La Belle Sauvage

From the snow and thunder of The Dark Is Rising, to another flood engulfing the landscape -- and once again it's the Thames that bursts its banks and sweeps away everything in its path.

This long-awaited prequel to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy was one of my Christmas presents, and we are also reading it for the Convent book group, where our next theme is Water. I must confess to ambivalent feelings about His Dark Materials. I think the trilogy is a magnificent achievement, brimming with imagination and big ideas: the animal daemons, the subtle knife that cuts into parallel worlds, the armoured bears, the alethiometer (which was always going to appeal to an occasional tarot card reader like myself!)

And yet I have never gone back to re-read them. I admired the books, but I didn't love them.

Maybe I'm just too old to fall in love with books like that any more? Perhaps it's partly because, as a lover of Narnia, I was slightly resentful of Pullman's deliberately anti-Narnia project. But reading La Belle Sauvage, it occurred to me that the difference between the two series for me was not whether they were pro- or anti-Christianity. For me, the difference is that the Narnia books were written out of a deep and almost incoherent love, an emotion that could sweep along talking beasts and Greek gods and the figure of Christ transformed into a lion (to return to the flood analogy). But Pullman's books seem to have been written from the intellect more than the heart. However brilliant they are, however clever and carefully constructed and layered, for me that crucial element of love is missing.

I enjoyed La Belle Sauvage and I will read the rest of the sequels when they appear. I might even, finally, return to the original books. Perhaps my analysis is wrong, and it might be fun to find out.