La Belle Sauvage, by Philip Pullman

In La Belle Sauvage (2017) Philip Pullman offers backstory to events and characters of his Dark Materials trilogy.  Some of the same characters appear, along with new ones, and the infant Lyra, who as a young girl was the central character of the trilogy, plays an important role. The focus of this novel is an eleven-year-old boy named Malcolm.  He’s bright and resourceful and not entirely aware of his innate intelligence and talents.  He’s the owner of a canoe, La Belle Sauvage, which he uses to travel from place to place, especially during the flood that dominates the novel’s latter chapters. La Belle Sauvage is the first installment of a new trilogy called The Book of Dust.

This novel is more earthbound than the Dark Materials books, which is not a criticism.  The plot concerns a darkening political situation as the government is increasingly dominated by people and ideas associated with the Magisterium, which is gradually imposing a police state. (The Magisterium is a thinly veiled version of Catholicism, which itself stands for Christianity, and which is also representative of repressive, authoritarian religion in general).

The novel is very readable.  Pullman delineates characters effectively and deftly develops a mystery that gradually becomes a full-blown crisis.  A budding attraction between Malcolm and a sixteen-year-old girl named Alice who works at his father’s pub is an important element.

My problem with the Dark Materials trilogy centered on its attempts to make religion the central enemy of a just and reasonable world.  The second and especially third installments grew increasingly strident and polemical. While I do not disagree with this notion (current events--not to mention two thousand years of history--make it credible), I don’t like novels that attempt to indoctrinate young readers.  This was my complaint against C. S. Lewis’ much over-rated Narnia novels, each of which in succession grew more tedious and didactic. 

Pullman in La Belle Sauvage does not overblow his antagonism against the Church.  Instead he allows characters and events to develop on their own terms.  We can see that sexual harassment and pedophilia may become elements that he will attack in later novels in this new trilogy. And there’s no doubt that the danger of a theocratically governed world will be at the center of the developing crisis.

Pullman is not opposed to religion per se.  We see a convent of nuns whom he treats sympathetically, even though many of them die in the flood.  He portrays pagan religion to an extent, the old religions and legends of the British past.  What he does not care for is an institutional religion that imposes control over how people think and act, an authoritarian religion that becomes the basis of an authoritarian, tyrannical government. He’s opposed to fascism, clearly enough.  And the government that is developing in this novel is one that shares many affinities with the rise of Nazism and its persecution of Jews and other minorities. It also has affinities with our current American situation.