CANR

• Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling - 2017 David Fickling Books, Oxford, United Kingdom
• The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship - 2017 David Fickling Books, Oxford, United Kingdom
• La Belle Sauvage - 2017 Knopf, New York, NY

• Fantastic Fiction -

  Series
  Sally Lockhart
  1. The Ruby in the Smoke (1985)
  2. The Shadow in the North (1986)
       aka The Shadow in the Plate
  3. The Tiger in the Well (1990)
  4. The Tin Princess (1994)
  Sally Lockhart Slipcase (omnibus) (2004)

   
  New Cut Gang
  1. Thunderbolt's Waxwork (1994)
  2. The Gas-Fitters' Ball (1995)
  The Adventures of the New Cut Gang (2011)
  Two Crafty Criminals! (2012)

   
  His Dark Materials
  0.5. Once Upon a Time in the North (2008)
  0.6. The Collectors (2015)
  1. Northern Lights (1995)
       aka The Golden Compass
  2. The Subtle Knife (1997)
  3. The Amber Spyglass (1999)
  3.5. Lyra's Oxford (2003)
  His Dark Materials Trilogy (omnibus) (2002)

   
  His Dark Materials Graphic Novel
  1. The Golden Compass The Graphic Novel (2015)
       aka Northern Lights Graphic Novel
  2. The Golden Compass Graphic Novel, Volume 2 (2016)

   
  Book of Dust
  1. La Belle Sauvage (2017)

   
  Novels
  The Haunted Storm (1973)
  Galatea (1978)
  Count Karlstein (1982)
  How to Be Cool (1987)
  Spring-heeled Jack (1989)
  The Broken Bridge (1990)
  The White Mercedes (1992)
  The Firework-Maker's Daughter (1995)
  Clockwork (1996)
  The Butterfly Tattoo (1998)
  I Was a Rat! (1999)
  The Scarecrow and His Servant (2004)

   
  Omnibus
  Clockwork / Firework Maker's Daughter (1997)

   
  Collections
  Thirteen More Tales of Horror (1994) (with David Belbin, Colin Greenland, Diane Hoh, Garry Kilworth, Graham Masterton, Stan Nicholls, Susan Price and Chris Westwood)
  Magic Beans (2011) (with Adèle Geras, Michael Morpurgo and Jacqueline Wilson)
  Grimm Tales (2012)
  The Golden Key (2012)
  Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm (2012)

   
  Plays
  Frankenstein (1990)
  Sherlock Holmes and the Limehouse Horror (1992)

   
  Picture Books
  Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp (1993)
  Puss in Boots (2000)

   
  Graphic Novels
  The Adventures of John Blake: The Mystery of the Ghost Ship (2017) (with Fred Fordham)

   
  Chapter Books
  Mossycoat (1998)

   
  Series contributed to
  Myths
  14. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2009)

   
  Anthologies edited
  Detective Stories (1998)
  Whodunit? (2007)

   
  Non fiction
  Using the Oxford Junior Dictionary (1979)
  Ancient Civilizations (1979)
  Meetings with the Minister (2003) (with Bernard Ashley, Anne Fine, Jamila Gavin and Chris Powling)
  Daemon Voices (2017)

   
  Awards

  British Fantasy Society Best Novel nominee (1995) : Northern Lights

  Carnegie Medal Best Book winner (1996) : Northern Lights

  World Fantasy Best Novel nominee (2001) : The Amber Spyglass

• Wikipedia -

  Philip Pullman
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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  Philip Pullman

  Pullman in April 2005
  Born
  19 October 1946 (age 71)
  Norwich, Norfolk, England, UK
  Occupation
  Novelist
  Education
  English
  Alma mater
  Exeter College, Oxford
  Genre
  Fantasy
  Notable works
  His Dark Materials
  The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
  Notable awards
  Carnegie Medal
  1995
  Guardian Prize
  1996
  Astrid Lindgren Award
  2005
  Website
  www.philip-pullman.com
  Philip Pullman CBE, FRSL (born 19 October 1946) is an English novelist. He is the author of several best-selling books, including the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials and the fictionalised biography of Jesus, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. In 2008, The Times named Pullman one of the "50 greatest British writers since 1945".[1] In a 2004 poll for the BBC, Pullman was named the eleventh most influential person in British culture.[2][3]
  The first book of Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, Northern Lights, won the 1995 Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's outstanding English-language children's book.[4] For the 70th anniversary of the Medal it was named one of the top ten winning works by a panel, composing the ballot for a public election of the all-time favourite.[5] It won the public vote from that shortlist and was thus named the all-time "Carnegie of Carnegies" in June 2007. It was adapted as a film under its US title, The Golden Compass.

  Contents  [hide] 
  1
  Life and career
  2
  His Dark Materials
  3
  Public campaigns
  3.1
  Age and gender labelling of books
  3.2
  Civil liberties
  3.3
  Public jury
  3.4
  Library closures
  3.5
  ebook library loans
  3.6
  William Blake’s cottage
  3.7
  Fees for guest authors at book festivals
  4
  Perspective on religion
  5
  Adaptations
  5.1
  Screen adaptations
  5.2
  Other adaptations
  6
  Selected works
  6.1
  His Dark Materials
  6.1.1
  His Dark Materials companion books
  6.1.2
  The Book of Dust trilogy
  6.2
  Sally Lockhart
  6.3
  The New-Cut Gang
  6.4
  Non-series books
  6.5
  Plays
  6.6
  Non-fiction
  6.7
  Comics
  7
  Notes
  8
  References
  9
  Further reading
  10
  External links

  Life and career[edit]

  Philip Pullman's imagined Coat of Arms, "A bird of the raven family with a diamond in her beak. This is the storyteller: storytellers always steal their stories, every story has been told before."[6][7]
  Philip Pullman was born in Norwich, England, the son of Audrey Evelyn Pullman (née Merrifield) and Royal Air Force pilot Alfred Outram Pullman. The family travelled with his father's job, including to Southern Rhodesia, though most of his formative years were spent in Llanbedr in Ardudwy, north Wales.[8]
  His father, an RAF pilot, was killed in a plane crash in 1954 in Kenya when Pullman was seven, being posthumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC). Pullman said at the beginning of a 2008 exchange that to him as a boy, his father "was a hero, steeped in glamour, killed in action defending his country" and had been "training pilots". Pullman was then presented with a report from The London Gazette of 1954 "which carried the official RAF news of the day [and] said that the medal was given for 'gallant and distinguished service' during the Mau Mau uprising. 'The main task of the Harvards [the squadron of planes led by his father] has been bombing and machine-gunning Mau Mau and their hideouts in densely wooded and difficult country.' This included 'diving steeply into the gorges of [various] rivers, often in conditions of low cloud and driving rain.' Testing conditions, yes, but not much opposition from the enemy, the journalist in the exchange continued. Very few of the Mau Mau had guns that could land a blow on an aircraft." Pullman responded to this new information, writing "my father probably doesn't come out of this with very much credit, judged by the standards of modern liberal progressive thought" and accepted the new information as "a serious challenge to his childhood memory."[9] His mother remarried, and with a move to Australia came Pullman's discovery of comic books including Superman and Batman, a medium which he continues to espouse.
  Pullman attended Taverham Hall and Eaton House in his early years,[10] and from 1957 he was educated at Ysgol Ardudwy in Harlech, Gwynedd, and spent time in Norfolk with his grandfather, a clergyman. Around this time Pullman discovered John Milton's Paradise Lost, which would become a major influence for His Dark Materials.[11]
  From 1963, Pullman attended Exeter College, Oxford, receiving a Third class BA in 1968.[12] In an interview with the Oxford Student he stated that he "did not really enjoy the English course" and that "I thought I was doing quite well until I came out with my third class degree and then I realised that I wasn’t — it was the year they stopped giving fourth class degrees otherwise I’d have got one of those".[13] He discovered William Blake's illustrations around 1970, which would also later influence him greatly.
  Pullman married Judith Speller in 1970 and began teaching children aged 9 to 13 at Bishop Kirk Middle School in Summertown, North Oxford and writing school plays. His first published work was The Haunted Storm, which was joint-winner of the New English Library's Young Writer's Award in 1972. He nevertheless refuses to discuss it. Galatea, an adult fantasy-fiction novel, followed in 1978, but it was his school plays which inspired his first children's book, Count Karlstein, in 1982. He stopped teaching shortly after the publication of The Ruby in the Smoke (1986), his second children's book, which has a Victorian setting.
  Pullman taught part-time at Westminster College, Oxford, between 1988 and 1996, continuing to write children's stories. He began His Dark Materials in about 1993. The first book, Northern Lights was published in 1995 (entitled The Golden Compass in the U.S., 1996). Pullman won both the annual Carnegie Medal[4] and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a similar award that authors may not win twice.[14][a]
  Pullman has been writing full-time since 1996. He continues to deliver talks and writes occasionally for The Guardian, including writing and lecturing about education, where he is often critical of unimaginative education policies.[15][16] He was awarded a CBE in the New Year's Honours list in 2004. He also co-judged the Christopher Tower Poetry Prize (awarded by Oxford University) in 2005 with Gillian Clarke. In 2004, he was elected President of the Blake Society.[17] In 2004 Pullman also guest-edited The Mays Anthology, a collection of new writing from students at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
  In 2005 Pullman won the annual Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish Arts Council, recognising his career contribution to "children's and young adult literature in the broadest sense". According to the presentation, "Pullman radically injects new life into fantasy by introducing a variety of alternative worlds and by allowing good and evil to become ambiguous." In every genre, "he combines storytelling and psychological insight of the highest order."[18]
  He was one of five finalists for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2006[19] and he was the British nominee again in 2012.[20]
  In 2008, he started working on The Book of Dust, a companion book to his His Dark Materials trilogy, and "The Adventures of John Blake", a story for the British children's comic The DFC, with artist John Aggs.[21][22][23]
  On 23 November 2007, Pullman was made an honorary professor at Bangor University.[24] In June 2008, he became a Fellow supporting the MA in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University.[25] In September 2008, he hosted "The Writer's Table" for Waterstone's bookshop chain, highlighting 40 books which have influenced his career.[26] In October 2009, he became a patron of the Palestine Festival of Literature. He is also a patron of the Shakespeare Schools Festival, a charity that enables school children across the UK to perform Shakespeare in professional theatres[27]
  On 24 June 2009, Pullman was awarded the degree of D. Litt. (Doctor of Letters), honoris causa, by the University of Oxford at the Encænia ceremony in the Sheldonian Theatre.[28]
  In 2012, during a break from writing The Book Of Dust, a companion book to the Dark Material Trilogy, Pullman was asked by Penguin Classics to curate 50 of Grimms' classic fairytales, from their compendium of over 200 stories. "They are not all of the same quality," said Pullman, "Some are easily much better than others. And some are obvious classics. You can't do a selected Grimms' without Rumpelstiltskin, Cinderella and so on."[29]
  Beginning in August 2013, Pullman was elected President of the Society of Authors - the "ultimate honour" awarded by the British writers body, and a position first held by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.[30]
  The first volume of Pullman’s trilogy The Book of Dust will be published by Penguin Random House Children's and David Fickling in the UK and by Random House Children's in the US on 19 October 2017.[31][32]. The as-yet-unnamed second title in "The Book of Dust" will include a character named after Nur Huda el-Wahabi, a 16-year-old victim of London's tragic Grenfell Tower fire. As part of the charity auction Authors for Grenfell Tower, Pullman offered the highest bidder a chance to name a character in the upcoming trilogy. Ultimately, he raised £32,400 to provide relief for survivors of the Grenfell disaster. [33]
  His Dark Materials[edit]
  Main article: His Dark Materials
  His Dark Materials is a trilogy consisting of Northern Lights (titled The Golden Compass in North America), The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. Northern Lights won the Carnegie Medal for children's fiction in the UK in 1995. The Amber Spyglass was awarded both 2001 Whitbread Prize for best children's book and the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in January 2002, the first children's book to receive that award. The series won popular acclaim in late 2003, taking third place in the BBC's Big Read poll. Pullman later wrote two companion pieces to the trilogy, entitled Lyra's Oxford, and Once Upon a Time in the North. A third companion piece Pullman refers to as the "green book" will expand upon his character Will.
  The Book of Dust was published in October 2017 and is the beginning of a separate trilogy which will include characters and events from His Dark Materials.
  Pullman has narrated unabridged audiobooks of the three main novels in His Dark Materials, the other parts are read by actors, including Jo Wyatt, Steven Webb, Peter England, Stephen Thorne and Douglas Blackwell.
  In a discussion on fantasy as escapism, Pullman admitted he never reads fantasy as "it's not satisfying." He then went on to argue that he sees His Dark Materials as "stark realism", not fantasy.[34]
  Public campaigns[edit]
  Pullman has been a vocal campaigner on a number of book-related and political issues.
  Age and gender labelling of books[edit]
  In 2008, Pullman led a campaign against the introduction of age bands on the covers of children’s books, saying: "It's based on a one-dimensional view of growth, which regards growing older as moving along a line like a monkey climbing a stick: now you're seven, so you read these books; and now you're nine so you read these".[35] More than 1,200 authors, booksellers, illustrators, librarians and teachers joined the campaign; Pullman’s own publisher, Scholastic agreed to his request not to put the age bands on his book covers. Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller, said: "The steps taken by Mr Pullman and other authors have taken the industry by surprise and I think these proposals are now in the balance".[35]
  In 2014, Pullman supported the Let Books Be Books campaign to stop children’s books being labelled as ‘for girls’ or ‘for boys’, saying: "I'm against anything, from age-ranging to pinking and blueing, whose effect is to shut the door in the face of children who might enjoy coming in. No publisher should announce on the cover of any book the sort of readers the book would prefer. Let the readers decide for themselves".[36]
  Civil liberties[edit]
  Pullman has a strong commitment to traditional British civil liberties and is noted for his criticism of growing state authority and government encroachment into everyday life. In February 2009, he was the keynote speaker at the Convention on Modern Liberty in London[37] and wrote an extended piece in The Times condemning the Labour government for its attacks on basic civil rights.[38] Later, he and other authors threatened to stop visiting schools in protest at new laws requiring them to be vetted to work with youngsters—though officials claimed that the laws had been misinterpreted.[39]
  Public jury[edit]
  In July 2011, Pullman was one of the lead campaigners signing a declaration which called for a 1,000-strong "public jury", selected at random, to draw up a "public interest first" test to ensure that power is taken away from "remote interest groups". The declaration was also signed by 56 academics, writers, trade unionists and politicians from the Labour party, the Liberal Democrats and the Green party.[40]
  Library closures[edit]
  In October 2011, Pullman backed a campaign to stop 600 library closures in England calling it a "war against stupidity". Of the London Borough of Brent’s claims that it was closing half of its libraries to fulfil its 'exciting plans’ to improve its library service Pullman said: "All the time, you see, the council had been longing to improve the library service, and the only thing standing in the way was – the libraries”.[41]
  Speaking at a conference organised by The Library Campaign and Voices for the Library he added:
  The book is second only to the wheel as the best piece of technology human beings have ever invented. A book symbolises the whole intellectual history of mankind; it's the greatest weapon ever devised in the war against stupidity. Beware of anyone who tries to make books harder to get at. And that is exactly what these closures are going to do – oh, not intentionally, except in a few cases; very few people are stupid intentionally; but that will be the effect. Books will be harder to get at. Stupidity will gain a little ground.[41]
  ebook library loans[edit]
  In advance of becoming president of the Society of Authors in August 2013, Pullman led a call for authors to be fairly paid for ebook library loans. Under arrangements in force at the time, authors were paid 6p per library loan by the government for physical books, but nothing for ebook loans. In addition, the Society found that publishers had possibly been inadvertently underpaying authors for ebook loans. Altogether, this may have resulted in authors losing up to two-thirds of the income they would have received on the sale and loan of a physical book. Addressing this issue, Pullman said:
  New media and new forms of buying and lending are all very interesting, for all kinds of reasons, but one principle remains unchanged: authors must be paid fairly for their work. Any arrangement that doesn't acknowledge that principle is a bad one, and needs to be changed. That is our whole argument.[42]
  William Blake’s cottage[edit]
  As a long-time enthusiast of William Blake, and president of the Blake Society, Pullman led a campaign in winter 2014 to buy the Sussex cottage where the poet lived between 1800 and 1803, saying:
  Surely it isn’t beyond the resources of a nation that can spend enormous amounts of money on acts of folly and unnecessary warfare, a nation that likes to boast about its literary heritage, to find the money to pay for a proper memorial and a centre for the study of this great poet and artist. Not least because this is the place where he wrote the words now often sung as an alternative (and better) national anthem, the poem known as Jerusalem: "And did those feet in ancient time". Blake’s feet walked in Felpham. Let’s not let this opportunity pass by.[43]
  Fees for guest authors at book festivals[edit]
  In January 2016, Pullman resigned as patron of the Oxford Literary Festival after five years, saying that its continued refusal to pay authors fees for appearing as guest speakers at the event placed him in an "awkward position" because it conflicted with his presidency of the Society of Authors, which campaigns for authors to be paid for appearing at book festivals. He made the announcement on Twitter, saying that he had made lengthy attempts to persuade the Festival to pay authors, "but they won't. Time to go". Reporting Pullman's decision, UK daily newspaper The Independent noted, "The Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society found in 2014 that the average earnings of a professional full-time author is just £11,000".[44]
  Perspective on religion[edit]
  Though Pullman has stated he is "a Church of England atheist, and a 1662 Book of Common Prayer atheist, because that’s the tradition I was brought up in”,[45] he has also said he is technically an agnostic.[46] He has singled out elements of Christianity for criticism: "if there is a God, and he is as the Christians describe him, then he deserves to be put down and rebelled against."[46] However, he said that his argument can extend to all religions.[47][48] Pullman has also referred to himself as knowingly "of the Devil's party", a reference to William Blake's revisionist view of Milton in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.[49] Pullman is a supporter of Humanists UK and an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society. In 2011 he was given a services to Humanism award by the British Humanist Association for his contribution as a longstanding supporter.[50]
  On 15 September 2010, Pullman along with 54 other public figures (including Stephen Fry, Professor Richard Dawkins, Terry Pratchett, Jonathan Miller and Ken Follett) signed an open letter published in The Guardian stating their opposition to Pope Benedict XVI being given "the honour of a state visit" to the UK; the letter argued that the Pope had led and condoned global abuses of human rights, leading a state which has "resisted signing many major human rights treaties and has formed its own treaties ("concordats") with many states which negatively affect the human rights of citizens of those states".[51]
  New Yorker journalist Laura Miller described Pullman as one of England's most outspoken atheists.[45] He has characterised atheist totalitarian regimes as religions.[52]
  Alan Jacobs (of Wheaton College) said that in His Dark Materials Pullman replaced the theist world-view of John Milton's Paradise Lost with a Rousseauist one.[53] The books in the series have been criticised for their attitude to religion, especially Catholicism, by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights[54] and Focus on the Family.[55]
  Writing in the Catholic Herald in 1999, Leonie Caldecott cited Pullman's work as an example of fiction "far more worthy of the bonfire than Harry [Potter]" on the grounds that
  "[by] co-opting Catholic terminology and playing with Judaeo-Christian theological concepts, Pullman is effectively removing, among a mass audience of a highly impressionable age, some of the building blocks for future evangelisation".[56]
  Pullman was "flattered" and asked his publisher to include quotes from Caldecott's article in his next book.[57][58] In 2002, the Catholic Herald published an article by Sarah Johnson that compared Pullman to a "playground bully" whose work "attacks a religious minority".[59] The following year, after Benedict Allen's reference to the criticism during the BBC TV series The Big Read, the Catholic Herald republished both articles and Caldecott claimed her "bonfire" comment was a joke and accused Pullman and his supporters of quoting her out of context.[60][61] In a longer article for Touchstone Magazine earlier in 2003, Caldecott had also described Pullman's work as "axe-grinding" and "a kind of Luciferian enterprise".[62]
  Peter Hitchens argued that Pullman pursues an anti-Christian agenda, citing an interview in which Pullman is quoted as saying: "I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief."[63][64] In the same interview, Pullman acknowledges that a controversy would be likely to boost sales, but continues "I'm not in the business of offending people. I find the books upholding certain values that I think are important, such as life is immensely valuable and this world is an extraordinarily beautiful place. We should do what we can to increase the amount of wisdom in the world."[64] Hitchens also views the His Dark Materials series as a direct rebuttal of C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia;[65] Pullman has criticised the Narnia books as religious propaganda.[66] Hitchens' brother Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, praised His Dark Materials as a fresh alternative to Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and J. K. Rowling, describing the author as one "whose books have begun to dissolve the frontier between adult and juvenile fiction".[57] However, he was more critical of The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, accusing Pullman of being a "Protestant atheist" for supporting the teachings of Christ but being critical of organised religion.[67]
  Pullman has found support from some Christians, most notably Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who argued that Pullman's attacks focus on the constraints and dangers of dogmatism and the use of religion to oppress, not on Christianity itself.[68] Williams recommended His Dark Materials for discussion in Religious Education classes, and said that "to see large school-parties in the audience of the Pullman plays at the National Theatre is vastly encouraging".[69] Pullman and Williams took part in a National Theatre platform debate a few days later to discuss myth, religious experience and its representation in the arts.[70]
  Donna Freitas, professor of religion at Boston University, argued that challenges to traditional images of God should be welcomed as part of a "lively dialogue about faith". The Christian writers Kurt Bruner and Jim Ware "also uncover spiritual themes within the books".[71] Pullman's contribution to the Canongate Myth Series, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, was described by Mike Collett-White as "a far more direct exploration of the foundations of Christianity and the church as well as an examination of the fascination and power of storytelling".[72]
  In 2017 interview with The Times Magazine, Pullman said: "The place religion has in our lives is a permanent one." He concluded that there was 'no point in condemning [religion]', and mused that it is part of the human mind to ask philosophical questions such as the purpose of life. He reiterated that it was useless to 'become censorious about [religion], to say there is no God'. He also mentioned that his novel, The Book of Dust, is based on the 'extreme danger of putting power into the hands of those who believe in some absolute creed, whether that is Christianity or Islam or Marxism'.[73]
  Adaptations[edit]
  Screen adaptations[edit]
  A mini-series adaptation of I Was a Rat was produced by the BBC and aired in three one-hour instalments in 2001.
  A film adaptation of The Butterfly Tattoo[74] finished principal photography on 30 September 2007. The Butterfly Tattoo is a project, supported by Philip Pullman, to allow young artists a chance to gain experience in the film industry. The film is produced by the Dutch production company Dynamic Entertainment.
  A co-produced BBC and WGBH Boston television adaptation of The Ruby in the Smoke, starring Billie Piper and Julie Walters, was screened in the UK on BBC One on 27 December 2006, and broadcast on PBS Masterpiece Theatre in America on 4 February 2007. The television adaptation of the second book in the series, The Shadow in the North, aired on the BBC on 26 December 2007. The BBC and WGBH announced plans to adapt the next two Sally Lockhart novels, The Tiger in the Well and The Tin Princess, for television as well; however, since The Shadow in the North aired in 2007, no information has arisen regarding an adaptation of The Tiger in the Well.
  A film adaptation of Northern Lights, titled The Golden Compass, was released in December 2007 by New Line Cinema, starring Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra, along with Daniel Craig, Nicole Kidman, Eva Green, Sam Elliott and Ian McKellen.
  Other adaptations[edit]
  London's Royal National Theatre staged a two-part theatrical version of His Dark Materials in December 2003. The same adaptation since been staged by several other theatres in the UK and elsewhere.
  His Dark Materials has also been adapted for radio, CD and unabridged audiobook; the unabridged audiobooks were narrated by the author.
  Selected works[edit]
  His Dark Materials[edit]
  1995 Northern Lights; US title, The Golden Compass
  1997 The Subtle Knife
  2000 The Amber Spyglass
  His Dark Materials companion books[edit]
  2003 Lyra's Oxford
  2008 Once Upon a Time in the North
  2014 The Collectors (audiobook only)
  The Book of Dust trilogy[edit]
  2017 La Belle Sauvage
  The Secret Commonwealth [75][76] Publication date not yet announced
  Sally Lockhart[edit]
  1985 The Ruby in the Smoke
  1986 The Shadow in the North (first published as The Shadow in the Plate)
  1990 The Tiger in the Well
  1994 The Tin Princess
  The New-Cut Gang[edit]
  1994 Thunderbolt's Waxwork
  1995 The Gasfitter's Ball
  Non-series books[edit]
  1972 The Haunted Storm
  1976 Galatea
  1982 Count Karlstein
  1987 How to be Cool
  1989 Spring-Heeled Jack
  1990 The Broken Bridge
  1992 The White Mercedes
  1993 The Wonderful Story of Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp
  1995 Clockwork, or, All Wound Up
  1995 The Firework-Maker's Daughter
  1998 Mossycoat
  1998 The Butterfly Tattoo (re-issue of The White Mercedes)
  1999 I was a Rat! or The Scarlet Slippers
  2000 Puss in Boots: The Adventures of That Most Enterprising Feline
  2004 The Scarecrow and his Servant
  2010 The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (part of the Canongate Myth series)
  2012 Fairy Tales From The Brothers Grimm
  Plays[edit]
  1990 Frankenstein
  1992 Sherlock Holmes and the Limehouse Horror
  Non-fiction[edit]
  1978 Ancient Civilizations
  1978 Using the Oxford Junior Dictionary
  2012 The Fall of the House of Murdoch
  Comics[edit]
  2008 The Adventures of John Blake in The DFC

• Amazon -

  PHILIP PULLMAN is one of the most acclaimed writers working today. He is best known for the His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass), which has been named one of the top 100 novels of all time by Newsweek and one of the all-time greatest novels by Entertainment Weekly. He has also won many distinguished prizes, including the Carnegie Medal for The Golden Compass (and the reader-voted "Carnegie of Carnegies" for the best children's book of the past seventy years); the Whitbread (now Costa) Award for The Amber Spyglass; a Booker Prize long-list nomination (The Amber Spyglass); Parents' Choice Gold Awards (The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass); and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, in honor of his body of work. In 2004, he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

  It has recently been announced that The Book of Dust, the much anticipated new book from Mr. Pullman, also set in the world of His Dark Materials, will be published as a major work in three parts, with the first part to arrive in October 2017.

  Philip Pullman is the author of many other much-lauded novels. Other volumes related to His Dark Materials: Lyra’s Oxford, Once Upon a Time in the North, and The Collectors. For younger readers: I Was a Rat!; Count Karlstein; Two Crafty Criminals; Spring-Heeled Jack, and The Scarecrow and His Servant. For older readers: the Sally Lockhart quartet: The Ruby in the Smoke, The Shadow in the North, The Tiger in the Well, and The Tin Princess; The White Mercedes; and The Broken Bridge.

  Philip Pullman lives in Oxford, England. To learn more, please visit philip-pullman.com and hisdarkmaterials.com. Or follow him on Twitter at @PhilipPullman

• Time - http://time.com/4985408/philip-pullman-book-of-dust-interview/

  Philip Pullman on His New Trilogy, His Influences and the Upcoming His Dark Materials TV Show

  By Dan Stewart October 18, 2017
  The article contains minor spoilers on the plot of La Belle Sauvage.
  It’s been over twenty years since Philip Pullman introduced readers to the universe of His Dark Materials, and now he’s back with the first in a new trilogy entitled The Book of Dust.
  At the end of the last book in the first trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, Pullman’s young heroes Lyra and Will have witnessed the death of the heavenly “Authority,” unwittingly staged the second fall of Man and cut a hole in the fabric of the underworld to free untold hordes of the dead to become one with the universe. How do you top that?
  The answer is, you don’t. Instead, in La Belle Sauvage, Pullman has shrunk the canvas to present readers with a book that, despite being set over a decade before His Dark Materials, is less a prequel than a companion volume. In it, we meet Malcolm, a curious and lively inkeeper’s son who loves nothing more than boating up and down Oxford’s canals in the vessel that gives this first volume its name. He soon crosses paths with the infant Lyra, and is thrown into an adventure which takes its cues both from Boy’s Own tales of suspense and intrigue, and the fairies and spirits of English folklore.

  In a conversation with TIME at his home in Cumnor, Oxfordshire in August, Pullman explained why he’d returned to the universe of His Dark Materials, gave some insight into the characters and themes of the new novel, and dropped some hints about what readers can expect from the second volume in the series, to be entitled The Secret Commonwealth.
  TIME: You’ve been talking about the possibility of writing a follow-up to His Dark Materials for over a decade. Why now?
  Philip Pullman: I felt there were more stories to tell. I felt that having established a position vis-a-vis organized religion, I was now free to look at other things that were of interest to me. I wanted to know more about Lyra, I wanted to know about other characters I’d seen peripherally, in the distance, and grew to like.
  If His Dark Materials was about how innocence turns to experience, what is the theme of this trilogy?
  I don’t write books to illustrate a theme but I sometimes find a theme developing as I write them. In this one, it’s the importance of imaginative vision, in William Blake’s terms. The dangers of what he called “single vision” — a narrow, dogmatic point of view that excludes every other angle of vision but what it deems to be true. You see that not just in dogmatic politics and religion, you see it in science, in all kinds of fields. It’s always destructive and it’s always restrictive and it’s always unhelpful. And in this trilogy, that sort of area is going to be what I’m exploring.

  But the meaning of a book is never just what the author thinks it is. It’s a great mistake to rely on the author to tell you what the meaning is. We don’t know. The meaning is only what emerges when the book and the reader meet.
  The journey from innocence to experience is still at the heart of this book though, with Malcolm’s journey?
  Yes, but in a different way. The relationship you have with a six-month-old baby is not a romantic one, but a protective one. And Malcolm is in that relationship with Lyra. He’s immensely seized by the idea of this baby. He’s an only child, he has never even seen a baby before. And he is put in the position of having to protect her. It’s a position of great moral responsibility, a great moral weight. And he’s capable of bearing it.

  Is there an element of autobiography in the writing of Malcolm?
  I’d like to think so. I’m not sure I’d be as brave as he is. I suppose Malcolm is to a certain extent the boy I was. But then, Lyra is the girl I was. They’re both equally made up characters. I knew Malcolms and I knew Lyras when I was teaching. But yes, there’s an element of me in both of them. I loved writing about Malcolm and Alice, who I became very fond of.
  Alice, the temperamental teenager who accompanies Malcolm on his quest, seems quite similar to the Lyra of the earlier books.
  Well, we’ll find out more in the second book about her connection with Lyra, which might be a bit of a surprise. As soon as I thought of Alice, I could see how that was going to develop. Some characters arrive at your desk with either an atmosphere about them, or a sense that there is more to them … an already developed hinterland or where they’re going. Mrs Coulter, for example. As soon as I thought of her I thought, yes there she is. Alice was the same.

  Did the character of Malcolm spring fully formed too?
  Yes. I saw him with his canoe, and he just looked up. I used to be a teacher, for about 12 years, and I was teaching children of his age and Lyra’s age as she was in His Dark Materials and I knew lots of children like that. Immensely interesting, immensely likable and immensely unpredictable. A curious mixture at that age of complete innocence and the beginnings of intellectual maturity and discovery. It’s an extraordinary age.
  This novel is set entirely in England, and mostly in Oxfordshire. What is it about Oxford that keeps bringing you back?
  It’s a very rich place to write about. There are all kinds of things to write about. There are so many Oxfords and so many atmospheres. You could never get tired of it. Besides, it’s just down the road. I don’t have to go to Heathrow and get on a plane and deal with passports in order to research it.

  Do you need to travel a lot to research the places you go to in your novels, like the Arctic?
  No, because I make my world up. What I don’t know, I’ll find out in some way or another. And what I can’t find out, I’ll make up. The function of research for a novelist is simply to give you enough stuff so that you can make up something that you need. My test for it is, if I were reading this, would I think it’s genuine? If it looks alright to me, as an average reader, who has read a bit about the subject, I reckon that’ll do.
  What about interviews?
  No, because people don’t tell me things. It’s not in my nature. I can spend time with someone most agreeably, but they would never tell me anything important about themselves. I haven’t got that receptive, engaging, welcoming air about me. It’s a great gift, but not something that could be faked. I could have made myself interested in people … but it’s a question of whether people feel at ease about you or not, and I don’t have that capacity.

  Evidently, that hasn’t impeded your creative spark.
  Perhaps it encourages it.
  In the new book, you delve into what life is like under the Magisterium, the “theocracy” that rules Britain. I wonder if there were parallels to what you see in the world today that were of particular influence?
  Yes, of course. We see in the Middle East and in isolated pockets of western Europe the enormous enthusiasm which that point of view is accepted. Especially by young men who love the idea of an absolute answer to everything, for which they’re willing to die, and to kill. That’s the absolute final pitch of single vision. What the prophet says is what is true, and everything else is false. That cast of mind has not very often acquired political power, but when it does it’s absolutely murderous.

  In many ways it seems as much like Soviet Russia, as historical theocracies like the Spanish Inquisition.
  Well, Soviet Russia was, in all respects except one, a theocracy. When I was accused of promoting atheism and doing down the church and so on, I used to make this point. The Soviet regime had a holy book, by Marx. It had a priesthood, the Communist Party. It had even holy relics, the corpses of Lenin and Stalin in Red Square. It had a whole system of secret denunciation, just as they did in Venice under the Spanish Inquisition. And this is very important: they had a teleological world view. The church was doing all this because it was helping re-establish Christ’s rule. In Soviet Russia, they were working towards the dictatorship of the proletariat. The parallels are extraordinary and multiple. It was in effect a theocracy. The fact they were atheist made no difference at all. So, my antipathy to organized religion is an antipathy to theocracy and an antipathy to people who think they have the answer getting their hands on the levers of power.

  The book changes direction in the second half, as a huge and mysterious flood rises. What inspired that?
  Well, the flood is a kind of metaphor of course. Floods are things that carry you away. Floods are also things that uncover and bring to the surface things that have been hidden, and so on. So all those things are involved. But one of the origins of this story, I’m certain, was from my childhood in Australia. In 1956, the River Murray flooded in Victoria and also South Australia. We were living in Adelaide, as my stepfather was in the RAF. This flood came along, and I remember driving out to somewhere in the country from where we could see the flood. It was astonishing. It was a mass, immense, as wide as the sea, of grey water, whipped up by a cold wind, flowing inexorably from there to there. The power of it. It was an impression that never left me. And I always wanted to write about a flood. So I made my own flood here in Oxfordshire. And of course it’s a metaphor. It’s more than a flood. It’s a sweeping away of all sorts of things.

  Up to that point the novel has been quite realistic, but the flood brings us into the fantasy world that one of the Gyptians in the novel calls “The Secret Commonwealth.” What is that?
  Robert Kirk wrote this book in the 1680s, it’s his term for the world of fairies, gnomes, sprites … the world of spirits basically. Which, for him, as a clergyman was very real. He was also writing from the point of view of a culture in Scotland and in Ireland where the spirit world is very real. I’m fascinated by that world, which is the complete opposite of the world that science tells us about. This is not in any sense an anti-science thing, but in William Blake’s terms I’m a proponent of two-fold, three-fold and four-fold vision and not single vision.

  Some writers about science use sentences like x equals nothing but y. Love is nothing more than the excitation of neurons in the brain, something like that. I would much rather say, love is the excitation of neurons in the brain, among other things. And I think that would be Blake’s attitude as well. That it can be all of those things. And that we’re not truly seeing it unless we see all of those things. That’s a lesson which Lyra and Malcolm will have to learn.
  The first book of the original trilogy told a complete story, somewhat. At the end of this book, there are many things left unresolved and explained.
  That was a different kind of book, with a more straightforward story. Lyra has lost something, [her friend] Roger has disappeared, she’s determined to find him. This is a different kind of mystery, a different kind of story. Various things are set in train in this book which will develop in the next one and the third.

  If things are unexplained, it’s because I haven’t explained them to myself. There are things that it would be impolite to enquire into. For example, people have occasionally asked me how daemons are born. I’ve never sought to go into the gynecology of daemons and I think it would be rather impolite. People can imagine that for themselves.
  What can you tell us about the rest of the trilogy?
  In the next book, which is going to be called The Secret Commonwealth, we are fully in the realms of experience. It will be 20 years later, Lyra is going to be an undergraduate and her own woman. And completely unlike in this one, and completely unlike the Lyra of His Dark Materials, she’s going to have the beginnings of an adult’s preoccupations. There will be a lot of trouble.

  The earlier trilogy was released at a time when social conservatism was in the ascendance, which I think feeds into the absolutism that you’re talking about. Do you feel like that has changed now in the U.S.?
  What we were seeing then was the influence of the evangelical Republicanism on the Republican Party in particular. They sold their soul to this side of influence and effectively could do nothing to prevent Donald Trump when he came along. Because he seemed to be saying the things they wanted to hear, about cutting taxes and preventing immigration and all these things… but they didn’t see what an unguided missile he was going to be.
  Back then, you were accused of peddling “atheism for kids.” Do you expect more controversy from this book?

  No, this is a different kind of book.
  Do you still receive letters from people telling you you’re going to hell?
  No … yet I haven’t gone away. Clearly, no evident evil has sprouted from [the books’] presence in the world for 20 years. There’s nothing they can point to and say this man ought to be burned at the stake.
  It feels like that religious absolutism has, to some extent, filtered into politics.
  Yes, you can see it in Brexit. Once we throw off the chains of Europe, we can pay 350 million pounds a week to the National Health Service! Absolute bullsh-t of course. But they can say it, because they know the answer. Or because they pretend to know the answer.

  Do you think the storyteller has a responsibility to reflect that in their writing?
  It’s something I’ve thought quite a lot about. We are citizens too. So we have an obligation to do as citizens should do, which is to be honest where we can. To denounce tyranny and lies where we can. We have those responsibilities which are borne by everyone. So yeah, we do have that sort of responsibility. We have other responsibilities as well, of providing for the family. Of looking after the language — which is our tool, our medium. Our overriding responsibility is our responsibility to the story.
  Is there also a responsibility to breed curiosity? It feels like an absence of curiosity is what makes you susceptible to demagoguery.

  Absolutely. Curiosity is a virtue. The traditional Christian virtues of temperance, justice, fortitude, I agree with all of them. I’ve nothing to disagree with on Christian virtues except one, which is faith. I would rather substitute curiosity. Intellectual curiosity is one of the strongest virtues we have.
  His Dark Materials is going to be a television show, on the BBC. You seem to have a mixed track record when it comes to adaptations.
  I’ve been through all sorts of adaptations, some of them more successful than others. It’s been a radio play. It’s been a theatrical play, at the National Theater. It’s been a Hollywood movie. It’s had all kinds of embodiments.
  The thing about a movie is that you’ve got to distill 12-13 hours of story into 120 minutes, and of course you can’t do it because you have to leave things out. Even a very faithful adaptation like Lord of the Rings left an enormous lot out, because you have to. The great advantage of the new world of long form television is that you can put much more in. So you can allow the time for a story to develop. So I’m hoping that will be the case for this adaptation.

  Are you hoping for something along the lines of Game of Thrones?
  I haven’t watched it. Not really my sort of thing. I don’t watch or read very much fantasy. I never really have. I read Lord of the Rings when I was an undergraduate, but I was very callow and easily impressed. Far less impressed by it now.
  Martin famously struggles with finishing his work. Was the process of writing this burdensome? I know you declined to cut your hair until you were finished…
  It was superstition. I made a stupid promise to myself, or a bargain with the muse or something. If I don’t cut my hair, this book will be all right won’t it? So I grew my ponytail which I still have in a drawer somewhere, in a Ziploc bag. I’m going to give it to the Bodleian Library. That was my personal superstition. I don’t know if it makes a difference or not.
  This transcript has been edited for length and clarity

• Catholic Herald - http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/issues/november-3rd-2017/peter-hitchens-whats-happened-to-philip-pullman/

  Peter Hitchens: What’s happened to Philip Pullman?
  by Peter Hitchens
  posted Thursday, 2 Nov 2017

  Pullman was once Britain’s most dangerous author (Getty)
  Philip Pullman used to be more of a cause than an author. But he has lost his way
  Some years ago I said that Philip Pullman was the most dangerous author in Britain. He pasted the cutting on his study wall and boasted publicly that he would see that the words were printed on the covers of future editions of his books. They never were, perhaps because his publishers thought that such an endorsement might repel the various aunties, godparents and grandparents who sustain so much of the Christmas and birthday present part of the book market. In any case, I now formally withdraw the title I once bestowed. If his latest book is anything to go by, Mr Pullman is no longer dangerous at all.
  I was kinder than I wanted to be to his Dark Materials trilogy when I first read it. The opening book, set beguilingly in an Oxford like and unlike the one I know and live in, had a certain imaginative power, and so did its successor. But the third seemed to me to have much more propaganda than joy in it. I could not imagine any normal child reading it with pleasure, though I could easily imagine an atheistical north Oxford parent pressing it on his progeny with hope in his heart.
  And here was the problem. Mr Pullman had become a cause more than an author. Everyone praised him. The National Theatre dramatised his trilogy. His first book was adapted into a film (which was not a great success). Mr Pullman’s anti-Christian position, rather than his work, became the issue. It was notable, and remains so, that the praise and worship are concentrated on his most explicitly anti-God writing, and tend to ignore his many other books. Yet there is also a paradoxical hesitation to acknowledge just what a missionary he is, while going on about his supposed genius.
  On page one of Section “C” of the Washington Post, on February 19, 2001, Mr Pullman was quoted by his interviewer, Alona Wartofsky, as having said: “I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief.” Yet I have seen British writers shy away from admitting this, by saying that Mr Pullman (who has never denied the statement nor pulled back from it) only “reportedly” said this. No, he said it beyond doubt and no reader of his work should be unaware of it.
  Recently, he has taken to attacking other children’s authors for their nostalgia. Well, Mr Pullman is not himself free of nostalgia. His child characters talk remarkably like Richmal Crompton’s “Just William” Brown, a creature of the 1930s, and his hero, Malcolm, lives in a pub whose menu is itself a wallow in a stodgier, more comforting past, with parents whose attitudes towards child-rearing are those of my childhood and Mr Pullman’s, a mixture of kindly authority and freedom.
  I genuinely cannot work out what sort of country Britain has become in his parallel universe. It is free and not free, modern and not modern, by turns. It has helicopters but apparently no telephones. There is a deadly secret service run by the wicked church, but it seems astonishingly inefficient. There is also a fanatical Christian youth league, named after a St Alexander unknown to me, which encourages schoolboys to spy on and denounce dissenters.
  This sounds remarkably like the Soviet cult of Pavlik Morozov, canonised by the Soviet authorities for denouncing his own parents to the police, and then being murdered by his angry grandfather. The story (based on a lie) has always struck me as the single most un-Christian feature of the whole Stalinist horror, with its blatant attack on the commandment to honour thy father and thy mother.
  But Mr Pullman has otherwise softened a little towards the Christian faith, as his latest story, La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust Volume One, contains several perfectly pleasant and even rather admirable nuns (though there are some nasty nuns elsewhere, to make up for this).
  Ah, the story. It’s meant to be exciting, with chases, floods and rescues. I found it slow-moving and didactic, often defying the good rule that the author should show rather than tell. I have also never fully understood how Mr Pullman combines his loathing for the Christian story with his love of the supernatural. There are, for example, a wicked fairy and a river god in this book.
  He has made a special, laborious effort to equip all his characters with his famous “daemons”, talking animals which shift their shapes during childhood but embody their adult characters, who follow them closely around like imaginary friends, and have conversations with them. I have two problems with this. If such things existed, wouldn’t a belief in a divine purpose be almost impossible to avoid? And surely, once you’ve equipped a character with a “daemon” that is a three-legged hyena which likes urinating aggressively in public, you’ve removed any ambivalence about his character.
  Somewhere in the midst of his great flood, Mr Pullman has lost his way.
  Peter Hitchens is a columnist for The Mail on Sunday

• Philip Pullman Website - http://www.philip-pullman.com/

  I was born in Norwich in 1946, and educated in England, Zimbabwe, and Australia, before my family settled in North Wales. I received my secondary education at the excellent Ysgol Ardudwy, Harlech, and then went to Exeter College, Oxford, to read English, though I never learned to read it very well.
  I found my way into the teaching profession at the age of 25, and taught at various Oxford Middle Schools before moving to Westminster College in 1986, where I spent eight years involved in teaching students on the B.Ed. course. I have maintained a passionate interest in education, which leads me occasionally to make foolish and ill-considered remarks alleging that not everything is well in our schools. My main concern is that an over-emphasis on testing and league tables has led to a lack of time and freedom for a true, imaginative and humane engagement with literature.
  My views on education are eccentric and unimportant, however. My only real claim to anyone's attention lies in my writing. I've published nearly twenty books, mostly of the sort that are read by children, though I'm happy to say that the natural audience for my work seems to be a mixed one - mixed in age, that is, though the more mixed in every other way as well, the better.
  My first children's book was Count Karlstein (1982, republished in 2002). That was followed by The Ruby in the Smoke (1986), the first in a quartet of books featuring the young Victorian adventurer, Sally Lockhart. I did a great deal of research for the background of these stories, and I don?t intend to let it lie unused, so there will almost certainly be more of them.
  I've also written a number of shorter stories which, for want of a better term, I call fairy tales. They include The Firework-Maker's Daughter, I Was a Rat!, and Clockwork, or All Wound Up. This is a kind of story I find very enjoyable, though immensely difficult to write.
  However, my most well-known work is the trilogy His Dark Materials, beginning with Northern Lights (The Golden Compass in the USA) in 1995, continuing with The Subtle Knife in 1997, and concluding with The Amber Spyglass in 2000. These books have been honoured by several prizes, including the Carnegie Medal, the Guardian Children's Book Award, and (for The Amber Spyglass) the Whitbread Book of the Year Award the first time in the history of that prize that it was given to a children's book.
  I was the 2002 recipient of the Eleanor Farjeon Award for children's literature. At the award ceremony for that prize, which I was very proud to receive, I promised to spend my time in future making fewer speeches and writing more books.
  Well, that was an easy promise to make, and an easy one to break as well. The trouble is that people keep asking me to stand up and speak about one thing or another, and I keep finding things to be interested in and talk about. I suppose I shall have to put up with it, and so will my audiences.
  I have been very lucky with prizes. Northern Lights won the Carnegie Medal in 1996, and ten years later it was awarded the Carnegie of Carnegies, chosen by readers from all the books that have won this medal in the 70 years since it was first awarded. In 2001 The Amber Spyglass became the first children's book to win the overall Whitbread Award (now known as the Costa Award). The Whitbread could, and should, have gone to a children's book long before, but someone had to be first, and I was the lucky one.
  In 2005 I was surprised and delighted to win the Astrid Lindgren Award, or rather to share it with the Japanese illustrator Ryoji Arai. This is a wonderful international honour given by the Swedish government to writers, or illustrators, or others connected with bringing books to children. It?s very generous of Sweden to do that, but Astrid Lindgren was a great woman, and they are proud of what she achieved and glad to commemorate her with the award given in her name.

Open unto the fields, and to the sky; Philip Pullman's new novel

425.9063 (Oct. 21, 2017): p80(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
Not Binsey but Godstow (perhaps)
A Spenserian trip down the River Thames
IN HIS famous trilogy, "His Dark Materials", Philip Pullman created a detailed fantasy universe every bit as compelling as J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth or C.S. Lewis's Narnia. Mr Pullman's world is much closer to the real one than the other two. London and Oxford (the author's home) feature prominently, as do other European places, albeit with some political tweaks. The two pre-eminent distinguishing features are an all-powerful, malevolent Church centred in Geneva, and daemons: a sort of external soul that all humans have and which takes the form of different animals depending on the person's character.
Mr Pullman returns to that world in "La Belle Sauvage", the first in a trilogy called "The Book of Dust", which he has resisted calling a sequel. It takes place just over a decade before "His Dark Materials" begins. Lyra, one hero, has just been born, and spirited away for her safety to a nunnery in Godstow. At the risk of drawing too downmarket a comparison, "La Belle Sauvage" functions a little like "Rogue One" does for the Star Wars universe: less a narrative ploughing ahead than a bit of retroactive plot-filling.
Malcolm, a second character, is another of the author's young, thoughtful artful dodgers, whom Mr Pullman has managed to make decent, dutiful and interesting--not easy for a novelist. His parents run the Trout, a pub in Godstow (among the book's pleasures for Oxonians is seeing which real Oxford landmarks made it into this new world).
The plot largely comprises a journey down the river in which Malcolm and his companions face one test after another. Mr Pullman owes (and acknowledges) a debt to "The Faerie Queene" by Edmund Spenser, though "La Belle Sauvage" may also put readers in mind of "The Buried Giant", Kazuo Ishiguro's recent novel set in an almost-England populated by mythical beasts as well as humans.
Integral to this series, as to the previous one, is Dust--an elementary particle extant in multiple universes that is both conscious and attracted to consciousness--and the Church's fear and hatred of Dust, and indeed of anything it cannot control. Mr Pullman's anticlericalism is not smug or contemptuous; among his heroes is a group of nuns, expressing their faith through love, charity and care. Rather, Mr Pullman seems to believe, as Shakespeare once wrote, that there are more things in heaven and earth than any single philosophy can dream of.
La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust Volume One.
By Philip Pullman.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"Open unto the fields, and to the sky; Philip Pullman's new novel." The Economist, 21 Oct. 2017, p. 80(US). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA510366250&it=r&asid=c14476424b9942da8eddb4b38e24bc80. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A510366250

The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship

Patrick Gall
93.4 (July-August 2017): p140.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Horn Book, Inc.. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Sources, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.hbook.com/magazine/default.asp
The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship
by Philip Pullman; illus. by Fred Fordham
Middle School Fickling/Graphix/Scholastic 160 pp. g
5/17 978-1-338-14912-8 $19.99 e-book ed. 978-1-338-16659-0 $19.99
Pullman's first original graphic novel is a smorgasbord thriller containing a little bit of everything--including espionage, time travel, bloodthirsty pirates, high-tech gadgets, and substantial explosions. Several intersecting story lines and a large cast of characters swirl around the mysterious teenager John Blake and his time-hopping ship the Mary Alice. Multiple tangential players--a determined maritime agent, a formidable British spy, and an evil billionaire inventor--all with their own agendas, work with and against one another as they pursue John and the Mary Alice. A narrative of corporate greed, murder, and collusion quickly develops after John and his crew rescue the shipwrecked Serena, a modern-day teenager traveling the seas with her family, and attempt to get her back to the present day. Cinematic illustrations, along with a strong sense of atmosphere and liberal deployment of panels per page, carry much of the storytelling. A few exceptional visual moments--a jarringly vertical panel of Serena sinking into the depths of the ocean and a nearly all-white double-page spread depicting John's first time-travel experience--are a relief from the persistent mannequin-esque appearance of the characters. While many pieces of the story have a tendency to fall into place too easily, readers searching for a rollicking adventure comic will be thoroughly satisfied. PATRICK GALL

Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Gall, Patrick. "The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship." The Horn Book Magazine, July-Aug. 2017, p. 140+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA500260379&it=r&asid=16763ba26fc18b334b4b2f6120f49812. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A500260379

The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship

Jesse Karp
113.16 (Apr. 15, 2017): p38.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
* The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship. By Philip Pullman. Illus. by Fred Fordham. May 2017. 160p. Scholastic/Graphix, $19.99 (9781338149128); e-book, $12.99 (9781338166590). 741.5. Gr. 6-10.
Like Pullman's indelible Lyra, Christina Henderson is a girl who finds herself yanked out of her accustomed world. Rescued from drowning by the time-traveling ghost ship, Mary Alice, she makes the acquaintance of young John Blake, swept up by the currents of time when he was an unintentional participant in a secret, ocean-based experiment conducted by none other than Albert Einstein. The ship is pursued in the present by a British secret agent, a female maritime expert, and the CEO of the sinister Dahlberg Corporation, all of whom have meaningful connections to the ship. With obvious affection for Tin-tin, Pullman threads this complicated skein of plot with customary measures of awe and menace, and for an esteemed man of letters on his first expedition into the graphic novel format, he proves an expert visual storyteller. Fordham animates with characters who have the detail and agility of a Studio Ghibli cast. He shows particular flair for silent passages, evidencing as much gusto in nimble fight scenes and breathless chase sequences as in a meaningful glare and capturing the vastness of the sea as it swallows a young girl. Those eager for the release of Pullman's new His Dark Materials book this fall will be delighted to bide their time with this.--Jesse Karp

HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Anything new from Pullman is big news, and his first original graphic novel won't disappoint.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Karp, Jesse. "The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2017, p. 38. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA492536193&it=r&asid=dcd84f220379a3a99dfc232663a09b0b. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A492536193

Pullman, Philip: THE ADVENTURES OF JOHN BLAKE

(Mar. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Pullman, Philip THE ADVENTURES OF JOHN BLAKE Graphix/Scholastic (Children's Fiction) $19.99 5, 30 ISBN: 978-1-338-14912-8
Purloined technology, time travelers, ghost ships, and deception converge in this graphic page-turner. In a world not too unlike our own, most everyone is connected by Apparators, smartphonelike devices that can also project images, created by technology mogul Carlos Dahlberg. A member of the crew on the ghost ship Mary Alice, white time traveler John Blake is doomed to ride in and out of different time periods after an accident suffered during an experiment conducted by his scientist father. Young Blake knows Dahlberg's darkest secret and has the evidence and desire to expose him. Serena Anderson, a white Australian teenager lost at sea, Danielle Quayle Reid, a black Harvard Law graduate, and Roger Blake, a white commander in the Royal Navy, all become caught up in Dahlberg and Blake's tangled web. High-adrenaline chases, blazing explosions, and gunfights abound as they come to discover their shocking connections. Will they be able to stop Dahlberg before his nefarious plans come to fruition? Pullman has created an intricate blend of science fiction and adventure, skillfully weaving together many disparate elements into a cohesive and exciting tale. Fordham's art, although realistic and spare, is cinematic in scope, imbuing this with all the momentum of a Hollywood blockbuster. Some of the finer plot details have a tendency to be quickly glossed over, but expect readers to be too caught up in this whirlwind ride to care. A richly imagined high-octane thriller. (Science fiction/adventure. 13-adult)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"Pullman, Philip: THE ADVENTURES OF JOHN BLAKE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485105299&it=r&asid=0eb46edc2a172f85599e58ecf9bf5f3e. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A485105299

The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship

264.11 (Mar. 13, 2017): p87.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship
Philip Pullman, Illus. by Fred Fordham. Graphix/Fickling, $19.99 (160p) ISBN 978-1338-14912-8
Washed overboard when a storm hits her family's sailboat, young Serena Henderson is saved by John Blake, a mysterious teenager aboard a time-traveling ghost ship called the Mary Alice. Elsewhere, investigator Danielle Quayle and British navy commander Roger Blake seek to learn more about John and the strange timepiece he carries; a tech billionaire, Carlos Dahlberg, is also after John--with darker intentions. Once John reveals to Serena the secret that he knows will bring the billionaire down, the story shifts into high gear. Outside of some well-timed assistance from Serena, it's the men who get to have most of the fun in action scenes ranging from hand-to-hand combat to the dramatic disarming of a giant missile. The graphic novel format lets Pullman's (the His Dark Materials series) dialogue shine, and Fordham's lucid panels are strong, legible, and charged with energy. Originally published serially by the Phoenix in the U.K., the adventure reads like a tautly paced film script. While the story isn't as wildly imaginative as some of Pullman's previous work, it will undoubtedly hold readers' attention. Ages 8-12. (May)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship." Publishers Weekly, 13 Mar. 2017, p. 87. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485971741&it=r&asid=97f58b1c49d880913977578ab6ebab9c. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A485971741

Pullman, Philip. Mystery of the Ghost Ship

Matisse Mozer
63.5 (May 2017): p109.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
PULLMAN, Philip. Mystery of the Ghost Ship, illus. by Fred Fordham. 160p. (The Adventures of John Black). Scholastic/Graphix. Jun. 2017. Tr $19.99. ISBN 9781338149128.
Gr 8 Up--When Harvard student Danielle succeeds in tracking the legendary Mary Alice, a pirate ship that disappears and reappears across time, she becomes drawn into a conspiracy headed by the menacing Dahlberg Corporation. The Dahlbergs are after the secrets of the Mary Alice, and only Royal Navy agent Roger Blake opposes them. Drawn into this web of intrigue is Serena, an Australian teenager who is swept off her parents' yacht and rescued by the Mary Alice crew. Serena learns of the mysterious vessel's ability to travel across time as well as the nature of its ragtag crew. While Roger Blake and Danielle race to find the ship before the Dahlbergs can, Serena unravels the true mystery aboard the Mary Alice: a teenage boy named John Blake. This is Pullman's first original graphic novel, and fans of "His Dark Materials" will recognize such plot elements as the use of futuristic gadgets and the role of father figures. Fordham's paneling and artwork initially read like storyboards, with a static appearance that relaxes as the fairly complex narrative progresses. The various plot threads coalesce into a powerful tale, with the artwork creating a soaring, cinematic feel. VERDICT A modern seafaring epic, highly recommended for all Pullman and fantasy fans and more than worthy of its author's oeuvre.--Matisse Mozer, Los Angeles Public Library
KEY: * Excellent in relation to other titles on the same subject or in the same genre | Tr Hardcover trade binding | lib. ed. Publisher's library binding | Board Board book | pap. Paperback | e eBook original | BL Bilingual | POP Popular Picks
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Mozer, Matisse. "Pullman, Philip. Mystery of the Ghost Ship." School Library Journal, May 2017, p. 109. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491032188&it=r&asid=571e719a11f32425c3a91766025de5c0. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A491032188

"Open unto the fields, and to the sky; Philip Pullman's new novel." The Economist, 21 Oct. 2017, p. 80(US). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA510366250&asid=c14476424b9942da8eddb4b38e24bc80. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017. Gall, Patrick. "The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship." The Horn Book Magazine, July-Aug. 2017, p. 140+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA500260379&asid=16763ba26fc18b334b4b2f6120f49812. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017. Karp, Jesse. "The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2017, p. 38. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA492536193&asid=dcd84f220379a3a99dfc232663a09b0b. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017. "Pullman, Philip: THE ADVENTURES OF JOHN BLAKE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA485105299&asid=0eb46edc2a172f85599e58ecf9bf5f3e. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017. "The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship." Publishers Weekly, 13 Mar. 2017, p. 87. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA485971741&asid=97f58b1c49d880913977578ab6ebab9c. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017. Mozer, Matisse. "Pullman, Philip. Mystery of the Ghost Ship." School Library Journal, May 2017, p. 109. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA491032188&asid=571e719a11f32425c3a91766025de5c0. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.

• New Republic
  https://newrepublic.com/article/145552/philip-pullmans-war-fanatics
  Word count: 1473

  Philip Pullman’s War Against the Fanatics
  "La Belle Sauvage" expands on the themes first explored in the beloved "His Dark Materials."
  By Sarah Jones
  October 30, 2017
  God is dead—and Philip Pullman killed him. So claimed Protestants and Catholics alike when Pullman completed his beloved fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials, in 2000, and again when New Line Cinema released the film adaptation of the trilogy’s first volume, The Golden Compass, in 2007. “Pullman’s unholy fantasy ensnared me and nearly swallowed me whole,” Stephen Ross of the Christian Research Institute complained in 2007. “Only by God’s grace through my privileged training in the scriptures and Christian apologetics did I emerge from the experience without doubting the truth of the Christian worldview.” For the book’s supporters, this was praise indeed.
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  Ross’s chief points of contention with Pullman’s book—that the characters murder God and consort with beings called “daemons”—fueled pious right-wing tirades for years, even though they are based on misreadings. Pullman’s child heroes, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, don’t kill God; an angel calling himself the Authority dies when they attempt to free him. Daemons are animal spirits meant to represent the essential characteristics—what we might traditionally call the soul—of their human companions. But accuracy can be detrimental when waging a culture war, and so Pullman’s critics inadvertently proved his larger argument. His great foe is not Christianity, per se. It’s fanaticism.

  LA BELLE SAUVAGE by Philip PullmanKnopf, 464 pp., $22.99
  In this respect, his new novel, La Belle Sauvage, is not an addition to Lyra’s universe as much as it’s a clarification of themes that were first explored in His Dark Materials. Once again, the heroes are children; adults are either complicated moral actors or outright villains. The Magisterium, Pullman’s proxy Roman Catholic Church, is tightening its stranglehold on intellectual pursuits in response to a world-changing scientific discovery. Its agents—inquisitors in all but name—are determined to find and kidnap an infant Lyra, who is already a subject of prophecy and import. Separately, a madman targets her for his own reasons and she is rescued, eventually, by the book’s young protagonist, Malcolm Polstead, and his companion Alice Parslow. The trio embark on a treacherous river adventure in the novel’s titular boat, and find refuge thanks to a combination of endurance and luck.
  Many familiar characters are back: In addition to Lyra and her daemon Pan, her explorer father Lord Asriel and her villainous mother Marisa Coulter make appearances. So does Dust, an elementary particle attracted to human consciousness and associated, in the teachings of the Magisterium, with original sin. And there is an alethiometer, the eponymous golden compass that communicates with Dust to reveal the truth to those who know how to read it. That we greet these elements of the story as welcome familiars, rather than tired points in the great constellation of Pullman’s universe, is a testament to his gifts as a storyteller. None of his characters are caricatures: There are good nuns and dastardly ones, courageous academics and those willing to sacrifice innocents for what they perceive to be the public good.

  Pullman has said that The Book of Dust, of which La Belle Sauvage is the first volume, examines the “question of consciousness, perhaps the oldest philosophical question of all: Are we matter? Or are we spirit and matter? What is consciousness if there is no spirit?” The discovery of Dust throws the Magisterium into dangerous panic, and sets up a related question: What moral responsibility does consciousness bestow upon us?

  The central conflict in La Belle Sauvage pits freethinkers against fanatics, which is not simply a conflict between atheists and believers. Pullman is too savvy to indulge in the kind of simplistic polemic that propels the celebrity of New Atheists like Richard Dawkins. Instead, Pullman is principally interested in examining how people respond when they confront some new reality of the world. Malcolm Polstead begins the book as a good-hearted, budding intellectual trapped by village life and the quotidian expectations of his parents. By the end, he’s helped kill someone in self-defense and is headed for a career as a scholar—always an esteemed vocation in Pullman’s books.
  But Malcolm’s first friends are nuns, not philosophers. These nuns are part of that very system—the Church and its various enforcement arms, like the Consistorial Court of Discipline—that Lyra and Will fought in His Dark Materials. “It was hard to understand, but the Consistorial Court of Discipline was on the same side as the gentle sisters of Godstow Priory,” explains Pullman’s omniscient narrator. “They were both parts of the Church.”
  The only time Malcolm sees the prioress, Sister Benedicta, “truly distressed” is when he asks her about this apparent discrepancy. “These are mysteries we mustn’t inquire into, Malcolm,” she tells him. “They’re too deep for us. But the Holy Church knows the will of God and what must be done. We must continue to love one another and not ask too many questions.”
  To an atheist, this may seem anti-intellectual, even an admission of cowardice. But Sister Benedicta is a more complicated figure than this scene suggests: When the Church’s enforcers arrive at her priory to take the infant Lyra away, she refuses to surrender. “You are going to go away, and you are never going to come back,” she tells them, and tears up the warrant her own Church granted them.

  Malcolm is a burgeoning atheist, but his loyalty to Benedicta and her order never waivers. In Pullman’s alternative universe, fanaticism and free inquiry cannot coexist. But faith and free inquiry are not necessarily at odds.
  In turn, irreligiosity does not guarantee enlightenment. Benedicta has a secular counterpart in the character of Hannah Relf, an Oxford University scholar employed by Oakley Street, a secret government agency dedicated to protecting scientific research from Church repression. Relf studies the alethiometer and dissents, quietly, from the Church’s authority. Her work for this secret agency is dangerous, certainly not suitable for children, but through chance she ends up recruiting Malcolm. Relf feels guilty about this, a feeling not shared by all her fellow agents. Oakley Street’s leader, Lord Nugent, even recommends using Malcolm as bait to ensnare a pederastic Church agent. Relf quashes his proposal, but becomes disillusioned: “And she saw Lord Nugent in a new light too: under that patrician calm and friendliness, he was ruthless.”

  For Pullman, consciousness is not only power, but a form of responsibility. A sly class element informs his world: Those individuals born with power are, in the main, not heroes. Lord Asriel should be one, but he’s a largely selfish character who only redeems himself in a final heroic act in the third volume of His Dark Materials. Pullman introduces Lord Nugent as a sympathetic liberal crusader, only to reveal that he’s ready to use a serving boy for bait.
  Children have the least power of all, and crimes against them are the greatest offenses. In His Dark Materials, the Magisterium’s evil nature becomes apparent in its attempt to separate children them from their daemons—an act equivalent to a lobotomy—to harness the resulting energy for its own ends. In La Belle Sauvage, the Church infiltrates schools and transforms children into snitches. The fault, in Pullman’s framing, sits with the Church because it has all the power. Religion is not the problem, not really; rather, it’s the way power is concentrated, then wielded against the vulnerable. When children must be heroes, it is because adults have failed them.
  Like Pullman’s original trilogy, his new book is a bildungsroman, and it is a violent one. His Dark Materials is famous for the way it treats that mysterious process known as growing up; as something to be celebrated, along with the accumulation of knowledge, experience, and other variants of what the Church would call sin. But Pullman’s adults speak of childhood in reverent terms, the one stretch of sacred innocence to which we are all entitled. Adults are also childhood’s custodians, which means it never stays innocent for long. In the world of La Belle Sauvage, growing up is a tragedy. It is in ours, too.
  Sarah Jones is a staff writer for The New Republic.

  @onesarahjones

• Vox
  https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/10/19/16506434/book-of-dust-la-belle-sauvage-philip-pullman-review
  Word count: 1204

  Philip Pullman returns to the world of The Golden Compass with the thrilling La Belle Sauvage
  Updated by Constance Grady@constancegrady Oct 20, 2017, 9:47am EDT

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  Knopf Books for Young Readers
  Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which began with The Golden Compass more than 20 years ago, is the kind of fantasy series that digs its claws into you and never quite lets go. It’s a lavish, wildly compelling fantasy saga, with witches and zeppelins and talking polar bears — and it’s a fervent repudiation of what Pullman seems to see as the repressive forces of Christianity, a kind of Paradise Lost for teenagers.
  When you read His Dark Materials, at first you fall in love with the idea of the daemon, a kind of external manifestation of the soul that expresses itself as a talking animal. And you fall in love with watching Pullman’s scrappy, clever heroine, Lyra, battle her way past immeasurably powerful adults. But what gives the trilogy its staying power is realizing that Lyra is battling against powers that want to teach her to hate her body and deny an essential part of her soul. That’s what most people remember about the trilogy after they’re done with it, and what makes it stay in their minds long after the first reading.
  Now, 17 years after Pullman completed the trilogy with 2000’s The Amber Spyglass, he’s returning to the world and the rich mythology he created with a new trilogy, The Book of Dust. The first volume, La Belle Sauvage, just came out — and it’s stunning. It’s shaggy and messy, less mythic than the previous trilogy and more magic. If His Dark Materials is Paradise Lost for teenagers, then The Book of Dust is teenage Faerie Queene.
  Rating

  La Belle Sauvage isn’t a myth. It’s a fairy tale.
  Pullman has described The Book of Dust as an “equal” to the first trilogy, not taking place altogether before or after Lyra’s adventures but all around them. La Belle Sauvage, however, is firmly in the prequel territory: Lyra is 6 months old the whole way through, and slowly making her way to Oxford’s Jordan College, where she’ll have her unconventional childhood and where we’ll meet her at the beginning of The Golden Compass.
  Taking Lyra to Jordan is Malcolm Polstead, an 11-year-old boy with an orderly soul and an inquisitive nature. Malcolm is passionately devoted to carpentry; he’s the kind of kid who plays around with inventing a new and more secure kind of screw in his spare time. He’s also the kind of kid who spends his spare time reading works of theoretical physics — or, in this Church-dominated world, experimental theology.

  And Malcolm adores baby Lyra. When he sees her menaced by the shadowy Gerard Bonneville — a mysterious man with a laughing hyena daemon, one of Pullman’s creepiest villains — he snatches her up from the convent where she’s been dwelling, setting off to deliver her to safety without a second thought. But unluckily for Malcolm, Oxford has been racked by a flood of Biblical proportions. Thank goodness he has a canoe, the titular Belle Sauvage, and like any child obsessed with mechanics, he keeps his vehicle of choice in perfect repair.
  Accompanied by a sarcastic and viciously practical teenage girl named Alice, Malcolm and Lyra set off on the turbulent waters of the flooded Thames, past ever eerier enchanted islands. They’re not dealing with the witches and the armored bears of His Dark Materials here, but with fairies and river spirits, with fairy tale villains who can only be defeated if a child is clever and tricky enough. But Malcolm, like all of Pullman’s young heroes, is plenty tricky.
  The philosophical underpinning of this book is deeply concerned with how authoritarian regimes take power
  While the structure of La Belle Sauvage is less overtly devoted to religion than was His Dark Materials (no angels appear, and there’s much less Scriptural quoting), it has plenty to say about the newly relevant question of authoritarian regimes and how they take control.
  By the time of His Dark Materials, Oxford is fully under the thumb of the Magisterium, which operates more or less like the Vatican during the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition all rolled into one: It controls all scholarly inquiry, punishes heresy without mercy, and kidnaps and tortures children with impunity. But in La Belle Sauvage, the Magisterium is still consolidating its power, and Brytain — the rough equivalent of our Britain — still has its own government, actively fighting to remain distinct from the Magisterium.
  The Magisterium’s most chilling weapon in its quest for domination is its League of St. Alexander. The League is a secret society for children whose members wear badges and attend extra church services, and they’re encouraged to inform on any adults they catch doing anything sinful or heretical. At Malcolm’s school, the headmaster tries to forbid his pupils from wearing the badges on school property. The students, drunk with power, promptly inform on him; he’s taken into the Magisterium’s custody and never heard from again.
  So what Malcolm is fighting against is less spiritual oppression than it is political oppression. He doesn’t have any of the theological conversations about the nature of the body, soul, and ghost that Lyra and fellow protagonist Will have in His Dark Materials, but he thinks a great deal about what it means to be free to think and study and speak as he chooses, and how absurd it is that a bunch of silly little boys from his own school might be granted the power to deny him that freedom.
  La Belle Sauvage shares, then, the philosophical backbone that makes His Dark Materials so ambitious and iconic — while also expanding on the mythology of Pullman’s worlds in subtle and fascinating ways. The fairies we meet are new additions to the world, but they feel ancient and unknowable, like the witches but wholly unique.
  And most importantly, the characters of La Belle Sauvage are as singular and lovable as the characters of His Dark Materials. Bitter, sarcastic Alice is slightly underdeveloped in this volume (there’s a troubling scene in which her sexual assault becomes important mostly for how Malcolm reacts to it; Pullman can and should do better than that), but her sour, cranky voice is profoundly endearing. And Malcolm is a distinct protagonist, lacking the pride and flair of Lyra or the mournful brutality of Will, but with a quiet stubbornness and love for order all his own.
  Reading La Belle Sauvage, you’ll remember again why you fell in love with The Golden Compass. Pullman has returned to his old world and expanded it, bringing in the old elements his readers loved but approaching everything from a new angle. This book can stand on its own or in the context of what came before it — and it’s also a profoundly compelling foundation for a new trilogy.

• A.V Club
  https://www.avclub.com/philip-pullman-returns-to-his-dark-materials-with-the-s-1819517422
  Word count: 807

  Philip Pullman returns to His Dark Materials with the stunning follow-up La Belle Sauvage

  Graphic: Allison Corr

  Caitlin PenzeyMoog
  10/18/17 7:00pmFiled to: Book Reviews

  39

  3

  A decade before Lyra hides in the Retirement Room to spy on Lord Asriel, her birth coincides with dark forces sweeping through Brytain. Rain falls ceaselessly, a prophecy is made of a child who will destroy destiny, and the sinister Magisterium consolidates political power. Philip Pullman’s The Book Of Dust, a new trilogy follow-up to His Dark Materials, opens on Lyra as a 6-month-old baby, rewinding to tell an origin story of sorts.

  Book Review

  A
  La Belle Sauvage: The Book Of Dust Volume One
  Author
  Philip Pullman
  Publisher
  Knopf Books For Young Readers
  This time, it’s 11-year-old Malcolm Polstead who goes on an adventure. An easygoing son of tavern owners, his inquisitiveness—so necessary to any protagonist in a children’s book—leads him to find out more than he should about a secret agency and the baby they’ve brought to a nearby priory. When the river suddenly overflows and an epic flood spills through the Oxford countryside, he and his canoe are there to save Lyra from drowning—and from the other threats, political and personal, that have the baby in their crosshairs.
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  Pullman calls The Book Of Dust trilogy neither a sequel or prequel but an “equal,” taking place alongside His Dark Materials. But La Belle Sauvage, this first in the Book Of Dust trilogy, functions very much like a prequel, whatever Pullman says. We don’t know how Lyra will get there, but we know she will grow up at Jordan College, leeching any uncertainty out of her end destination. Pullman emphasizes this forgone conclusion in La Belle Sauvage’s opening pages, when Malcolm off-handedly learns that Jordan Collage is the last institution to offer academic sanctuary, providing a possible place for Lyra to be safe.
  In this case it’s the journey, not the destination, that matters, and Pullman crafts a singularly thrilling adventure for his young hero to embark on. Malcolm and a compellingly complex adversary-turned-ally flee an evil man with a ghoulish dæmon while trying to understand the unknowable forces acting around (and sometimes upon) them. Theirs is a classic coming-of-age story set in the world Pullman brought lavishly to life in His Dark Materials.
  That world is succinctly described in the preface to His Dark Materials as “like ours, but different in many ways,” and it’s with great pleasure that La Belle Sauvage slips effortlessly back into Pullman’s richly imagined Brytain. Pullman is perhaps the best fantasy writer alive, and certainly a master of world-building, and his new tale is more broadly fantastical than The Golden Compass and its two follow-ups. Malcolm’s story is firmly on the periphery of the Magisterium’s machinations, religious authoritarian control, and big ideas of consciousness and destiny, and this smaller narrative allows Pullman to interweave ideas of multiple worlds and conscious particles without focusing on or explaining them. The result is a story smaller in scope than anything in His Dark Materials, and presents an even more mysterious version of our world. It’s like the great flood sends Malcolm and his dæmon, Asta, in and out of multiple overlapping worlds, creating a fertile, enigmatic landscape to explore.

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  His Dark Materials fans will have plenty to chew over. Characters both major and minor from the first trilogy are present in this new one, and a single tantalizing line hints at what Lyra’s future story might be. (Pullman has stated that the next installment will take place 20 years after this one—in other words, 10 years after the events in His Dark Materials.) The real connective tissue between The Book Of Dust and His Dark Materials, though, is the tiny booklet that also connects them temporally. Lyra’s Oxford—which mixes a short story with detritus from her world and ours—is full of conjoining ideas that link this new series with the old. It’s an appropriate ligament in this set of stories that are themselves constantly folding over each other, like windows upon windows into separate but familiar worlds. Even without the deep well of context of those other books of Dust, La Belle Sauvage stands on its own as a singularly beguiling work of fantasy. It’s sure to be devoured by readers young and old alike.

  Purchasing La Belle Sauvage via Amazon helps support The A.V. Club.

• The Verge
  https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503046/philip-pullman-his-dark-materials-golden-compass-subtle-knife-amber-spyglass-antiauthoritarian-books
  Word count: 923

  Looking back on the anti-authoritarian themes of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials
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  The first installment of its companion trilogy, The Book of Dust, arrives in bookstores today
  by Andrew Liptak@AndrewLiptak Oct 19, 2017, 4:16pm EDT

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  Photo by Andrew Liptak / The Verge
  For more than a decade and a half, Philip Pullman has talked about a companion novel to his acclaimed fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. Earlier this year, he revealed that fans of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass would not only finally get to read The Book of Dust, but that it was a trilogy, with the first installment, La Belle Sauvage, hitting bookstores today.
  With the arrival of The Book of Dust, it’s worth looking back on Pullman’s dazzling trilogy. While readers have enjoyed a glut of great YA fantasy novels in the last two decades, His Dark Materials particularly stands out because of Pullman’s unwillingness to compromise a complex ethical and moral story for his younger audience, and his determination to move beyond a simple story of good versus evil.
  Pullman is unwilling to compromise a complex ethical and moral story for his younger audience
  The Golden Compass kicks off by introducing 12-year-old Lyra Belacqua, a girl who lives in Oxford in an alternative world where people are accompanied by physical manifestations of their souls, called dæmons. She’s pulled into an adventure to save a kidnapped friend from an oppressive church known as the Magisterium, which suppresses thought and research it considers heretical. Lyra’s uncle Lord Asriel and the Magisterium are both studying the same thing: an elementary particle known as Dust, which the Church believes is the root of sin. Lyra’s friend Roger was kidnapped as part of an experiment in their efforts to stamp it out.
  There’s a moment at the end of The Golden Compass that helps showcase the nuance Pullman injects into this story. Lyra is able to save her friend Roger from the Magisterium’s lab, and reunite with Lord Asriel. He tells her about the nature of Dust, and that he wants to continue his search for its source in other universes. He then severs Roger from his dæmon, which kills Roger and breaks a hole between their universe and another. Lyra can’t save her friend, but vows to stop Asriel, following him into the universe.

  In the subsequent novels, Pullman plays out an enormous story in which inhabitants from across universes vie for control of existence. Lyra travels to an alternate world, where she ends up meeting a boy from our own Earth: Will Parry. The two are caught up in interdimensional tides as they try and escape the Magisterium and the Authority, the first angel to emerge after the formation of the universe.
  Pullman uses Lyra and Will as focal points for a larger power struggle
  Pullman uses Lyra and Will as focal points for this larger power struggle between these two ends. The Authority and its forces rule over the cosmos, using churches such as the Magisterium as proxies for its orthodox views on the purpose of existence. It’s opposed by Lyra’s uncle, a radical scholar who studies the nature of Dust, and who eventually gathers allies to resist the Authority and its Regent, Metatron, to establish a Republic of Heaven. Over the course of the series, Pullman explores the lengths people will go to uphold their worldview, regardless of the cost it extracts from people along the way. Characters sacrifice their lives to protect Lyra and Will, while others die in the cause to kill them. Pullman never uses this to equate the two sides, but shows that while there is good and evil, there’s a considerable amount of gray area in between, which complicates the journey of the trilogy’s characters.
  Anti-authoritarianism is a common theme in most YA stories: look at novels such as the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, The 100 by Kass Morgan, or Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy. But Pullman’s novels go beyond the broad strokes of an oppressive government. He looks at authoritarianism through a theological lens, referencing works such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost, or the works of William Blake, which look at the relationship between religious belief and how those are imparted or imposed on those subjected to a church’s reach.
  ‘His Dark Materials’ ultimately advocates for the abolition of orthodox structures like organized religion
  His Dark Materials ultimately advocates for the abolition of rigid, orthodox structures such as organized religion, by pushing against dogma and encouraging rational thinking and logic. As a result, the trilogy is frequently banned over objections about how it depicts religion. The American Library Association ranks the series eight out of 100 on its most frequently banned list between 2000 and 2009.
  In recent years, there’s been a global shift away from democratic governments and toward powerful leaders who push a less tolerant agenda, and it spells out dire consequences for human rights around the world. Pullman’s arguments against authoritarianism are precisely why the books hold up so elegantly, 17 years after the last installment hit bookstores, and why the companion Book of Dust is so welcome. It not only adds to Lyra’s story, it promises to continue addressing the inequality Pullman sees in the world.

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