Dæmon Voices by Philip Pullman 

I love, love, love Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, and his latest first book in the new Book of Dust series, but I have sometimes found sometimes when I’ve heard Philip talk in interviews for him to be a bit too ‘opinionated’ so I approached this book cautiously.

I had had a taste of what it was like though: the essay on ‘Imaginary Friends’ published as a pamphlet for Independent Bookseller’s Day, five of them were serialised for Radio 4’s book of the week, and more importantly I was fortunate enough to hear him talk in person when he visited Oxford Brookes University in November.

This is an outstanding collection of essays (on the theme of storytelling). You will find yourself not always agreeing with Pullman, but he makes very good points and observations and makes you look at your own ideas and beliefs in a new way. You can’t fail to actually admire him. I think that maybe, he doesn’t get the time or the angle to articulate them (even though he articulates very well) those thoughts in more journalistic environments.

You will find yourself copying down, underlining, photographing, or instagramming quotes (however you choose to do it) because it is full of lots of choice quotes to apply elsewhere in life.

** Caution: this post may contain spoilers **

This is the long-awaited and much anticipated companion to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, and after the 17 year wait, I have been apprehensive about the book’s release. I had to buy it on the day of release, and planned how and where I would do so and I timed my reading so that I could begin it on the day of publication. But what if it didn’t deliver?

I was not disappointed. This is a book that from the first page to the last is Philip Pullman at his narrative best. Where at times, The Amber Spyglass could be over-complicated in comparison to the original Northern Lights, this was both dark and starkly relevant to the times that we now live, and a funny and engaging portrait of a world that’s not quite like our own.

The book is split into two halves. The first, mainly hops between opposite banks of the Thames from The Trout Inn to Godstow Nunnery (with occasional visits to nearby Jericho). The second, is an Odyssey-like quest that carries the reader south to London at the speed of a great flood pitching our hero from one danger to another. This is a classic adventure story, but a an adventure story with something to say about our own world.

If I had to make criticism of La Belle Sauvage it would be that at times it doesn’t read like the prequel (that it essentially is) to Northern Lights that it is. When Northern Lights was published in 1995, both it and it’s sequel The Subtle Knifemade it clear that Lyra’s Oxford and our Oxford were closely linked in time and space with just a few small but noticeable differences. They also read very much as contemporary books to the mid-1990s, and so this one, set 10 years before the events of Northern Lights should really be set in the mid-1980s. This book though, I find at least, reads very much like its set in the here and now of Lyra’s Oxford and not a that of a period piece set 30 years in the past.

The flood too, when it comes, is devastating – the worst that Oxford has seen in years – but even so I would expect some parts of the oldest, most central parts to be sitting like an island amongst the flood water. The geography of Oxford though is that is on a surprisingly large hill but no reference is made to this in how the river floods the city. And if it is as devastating as it it seems you would expect people to be talking about it long into the time of Lyra’s childhood in the other books.

These are minor grumbles though in an otherwise excellent book that has been a friend to me for a too short a time, and I can barely wait for the next instalment.

This is the book that concludes Philip Pullman’s epic trilogy, and it is the most complex of the three. In Northern Lights we are introduced to the recognisable but different Oxford of Lyra Belaqua’s world with a self-contained, developed, adventure of the best kind. In The Subtle Knife we discover how Lyra’s Oxford is linked to our own, and to another world that is both as alien to Lyra and Will as it is to ourselves. The Amber Spyglass shows us there are a myriad of worlds out there.

Particularly during the Mary Malone sections, this novel could almost be an introductory reader to anthropology as we learn about other the language and cultures of these other worlds. But this a book that at it’s heart takes on religion and the church head-to-head, and which pits Lyra against her parents too. She must travel between multiple worlds and even face her own death in order to arrive at her bittersweet ending in which both Lyra and Will discover that their own, individual stories are not quite finished yet.

At times I do find this book too complex, too knowing, for its own good. It also falls into the classic failing that fantasy books fall into, in that characters are given the ability to do something purely in order to fulfil a purpose, which once achieved is an ability that is lost to them. One of the finest moments on the original Northern Lights was that Lyra was able to ‘read’ the alethiometer, and I am disappointed to discover that that was a gift that was only ‘given’ to her for the purposes of the three books.

When I studied for my Masters in Publishing in ’95/’96 it coincided in the fall of the Net Book Agreement – a British fixed book price agreement between publishers and booksellers which set the prices at which books were to be sold to the public. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy was published in 1995, 1998, and 2000, and his forthcoming ‘equal’ is to be published this year, over twenty years since the first. When I look at the inside cover flaps of my first edition hardbacks I can see the history of the price of books very clearly.

Published in 1995, Northern Lights, was £12.99, as was The Subtle Knife in 1998, but by the time The Amber Spyglass was published in 2000, the price had gone up to £14.99. La Belle Sauvage is to be published with a RRP of a round £20! I know that inflation and increased production costs will have something to do with this but I can’t help thinking that this quite dramatic increase has more than a little to do with the 50% discount that online and major retailers are already listing the book as.

If retailers are going to sell books at half the cover price you can only guess at how big a discount they are getting from the publishers, and when you think that it’s only the big retailers with the buying power that get those discounts you can easily see how unfair it is on the smaller, independent booksellers.

How things would be different if we still had the NBA in operation. Yes, we wouldn’t get the predomination of book discounts on offer, but maybe we would have fairer book prices for all across all bookshops. You can argue that the NBA fixed prices and was thus bad, but it does seem that without that in place, it just results in publisher’s pushing the prices higher and higher to sustain their profits after they have given substantial discounts to those that have the buying power to do so.

Meanwhile consumers like myself are left in the conundrum of where to buy La Belle Sauvage on it’s publication day? Do I vote with my pocket and get it for half price from a major retailer, or support my local Indie…?

This is the second book in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materialstrilogy and has such it does exist in that slightly awkward middle-book-between-the-beginning-and-the-end way. It starts though, in scenes that is as vivid a beginning as it’s predecessor, Northern Lights, the book introduces us to a story in an Oxford in our own universe rather than Lyra’s, but one with every bit the intrigue.

We cross between the worlds through windows made by subtle knife. For most of the story the it is part-quest (for Will’s father), part-treasure hunt (for the subtle knife), and part-revenge (to regain Lyra’s stolen alethiometer). All three of these parts are as action-filled and immediate to read as one another and every bit as a good as Northern Lights.

Running over the top of all the main story, much like the path of Lee Scoresby’s balloon is his story; of how he made it out of the first book, and met up with the witches, and how his story will unfold into the third book – and it is this part of the story that is less satisfactory to me. With the final few chapters concentrating on this too, I am left feeling slightly underwhelmed after such a brilliant starter and main course to the book! It still does manage, in the closing pages, manage to tease me on to the final book in the series.

Northern Lights

With the publication of book one of the long-awaited The Book of Dust in October, and 22 years after I first read, and was blown away by, this book, I decided it was time for a re-read. This is a book set in a world that is very much like our own, and starts in an Oxford that is almost like ours except that we all have dæmons that shadow us.

Like all good stories, this is one that pulls you in from the very beginning, through the streets of Oxford and over the roofs of Jordan College. There is the alethiometer too – an object that has to be one of the finest literary creations of the 20th century – that enables Lyra to read what is happening in the world.

When her friend is kidnapped by Gobblers the action shifts to London, and to the waterways of England, before moving still further to the north, and to Svalbard where armoured bears roam, and experiments with Dust are carried out.

Book One was always my favourite of the trilogy, whilst I liked book two, and respected book three at the same time as getting overwhelmed by the ideas behind it. In contrast, Northern Lights is pure story and adventure, and a joy to read and to immerse yourself into.

It’s possible that I might have heard a review on BBC Radio 4’s Kaleidoscope but I don’t think so. What I do remember is taking it home and starting to read it immediately and being hooked immediately by the characters, the settings, the sense of danger. This was a world just like ours – all too like ours – but one where people have dæmons. Where the rest of His Dark Materials may have got complicated, Northern Lights was pure story, and a gripping one at that. The question is would I feel the same 22 years on…?

I’m still beguilded by the cover as a thing of beauty to revere (I covered the book jacket recently to protect it), and one chapter in, the story is every bit as readable as it was before. So I think, the answer, is yes!