions – that he may succeed in creating a young-adult fantasy world with as much substance as C.S. Lewis’s Narnia but without that works embrace of an orthodox faith that Pullman sees as limiting true individual expression – but they aren’t developed. Maybe this second trilogy as a whole can redeem the too-easy conclusion of The Amber Spyglass, but we don’t know enough yet.

On the other hand, La Belle Sauvage gradually becomes an utterly rollicking adventure. If half of Pullman’s inspiration is an effort to out-C.S. Lewis the original C.S. Lewis, the other seems to be to recapture the joy of Robert Louis Stevenson in Treasure Island. Once [SPOILER] Malcolm and Alice find they have to rescue Lyra and ride the titular canoe down a flooded river to London, we get what feels like pure old-fashioned adventure.

(As proof of that intention, there’s even an old-fashioned frontispiece in the hard-cover edition that the publisher sent me as a desk copy for a class I don’t teach. Thanks, though. That frontispiece, with its lithographic line-art and its excerpted sentence from later in the book, looks exactly like the kind of thing I’d have found in one of the library copies of Treasure Island, Horatio Hornblower, Ivanhoe, or any other classic adventure story I spent my childhood checking out.)

I loved the rhythm of the desperate canoe trip, and I also really liked its strange digressions into fairy and fantasy. Those suggest a separate metaphysics from the stuff of ‘dust,’ but Pullman doesn’t go into them in much detail. He doesn’t have to, but the fact that he doesn’t underscores again the tension between this as two discrete works in one volume.

There are some other issues as well: it isn’t clear why Lyra is so exposed in the first place. If she’s so essential for all that will follow, then why is she left more or less friendless in the convent where she’s prey to whomever assaults her first? And, why is that Bonneville is able, alone and deeply injured, to track the children more effectively than the best-equipped ships of the CCD and Oakley Street squads? I can wait on an answer since that’s part of what you get in the young-adult genre, but it does dampen some of the excellence that’s otherwise in place here.

So, yes, I thoroughly enjoyed this, and I am back in line for the promised second volume of this second trilogy. Pullman can certainly tell a good story. I’m willing to wait and see whether he can also sharpen the point of his ambitious critique about the nature and possibilities of contemporary faith.


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