Borrowing from spy thrillers, fantasy epics, steampunk odysseys, and Dickensian bildungsromans, the books are unplaceable, like a tune you might recall from childhood, or a dream. His novels, sturdy enough to contain ideas without sinking under them, are stories before they are anything else their striations of meaning reveal themselves over time. He is deeply allusive-his latest title quotes Rousseau’s “noble savage” doctrine-and fitfully allegorical, but he seems drawn first and foremost to emotional complication, to the pulses of imagination and impulse that accompany our thinking. Pullman has always been a writer temperamentally opposed to the categories his talent overflows anyway. The Book of Dust is love-nostalgic, warming, pure-at first mote. La Belle Sauvage (the first installment of this series set in the same dusky and glimmering multiverse as His Dark Materials, a world largely mute since 2000’s The Amber Spyglass) excites a specific enthrallment that is all the headier for being familiar. Pullman, now 70 and living in Oxford with his wife, a teacher, is simply one of the best storytellers to wave his hand over English literature.

I am confident in pronouncing that people will love the first volume of Philip Pullman’s trilogy, The Book of Dust, with the same helpless vehemence that stole over them when The Golden Compass came out in the mid-’90s, or even when they first met their partners or held their newborn children. It means you care about their flourishing their way of seeing is dear to you you want to stroke their hair and serve them cocoa their words take up residence in your mind and rearrange the furniture. Love, about a person, means that every inch of them delights you, even the parts that also cause you pain or terror. You should not use the word love lightly.

La belle sauvage book 3