Michael Prusse: Reading Philip Pullman’s «La Belle Sauvage» (2017)

Photo: Michael Prusse, The Danube between Bratislava and Vienna near Petronell-Carnuntum, 19 October 2017.

How would you define an „equel“? Philip Pullmann does not want his new trilogy, The Book of Dust, of which La Belle Sauvage is the first volume, to be understood as a prequel or sequel but as a parallel set of stories to His Dark Materials. Thus, the events in La Belle Sauvage take place ten years before the reader meets Lyra in Northern Lights; the future volumes of The Book of Dust are announced to be set after Lyra’s trials in The Amber Spyglass. In this way, readers of La Belle Sauvage are informed about what occured when Lyra was a baby (a prequel, really) and they will eventually learn about events that happened after the temporal setting of His Dark Materials (sequels, really).

The sources that inspired Pullman’s story are manifold: it brings back, of course, the setting of Oxford and its environments from Northern Lights. Jordan College features again as do some of the characters that readers are already familiar with from Pullman’s earlier trilogy. The story is very much about a flight to save a child that is persecuted by hostile forces; the „Magisterium“ is at work again, attempting among other things to lay their hands on Lyra, who is still a baby in La Belle Sauvage. The title refers to the name of a canoe, the proudest possession of Malcolm Polstead, the protagonist of the narrative. A story of a daring escape to save a child whose fate is important for the future reminds this reader, at least, of the biblical flight into Egypt. Moreover, it is a great flood, submerging Oxford and its environments in the course of the book, that permits Malcolm and his companions to escape their pursuers in the canoe by paddling downriver. The massive inundation after days of unrelenting rain is reminiscent of the biblical deluge, the divine punishment of humanity for its failures. It is certainly ironic (but not entirely new or surprising) that Pullman refers to these two stories from the Bible in a narrative that, like His Dark Materials, attacks religious institutions that attempt to dominate the discourse on knowledge. Pullman is a proclaimed atheist but he appreciates the Bible for the stories that are collected in it (such sentiments are clearly expressed in his collection of essays, Dæmon Voices). As a storyteller, of course, he makes use of these narratives for his own purposes. Apart from the Bible, a further influence must have been Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn since the latter also relates the events of people escaping down a river – on a raft in this case, rather than a canoe.

The events occurring in La Belle Sauvage take readers back into Lyra’s Oxford: they get to know Malcolm Polstead, son of the innkeepers in «The Trout», who becomes Lyra’s protector and an important protagonist in the network that attempts to resist the all-encompassing power of the Magisterium. It is Malcolm who saves Lord Asriel by rowing him across the river to see Lyra at the nunnery and afterwards lends him his canoe, which permits the nobleman to avoid his pursuers. The canoe is eventually returned to Malcolm, improved by the grateful Lord Asriel, and thus is in a fit state for the transport of a „princess“, in other words Lyra. When the Magisterium’s henchmen attempt to kidnap the girl from her sanctuary, it is Malcolm, together with «The Trout’s» kitchen-girl, Alice, who foils this ploy and sets them off on their epic journey down the river Thames. It is tempting to reveal more at this point but rather than spoil the pleasure of potential readers who ought to discover the world of La Belle Sauvage for themselves, I would like to draw their attention to the following, particularly striking aspects of Pullman’s novel: the sinister disappearance of children in Northern Lights is mirrored in La Belle Sauvage by means of the League of St. Alexander, an organisation that strongly reminds of youth organisations in totalitarian regimes because it encourages children to report suspicious activities of adults, in particular of their parents, to the authorities. The atmosphere at Malcolm’s school quickly becomes unbearably unpleasant. Parallels to the Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany or the pioneer organisations in communist countries readily spring to mind. The innocence of children (Pullman is a great admirer of Blake) is corrupted by the Magisterium in a terrifying manner.

Last but not least, La Belle Sauvage is a great adventure story that allows the two teenage protagonists to mature and to act bravely, to become responsible and, eventually, to outwit their adult opponents. To do so, they have to be separated from their parents, a separation that is typical for children’s literature and explains the astonishing proliferacy of orphans in the genre (if that is the right term to describe children’s literature). Pullman himself pronounced in an interview that such a separation was necessary and alluded to the famous opening of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice when doing so: „It is a truth universally acknowledged, that young protagonists in search of adventure must ditch their parents“ (Amazon interview). The deluge provides the setting that automatically separates the children from their families when they travel downriver towards London.