La Belle Sauvage

I don't like sequels.  Nope.  Never have, unless the "sequel" is a book actually anticipated at the time the original work was written.

Sequels strike me as an afterthought, a way of wringing some additional money out of an unexpectedly well-received original work.  They either change our reaction to the original work so that the conclusion of the original no longer has the impact it once had, or they are parasitical -- weak sisters living off the strength of the original.

Philip Pullman's La Belle Sauvage, the first volume of a trilogy entitled The Book of Dust, does not on first reading strike me as an exception. Pullman says that his new work is neither a prequel nor a sequel to His Dark Materials, but an "equel" -- a different story set in the same Universe. Whatever. Anyway, I'm willing to wait for the rest of the trilogy before drawing any final conclusions.

The "original work" in this case, of course, is the three books of His Dark Materials.  I've commented on both the books, and the movie based on the first volume, The Golden Compass, at various times in this blog.  His Dark Materials is generally regarded as one of the finest examples of fantasy literature told from the point of view of children -- but whose audience is in no way limited to children -- during the last hundred years or so.

The Golden Compass introduced us to an entirely original universe, a universe very similar and parallel to our own, but one with distinct differences.  We followed a pre-adolescent girl (Lyra) from her home in Oxford through a number of adventures, ending with an almost-literal bang among armored bears in the Far North.  We learned that every human being in Lyra's world had a daemon, an animal corresponding to the human's soul, that accompanied its human through life.  We learned of a Church -- a melding of Catholic and Calvinist traditions with headquarters in Geneva -- that dominated the world both religiously and politically.  We learned of a strange substance called "dust," whose importance remained unclear at the end of the first book.

La Belle Sauvage is different from that first volume of the earlier trilogy.  We already know about daemons and the Church and its Magisterium.  No need for much exposition.  The entire book takes place while Lyra is still a baby, and the hero's task is to keep her from being captured and possibly killed by the Magisterium.

The hero is a new character, Malcolm, a pre-adolescent son of an Oxford-area innkeeper.  Malcolm is an extremely likeable boy, and proves to be brave, intelligent, and resourceful.  When a great flood -- perhaps supernatural in origin -- hits the Thames valley, he and a young girl named Alice escape with the baby Lyra in a canoe, attempting to evade the agents of the Magisterium as they float downstream to London.

The story -- to me at least -- lacks much of the adventure and magic, the philosophical and religious implications, of The Golden Compass.  Lyra's world is already a given, its rules largely known from the original series.  This book reads more as a boy's adventure story -- admittedly, an exciting story -- than as the masterpiece represented by Pullman's first book.  The story's introduction of fairy creatures out of British folklore, during an episode in its second half, seems forced and out of place.

The book was fun to read, but I finished reading it with the feeling that my time might have been better spent elsewhere.  As I said at the beginning, the trilogy awaits publication of two more volumes, and I'll reserve judgment.  But La Belle Sauvage itself did nothing to change my long-held view that few sequels are worth writing.  Or reading.