#hisdarkmaterials — Public Fediverse posts

Ich habe „Das Feld der Rosen“ von Philip Pullman gelesen, welches die Nachfolgeserie von His Dark Materials (HDM) abschließt. Da HDM eine der prägenden Buchreihen meiner Jugend war, bin ich mit hohen Erwartungen an die neue Serie herangegangen, insbesondere an den finalen Band. Leider konnte er meine Erwartungen nicht erfüllen. Warum, erfahrt ihr in meinem Blog (link in Bio):

https://carolin-lueders.de/philip-pullman-das-feld-der-rosen/

#rezension #fantasy #hisdarkmaterials

Ich habe „Das Feld der Rosen“ von Philip Pullman gelesen, welches die Nachfolgeserie von His Dark Materials (HDM) abschließt. Da HDM eine der prägenden Buchreihen meiner Jugend war, bin ich mit hohen Erwartungen an die neue Serie herangegangen, insbesondere an den finalen Band. Leider konnte er meine Erwartungen nicht erfüllen. Warum, erfahrt ihr in meinem Blog (link in Bio):

https://carolin-lueders.de/philip-pullman-das-feld-der-rosen/

#rezension #fantasy #hisdarkmaterials

Ich habe „Das Feld der Rosen“ von Philip Pullman gelesen, welches die Nachfolgeserie von His Dark Materials (HDM) abschließt. Da HDM eine der prägenden Buchreihen meiner Jugend war, bin ich mit hohen Erwartungen an die neue Serie herangegangen, insbesondere an den finalen Band. Leider konnte er meine Erwartungen nicht erfüllen. Warum, erfahrt ihr in meinem Blog (link in Bio):

https://carolin-lueders.de/philip-pullman-das-feld-der-rosen/

#rezension #fantasy #hisdarkmaterials

Movie TV Tech Geeks #TV #HBO #Titans #HisDarkMaterials 8 Best HBO Shows Everyone Has Been Sleeping On http://dlvr.it/TRCxmX

Movie TV Tech Geeks #TVFeatures #HisDarkMaterials #GameOfThrones Forget 'Game of Thrones', HBO Already Gave Us a 3-Part Fantasy Series That Was Perfect From Start to Finish http://dlvr.it/TR5K6J

Movie TV Tech Geeks #TV #Fantasy #BestTVShows #HisDarkMaterials 10 Nearly Perfect Fantasy Shows, Ranked http://dlvr.it/TQN5CF

Movie TV Tech Geeks #TV #Fantasy #BestTVShows #HisDarkMaterials 10 Nearly Perfect Fantasy Shows, Ranked http://dlvr.it/TQN5CF

Movie TV Tech Geeks #TV #Fantasy #BestTVShows #HisDarkMaterials 10 Nearly Perfect Fantasy Shows, Ranked http://dlvr.it/TQN5CF

Movie TV Tech Geeks #TV #Fantasy #BestTVShows #HisDarkMaterials 10 Nearly Perfect Fantasy Shows, Ranked http://dlvr.it/TQN5CF

Movie TV Tech Geeks #TV #Fantasy #BestTVShows #HisDarkMaterials 10 Nearly Perfect Fantasy Shows, Ranked http://dlvr.it/TQN5CF

My review of the book “The Rose Field” by Philip Pullman, which is the last in “The Book Of Dust” trilogy of books:

https://rmathew.com/2025/trf.html

#Books #Review #BookReview #TheRoseField #TheBookOfDust #HisDarkMaterials #WebSite #Plug #Fantasy

My review of the book “The Rose Field” by Philip Pullman, which is the last in “The Book Of Dust” trilogy of books:

https://rmathew.com/2025/trf.html

#Books #Review #BookReview #TheRoseField #TheBookOfDust #HisDarkMaterials #WebSite #Plug #Fantasy

My review of the book “The Rose Field” by Philip Pullman, which is the last in “The Book Of Dust” trilogy of books:

https://rmathew.com/2025/trf.html

#Books #Review #BookReview #TheRoseField #TheBookOfDust #HisDarkMaterials #WebSite #Plug #Fantasy

My review of the book “The Rose Field” by Philip Pullman, which is the last in “The Book Of Dust” trilogy of books:

https://rmathew.com/2025/trf.html

#Books #Review #BookReview #TheRoseField #TheBookOfDust #HisDarkMaterials #WebSite #Plug #Fantasy

My review of the book “The Rose Field” by Philip Pullman, which is the last in “The Book Of Dust” trilogy of books:

https://rmathew.com/2025/trf.html

#Books #Review #BookReview #TheRoseField #TheBookOfDust #HisDarkMaterials #WebSite #Plug #Fantasy

I just finished reading _The Rose Field_, the third book of The Book of Dust trilogy (Philip Pullman), which is in the same world as His Dark Materials. It just came out a few weeks ago. It's an amazing book. The plot and characters wander all over the place, from somewhere in southern Turkey to somewhere in western China, more or less along the Silk Road. Most of the book happens in Syria and Azerbaijan. It's really interesting to compare British colonialism in Lyra's world vs. ours. People from Syria through Uzbekistan seem to have more power in Lyra's world than in ours. Comparing the technology to ours and thinking of why it might have developed differently remains interesting. I think I can say without spoilers that the main meaning of this book is that participating in modern capitalism kills the soul, or distances people from their souls. It even covers monetization of universities, like naming rights for colleges. I think what the author is objecting to is prioritizing profit over community and human needs, while recognizing that trade in general is an old thing. There's also a lot about authoritarianism. I kept google maps open while I read the book so I could keep figuring out where various characters were, and learned some things about our world in the process. I couldn't reliably say which is the Caspian Sea and which the Black Sea without looking it up, and certainly didn't know anything about the Caspian Sea. I now really need Pullman to write another book in this world, because I need to know what happens in this world next. It's excellent and I strongly recommend it, but if one hasn't read the preceding 5 books, it would be best to start with those. #reading #novels #Pullman #HisDarkMaterials https://bookshop.org/p/books/untitled-knopf-bfyr-6635-knopf-bfyr/22418874

I just finished reading _The Rose Field_, the third book of The Book of Dust trilogy (Philip Pullman), which is in the same world as His Dark Materials. It just came out a few weeks ago. It's an amazing book. The plot and characters wander all over the place, from somewhere in southern Turkey to somewhere in western China, more or less along the Silk Road. Most of the book happens in Syria and Azerbaijan. It's really interesting to compare British colonialism in Lyra's world vs. ours. People from Syria through Uzbekistan seem to have more power in Lyra's world than in ours. Comparing the technology to ours and thinking of why it might have developed differently remains interesting. I think I can say without spoilers that the main meaning of this book is that participating in modern capitalism kills the soul, or distances people from their souls. It even covers monetization of universities, like naming rights for colleges. I think what the author is objecting to is prioritizing profit over community and human needs, while recognizing that trade in general is an old thing. There's also a lot about authoritarianism. I kept google maps open while I read the book so I could keep figuring out where various characters were, and learned some things about our world in the process. I couldn't reliably say which is the Caspian Sea and which the Black Sea without looking it up, and certainly didn't know anything about the Caspian Sea. I now really need Pullman to write another book in this world, because I need to know what happens in this world next. It's excellent and I strongly recommend it, but if one hasn't read the preceding 5 books, it would be best to start with those. #reading #novels #Pullman #HisDarkMaterials https://bookshop.org/p/books/untitled-knopf-bfyr-6635-knopf-bfyr/22418874

I just finished reading _The Rose Field_, the third book of The Book of Dust trilogy (Philip Pullman), which is in the same world as His Dark Materials. It just came out a few weeks ago. It's an amazing book. The plot and characters wander all over the place, from somewhere in southern Turkey to somewhere in western China, more or less along the Silk Road. Most of the book happens in Syria and Azerbaijan. It's really interesting to compare British colonialism in Lyra's world vs. ours. People from Syria through Uzbekistan seem to have more power in Lyra's world than in ours. Comparing the technology to ours and thinking of why it might have developed differently remains interesting. I think I can say without spoilers that the main meaning of this book is that participating in modern capitalism kills the soul, or distances people from their souls. It even covers monetization of universities, like naming rights for colleges. I think what the author is objecting to is prioritizing profit over community and human needs, while recognizing that trade in general is an old thing. There's also a lot about authoritarianism. I kept google maps open while I read the book so I could keep figuring out where various characters were, and learned some things about our world in the process. I couldn't reliably say which is the Caspian Sea and which the Black Sea without looking it up, and certainly didn't know anything about the Caspian Sea. I now really need Pullman to write another book in this world, because I need to know what happens in this world next. It's excellent and I strongly recommend it, but if one hasn't read the preceding 5 books, it would be best to start with those. #reading #novels #Pullman #HisDarkMaterials https://bookshop.org/p/books/untitled-knopf-bfyr-6635-knopf-bfyr/22418874

I just finished reading _The Rose Field_, the third book of The Book of Dust trilogy (Philip Pullman), which is in the same world as His Dark Materials. It just came out a few weeks ago. It's an amazing book. The plot and characters wander all over the place, from somewhere in southern Turkey to somewhere in western China, more or less along the Silk Road. Most of the book happens in Syria and Azerbaijan. It's really interesting to compare British colonialism in Lyra's world vs. ours. People from Syria through Uzbekistan seem to have more power in Lyra's world than in ours. Comparing the technology to ours and thinking of why it might have developed differently remains interesting. I think I can say without spoilers that the main meaning of this book is that participating in modern capitalism kills the soul, or distances people from their souls. It even covers monetization of universities, like naming rights for colleges. I think what the author is objecting to is prioritizing profit over community and human needs, while recognizing that trade in general is an old thing. There's also a lot about authoritarianism. I kept google maps open while I read the book so I could keep figuring out where various characters were, and learned some things about our world in the process. I couldn't reliably say which is the Caspian Sea and which the Black Sea without looking it up, and certainly didn't know anything about the Caspian Sea. I now really need Pullman to write another book in this world, because I need to know what happens in this world next. It's excellent and I strongly recommend it, but if one hasn't read the preceding 5 books, it would be best to start with those. #reading #novels #Pullman #HisDarkMaterials https://bookshop.org/p/books/untitled-knopf-bfyr-6635-knopf-bfyr/22418874

I just finished reading _The Rose Field_, the third book of The Book of Dust trilogy (Philip Pullman), which is in the same world as His Dark Materials. It just came out a few weeks ago. It's an amazing book. The plot and characters wander all over the place, from somewhere in southern Turkey to somewhere in western China, more or less along the Silk Road. Most of the book happens in Syria and Azerbaijan. It's really interesting to compare British colonialism in Lyra's world vs. ours. People from Syria through Uzbekistan seem to have more power in Lyra's world than in ours. Comparing the technology to ours and thinking of why it might have developed differently remains interesting. I think I can say without spoilers that the main meaning of this book is that participating in modern capitalism kills the soul, or distances people from their souls. It even covers monetization of universities, like naming rights for colleges. I think what the author is objecting to is prioritizing profit over community and human needs, while recognizing that trade in general is an old thing. There's also a lot about authoritarianism. I kept google maps open while I read the book so I could keep figuring out where various characters were, and learned some things about our world in the process. I couldn't reliably say which is the Caspian Sea and which the Black Sea without looking it up, and certainly didn't know anything about the Caspian Sea. I now really need Pullman to write another book in this world, because I need to know what happens in this world next. It's excellent and I strongly recommend it, but if one hasn't read the preceding 5 books, it would be best to start with those. #reading #novels #Pullman #HisDarkMaterials https://bookshop.org/p/books/untitled-knopf-bfyr-6635-knopf-bfyr/22418874

Movie TV Tech Geeks #TVFeatures #HisDarkMaterials #PhilipPullman This 10/10 HBO Fantasy Series Did What Most Netflix Shows Never Get To Do http://dlvr.it/TQ4Rk8

Re-listen Liveblog: La Belle Sauvage

Doing a re-listen of books 1-2 in the Book of Dust trilogy, since book 3 just came out.

I just finished the first one, La Belle Sauvage, liveblogging it on Mastodon and on Bluesky, Here’s a roundup post.

(I haven’t read this book since it came out in 2017, and I deliberately didn’t reread my original 2017 reaction post to LBS until now. Feel free to look through both, see which things I had different reactions about, and how many times I just noticed the same thing twice.)

La Belle Sauvage, chapters 1-3:

This starts off so strong. Like Lyra opening TGC, Malcolm is an active, curious, fun kid! We get a ton of worldbuilding through the places he explores, and a ton more through “noticing what the adults pointedly aren’t telling him.”

Not sure how well a reader could follow the background mystery if you didn’t know all the names and references from HDM. But if you have, it’s really juicy. Malcolm obvs has no idea, and it’s great how he fills the gaps with wild speculation.

Our one glimpse of baby Lyra so far was super charming.

Chapter 4:

Detour into the POV of Farder Coram.

In retrospect, a lot of this is an excuse to recap things we know from HDM, but the writing is engaging enough that it’s hard to mind.

[Note after rereading my original reaction post: Huh, this annoyed me a lot more the first time around. Apparently it gets a lot more tolerable when you haven’t been deep in the original HDM recently.]

Chapters 5-6:

Hannah Relf, and the whole field of “alethiometry as a serious academic discipline” that she belongs to, is barely in HDM. Really cool to see it showcased with her younger self in action here.

The way Malcolm gets roped into her spycraft is a little contrived, but I’ll allow it. Hannah’s ongoing stress about the morality of it helps.

(Made more sense when adults were recruiting Lyra, she wasn’t just an unusually-sharp 11-year-old, they also knew she was part of an Important Prophecy.)

The first titles Hannah lends Malcolm turn out to be “The Body in the Library” and “A Brief History of Time.”

Anybody out there written “HDM AU of Agatha Christie”? It’s canon now.

Chapters 7-9:

Getting into the League of St. Alexander plot now, and, oof, still hits hard. An upsettingly realistic story of a group of kids being manipulated into turning on each other, and on the actually-supportive adults in their lives.

Reminds me of the school sections in Nona the Ninth. There’s high-stakes politics and espionage happening around them, people are getting killed, we have a small group of good teachers trying their best to get normal lessons to the kids in spite of it all, and the whole thing is from the POV of the kids, who aren’t officially being told much, but they know something is up. Lots of urgently passing rumors, on the level of “well, my dad says he heard such-and-such, so I reckon that means…”

Very different setups, but still, lots of parallels! And both good.

Oh, one more thing!

This St. Alexander appears to be an in-universe creation, but the Church official who tells his story also talks to the kids about Jesus – not in detail, just mentions of things like, their job is to spread The Love Of Jesus(TM).

I checked out the HDM ebooks just to text-search them. The name “Christ” never comes up. The name “Jesus” only comes up in TAS, and it’s from Mary Malone. (Talking to Lyra — no mention of whether Lyra recognizes the name.) Nobody ever mentions Christmas or Easter, either.

The Magisterium is explicitly Christian — TGC has Lyra mention someone being “baptized as a Christian.” (After that, the term disappears until, again, Mary in TAS uses it.) So this felt like a worldbuilding point, that their doctrine specifically de-emphasizes Jesus. No obligatory prayers, no lip service to “what would Jesus do,” no framing their actions in terms of “following the Word of Christ,” no references at all.

…And now we’re in LBS, and this random person is telling a group of elementary-school kids “of course this is a Proper Country where we follow the Good Word about Jesus,” like of course that’s a common thing they’ve all heard of.

Is this difference also a worldbuilding point? Or is it a Doylist thing where, in writing HDM, Pullman wasn’t ready to antagonize Jesus’ fans that directly, and now he is?

(So far, no idea! TBD if anything in future chapters will make it clearer.)

[Post-reread note: They did not make it clearer.]

Chapters 10-11:

Lors Asriel! HDM readers know in a few years he’ll murder a kid Malcolm’s age for a military advantage, but here, Malcolm doesn’t pick up anything sinister at all. Personal charisma on full blast. Don’t remember if Malcolm ever learns different, or not.

[Post-reread note: Well, not in this book, at least.]

Stray daemon details that caught my eye:

• The shop teacher’s woodpecker daemon drills holes in scrap wood as a nervous tic
• Malcolm’s unsettled Aster can take chimera forms, like an owl with duck feathers, but only experiments with that when nobody else is watching
• Hyena daemon urinates in the road, while looking at Malcolm. Makes him feel so dirty/violated that he’s too embarrassed to tell anyone until his next meeting with Hannah

Are we supposed to believe daemons have been doing that (just, you know, normally in private) all along? Not sure I buy it.

[Post-reread note: There’s an upcoming journey with baby Lyra in which Malcolm is constantly aware of how often she needs to be fed and changed. The idea of feeding/changing Pan is never even mentioned. So, yeah, I don’t think it’s a general daemon bodily function. I think it’s is a skill this specific daemon has cultivated to freak people out.]

Chapters 12-13:

Oh, huh. Argument at Malcolm’s family pub, the phrase “scientific management of resources” gets thrown around. A slip from Pullman, or was “experimental theology” supposed to be a term from Church-controlled circles, not common in the general public?

[Post-reread note: For now, I think it was just a slip from Pullman.]

Argument is about the upcoming plot-point flood.

Seems worth noting that the “modern, scientific” proponents are all characters who are going to be proven wrong. The Right Understanding comes from “the ancient wisdom of the gyptians who know how to read the signs” and “one guy’s granny.”

Hannah gets access to a contraband alethiometer! From the description, this is the one Lyra will eventually get.

Contrast to the Bodleian Library one she was using officially. Don’t think I realized there were different models before this. With only 6 ever made, I figured they were a matching set.

The Bodleian one has full-color symbols! The stolen one has plain black ink lineart.

Idle theorizing: all 6 were originally made with black lineart, but that faceplate was damaged and replaced at some point. The new artist either was told to paint the new symbols fancier, or just had fun with it.

End of this latest chapter refers to Bonneville (the guy with the hyena daemon) as “a physicist.”

So much for my half-baked theory that maybe “experimental theology” was a replacement term for “physics” specifically.

Chapters 14-15:

Higher-up spies encourage Hannah to keep talking with (from their POV) this random 11-year-old, but it gets in-universe justified in a way that works for me. (…I mean narratively, not ethically.)

Alice (teen kitchen worker) calls Lyra a “little flirt” for giggling at Malcolm. Not creepy on its own, that’s a joke people make about babies…but knowing that Pullman is planning future Lyra/Malcolm, with more explicitly-creepy stuff in the lead-up…yeah, this is a retroactive big oof.

Malcolm gets to meet Mrs. Coulter! Unlike with Asriel, he gets a bad vibe off her immediately. Well, she’s on track to murder a lot more children than Asriel will, so maybe it’s fair.

(Also, Asriel shows care for Lyra, which biases Malcolm toward him instantly.)

Part 1 ends (at the 54% mark) with the predicted Big Flood hitting. Alice, Malcolm, and Lyra get stranded together in a boat.

Everything I remember being “meh” about this book is on their river journey. Plunging apprehensively onward…

Chapter 16:

Worldbuilding detail: pharmacies are marked with a green cross. (Not sure from context if it’s just a palette-swapped ➕️, or an actual ✝️.)

The dynamic between Alice and Malcolm is really good here. Grudging teamwork.

Malcolm and Aster see a drowned body during the flooding, and wonder “what happens to daemons when you die?”

Surprised they wouldn’t know. Even with no deaths in their close family, surely it’s a thing children are taught about? (They’ve been reading murder mysteries! It never came up?)

Different chat a few chapters ago, they saw Pan turning into a mole, and wondered how a baby daemon knows how to turn into a creature they’ve never actually seen.

That I liked, because it doesn’t seem like there’s a clear, generally-known answer. One adult daemon offered “You just feel mole-y.”

Chapter 17:

Mention of a prophecy about “a boy” that might be Malcolm.

Feels like overkill? Like “he can’t just be a normal person caught up in Lyra’s cosmic destiny, he’s gotta be special too.” (Don’t remember if there’s payoff for this later. Might like it more if it’s good. TBD.)

[Post-reread note: There was not.]

Chapter 18:

Not much to say here except “go Alice.” Previously seen decking Bonneville with a chair, now she gets off a gun at him.

Bonneville mentions “experimental theology” to Malcolm. Guess he doesn’t use “science”…?

Malcolm has been seeing flecks/lights that Hannah thinks are migraine auras. He misheard it as “auroras”. Unsubtle hint that this is Dust’s way of guiding him? Hasn’t been plot-pivotal yet, so we’ll see.

[Post-reread note: It was not.]

Chapter 19:

Reappearance of a trusted ally I forgot was coming back at all! Surprised and delighted.

Kitten!Pan kneads Malcolm’s hand as he rocks Lyra. He thinks “she’s too young to know it’s taboo,” but I expect it’d hurt if she didn’t feel so comfy and cared-for with him.

Earlier hints of “things in the river” now expanded with examples: mermaids, Father Thames, “old gods.”

I know we meet some of these in later chapters. And, look, I’m good with Lyra’s world having more fantastical beings than we already saw. But it sure would be weird if, after all HDM, the message of LBS was “sure, the Magisterium is evil and their god sucks, but science also sucks and will lead you astray, the truth is in following the right religion and trusting the better gods.”

Don’t remember if that’s how it actually ends! Just noting, as of now, the vibes feel odd.

[Post-reread note: Good news, I don’t think that was the message. The possibly-god-ish creatures we meet are no more or less trustworthy than other people.]

Chapter 20:

Evil Magisterium group kidnapped Lyra, after a St. Alexander kid in the refugee group tipped them off. Malcolm hates him, which is fair, but his own family are also so awful to him that I get why he was won over in the first place. Praise and affirmation for a kid who isn’t getting any at home is one heck of a drug.

The daring rescue is quite good! The Alice-Malcolm teamwork is really flourishing by now.

Malcolm’s “aurora” pops up again, but only to highlight the place they were already going. Finding Lyra is all their own ingenuity.

Chapter 21:

Last quarter of the book, and now things get outright magical.

Washing up on the island of a mystery woman with a cloud of butterflies. Malcolm first assumes one of them is her daemon, then wonders if, somehow, all of them are. Hey, I’ve written that fic.

A bag they took off Bonneville has…an alethiometer inside. Malcolm figures it’s the famous missing one.

Explains how conveniently Bonneville always caught up to them! And maybe why he was so convinced that “kidnapping Lyra” was the key to fixing his life in the first place.

They leave the alethiometer with the probably-faerie woman. So I guess from now on it’ll be Missing For Real forever.

At least it’s a more poetic end than “the kids drop it in the water and it gets crushed in the flood.” Getting some One Ring vibes here. It won’t get lost when it doesn’t want to.

Chapter 22:

Oh, they didn’t trade the alethiometer to the faerie, just its nice box? Huh. That’s less poetic, but a savvier move from Malcolm, so good for him.

New batch of probably-faeries, in fancy dress, in the garden of a fancy-but-unreachable manor. They each have a bird, which might or might not be daemons.

Really like the setup of “desolate ruins, hidden just outside the beautiful tranquil sphere of the garden.” Classic Fairyland worldbuilding.

…And Bonneville isn’t dead, again. Ugh.

Unless this is a faerie-thing taking his shape? Others are taking shapes of people familiar to Alice+Malcolm, including at least one who’s dead. Although I don’t remember him being that…and it’s enough of a satisfying twist, I feel like I would?

[Post-reread note: No luck, this is just Bonneville.]

This might retroactively ruin my “oh, nice, the alethiometer justifies how conveniently he always caught up with them” satisfaction.

Will the narrative give him a new justification for this round? TBD.

[Post-reread note: It did not.]

Chapter 23:

Meeting a giant in the water, talking him into opening a set of gates. Fully fairy-tale logic here, with Little Nemo type imagery. This team could make it through the Phantom Tollbooth or survive the Labyrinth, easy.

They figure this guy is the minor god of some tributary, since he works for Father Thames, god of the Thames. Logical enough.

Also, part of their scheme is making him believe Lyra is a princess. Not clear if he’s just gullible, or she has supernatural Princess Vibes that he can sense.

Back in normal reality, a witch! Most human person they’ve met all day, but with her Arctic-tern daemon not in range at first, poor Malcolm assumes otherwise.

(Briefly wonders if her branch of cloud-pine is her daemon. …I’ve written that fic too.)

Okay, I know from HDM why the witches would have an interest in Lyra. What I’m not sure of is, why didn’t this one try to either (depending on clan) guide her to safety, or kill her?

She shields them with what H2G2 would call a Somebody Else’s Problem field, but then just flies off again. Hmm.

[Post-reread note: Yeah, this never gets resolved or comes up again. Why even put her in the book??]

Chapter 24:

Alice swiped a bunch of food from the faerie garden party, and the whole crew eats some now. I’m surprised it’s still food-shaped, outside that sphere of magic influence. They’re not hesitant to eat it, hm.

I didn’t mention before, but the faerie woman with the butterflies breastfed Lyra, and Malcolm+Alice were immediately suspicious. So they have some idea of the dangers of eating unseelie food…

[Post-reread note: Yeah, this goes nowhere.]

Getting foreshadowing now that Bonneville is a ghost, which would be fine by me!

…Nope, he’s alive, hyena daemon and all. Dammit.

Malcolm, almost in these words: “I need an adult”

Valid, buddy.

Anyway, we’re trying to murder him again, and this time the hyena vanishes, so I guess it finally took. About time.

Bonneville grabbed Alice’s daemon to force her to follow him, so Malcolm followed to help, while his own daemon stayed to guard Lyra. Forced to endure the distance pain because they had no one else to rely on. That was a good heroic sequence there!

Mixed feelings about the rest. Alice already beat this guy twice, and yet he gets to keep coming back, until the boy character takes him on? Malcolm succeeds with an oar when Alice couldn’t with An Actual Gun? Not my favorite twist.

There’s been an air of SA around Bonneville for a while. He got shunned from academia over an unspecified sex crime, which got mentioned so much that I figured it was setting up a dramatic reveal of the details, but now it seems like maybe not?

Point is, it’s not unexpected that he tries to assault Alice. (Vague about the extent of it, since Malcolm’s POV doesn’t fully process what he sees.)

But before now, all his creepiness was a means to the end of kidnapping Lyra. And here it seems like he forgets all about Lyra, his main goal is to assault Alice.

We know why Lyra was worth a massive multi-day boat chase: she’s Mrs. Coulter’s baby, and he wanted her influence on his side.

But why is Alice worth that?

There’s no nice way to put this, sorry in advance: why not go after any of the thousand closer teenage girls who would be easier targets? This is so much work to attack a specific girl! Predators are lazy!

I can sure imagine it being about “revenge for those two times she nearly killed him.”

But: He doesn’t show that. There’s no “haha, now you’ll be sorry for everything you did to me!” type gloating. Can’t think of anything that foreshadowed his priority-switch away from Lyra. This is just me retconning in a reason, not the book giving one.

One chapter left to go.

The list of “points I expect this book to leave unresolved” has gotten pretty long. On first read, I remember thinking they were left hanging for the sequel to pick up! They…were not.

Here goes nothing…

Chapter 25, thread 1:

I do like that they’ve washed up in a graveyard this time. Coffins in a stone mausoleum give them justifiably-still-dry wood to build fires with.

Malcolm apologizes a lot to the skeletons. Good kid.

…It’s just occurring to me that I would’ve loved a reveal that the hints about ghosts were foreshadowing “the ghosts of the graveyard, moved and affirmed by Malcolm’s respect, rise up to help him kill Bonneville.”

Doubly so if this was Ghost Bonneville, seeking revenge on Alice for killing him. That unfinished business could have guided him after Alice, and Malcolm would need the supernatural help of the graveyard ghosts to kill him double-plus-dead.

Feeling a little cheated we didn’t get this now, ngl :(

Back on the morning after the flood, Hannah deduced that Malcolm would try to take Lyra to Asriel’s address.

Good payoff: her allies have had boats looking for the canoe ever since. They even found Asriel first, got him in a boat, and so they found the canoe on the water! Probably would’ve fallen apart before the kids reached him, so instead, he reaches them. Moments before a Magisterium boat does, even! A good dramatic rescue scene.

Bad lack-of-payoff: Did Hannah’s cool secret alethiometer come to anything at all?

She didn’t use it to figure out where Malcolm was going, she just deduced that from the evidence + how well she knows Malcolm.

[Post-reread note: I didn’t comment at the time, but this was in chapter 17. Which is also Hannah’s last appearance in the book. She gets mentioned in chapters 18 and 22, but never shows up on-page again.]

To be clear, I like that bit! Their friendship is genuine and important. Giving it that kind of plot payoff was good!

But there was never a different plot point that she did need the alethiometer for.

There was also plenty of setup about how difficult it is. It takes a lot of study and cross-referencing. Hannah doesn’t have the magical intuition that Lyra does.

So you could’ve made the payoff out of that instead. It answered something for her, she’s poring over the books looking at the symbols…and we, the readers, can connect them all to the bizarre events of Malcolm and Alice’s Excellent Unseelie Adventure. But Hannah doesn’t have that context. At last, she despairs. “I can’t do it! This is out of my league! It’s so obscure and complicated, only a genius could figure it out.”

[Cue Lyra’s leitmotif from HDM playing in the background.]

Heck, drop the whole Special Bonus Witch Prophecy, let Hannah deduce “a boy is going on a journey carrying a treasure” from the symbols she reads. She just can’t interpret anything more helpful, like “pick him up at this date and time.”

Oh, and! About that prophecy! Why didn’t it say “a boy and a girl”?

Alice was integral to Lyra surviving this trip. She did half the carrying! What gives, prophets? Behind every man is an unacknowledged woman, even in a witch prophecy??

Chapter 25, thread 2:

Alice gets to yell at Lord Asriel about how great Malcolm is, so don’t you dare disrespect everything he’s done.

I like this! Well-earned!

Alice has never hesitated to tell off Malcolm when she has a problem with him. So this reversal, telling off someone else in his defense, is really fulfilling. And you know she means it.

From here they get to Jordan College, via Asriel flying a gyropter. (Helicopter.) I’m retroactively surprised Malcolm+Alice haven’t heard any before. Wouldn’t they be used for rescues? And to survey the flood damage?

They gyropters also have earmuff/microphone setups to communicate over the rotors. Which has me retroactively wondering why nobody else has used radio. Not to communicate, not for news reports, not to play music in the pub…

I was vaguely assuming the tech didn’t exist here! Now…huh.

Asriel basically dumps the kids at Jordan (literally, the last scene is Malcolm collapsing on their carpet) and immediately biffs off to the North. A+ parenting, right there.

Most of this journey has been “washing up at a sanctuary, feeling safe for a short time, then having to flee”, so it’s a little anticlimactic to end on “but THIS time it’ll be fine, no worries, roll credits.”

I’d feel better if Hannah was here to greet them! Which would also salve the lack of Hannah in the back half of the book. She got a few scenes, chapters ago, then totally disappeared. Unsatisfying.

(And just imagine if Hannah had brought Malcolm+Alice’s parents! We didn’t actually meet Alice’s before, but we met Malcolm’s, and surely all of them deserve that reunion!)

One more anticlimax: Asriel tells the kids “never talk about this, not with anyone but each other, then you’ll be safe.”

Not buying that at all.

Their school is full of junior Magisterium spies. Teachers were getting fired. A local guy stood up to Church agents at the pub once, then he and his family had to flee the district.

The town knows which kids went missing during the flood. And which one had a canoe.

What stops the Church from kidnapping these kids the minute they get home, and forcing the intel out of them?

…on a more upbeat note, why not give the kids clearance to talk about it with a whole circle of specific adults Asriel trusts? Farder Coram counts. Hannah deserves to.

It took support, intel, and prep from several sympathetic adults to get these kids through the flood. If we ended with Asriel setting up a group of supporters to get them through whatever danger the Church brings down next, I’d feel reassured!

But nope.

So that’s La Belle Sauvage. Really strong start! Faceplanted in a whole lot of ways by the end.

Might need a new thread for the “and ANOTHER thing that never got resolved–!” reactions that will undoubtedly hit me over the rest of the night.

(TSC is checked out. Will start that some time soon.)

#HisDarkMaterials

Re-listen Liveblog: La Belle Sauvage

Doing a re-listen of books 1-2 in the Book of Dust trilogy, since book 3 just came out.

I just finished the first one, La Belle Sauvage, liveblogging it on Mastodon and on Bluesky, Here’s a roundup post.

(I haven’t read this book since it came out in 2017, and I deliberately didn’t reread my original 2017 reaction post to LBS until now. Feel free to look through both, see which things I had different reactions about, and how many times I just noticed the same thing twice.)

La Belle Sauvage, chapters 1-3:

This starts off so strong. Like Lyra opening TGC, Malcolm is an active, curious, fun kid! We get a ton of worldbuilding through the places he explores, and a ton more through “noticing what the adults pointedly aren’t telling him.”

Not sure how well a reader could follow the background mystery if you didn’t know all the names and references from HDM. But if you have, it’s really juicy. Malcolm obvs has no idea, and it’s great how he fills the gaps with wild speculation.

Our one glimpse of baby Lyra so far was super charming.

Chapter 4:

Detour into the POV of Farder Coram.

In retrospect, a lot of this is an excuse to recap things we know from HDM, but the writing is engaging enough that it’s hard to mind.

[Note after rereading my original reaction post: Huh, this annoyed me a lot more the first time around. Apparently it gets a lot more tolerable when you haven’t been deep in the original HDM recently.]

Chapters 5-6:

Hannah Relf, and the whole field of “alethiometry as a serious academic discipline” that she belongs to, is barely in HDM. Really cool to see it showcased with her younger self in action here.

The way Malcolm gets roped into her spycraft is a little contrived, but I’ll allow it. Hannah’s ongoing stress about the morality of it helps.

(Made more sense when adults were recruiting Lyra, she wasn’t just an unusually-sharp 11-year-old, they also knew she was part of an Important Prophecy.)

The first titles Hannah lends Malcolm turn out to be “The Body in the Library” and “A Brief History of Time.”

Anybody out there written “HDM AU of Agatha Christie”? It’s canon now.

Chapters 7-9:

Getting into the League of St. Alexander plot now, and, oof, still hits hard. An upsettingly realistic story of a group of kids being manipulated into turning on each other, and on the actually-supportive adults in their lives.

Reminds me of the school sections in Nona the Ninth. There’s high-stakes politics and espionage happening around them, people are getting killed, we have a small group of good teachers trying their best to get normal lessons to the kids in spite of it all, and the whole thing is from the POV of the kids, who aren’t officially being told much, but they know something is up. Lots of urgently passing rumors, on the level of “well, my dad says he heard such-and-such, so I reckon that means…”

Very different setups, but still, lots of parallels! And both good.

Oh, one more thing!

This St. Alexander appears to be an in-universe creation, but the Church official who tells his story also talks to the kids about Jesus – not in detail, just mentions of things like, their job is to spread The Love Of Jesus(TM).

I checked out the HDM ebooks just to text-search them. The name “Christ” never comes up. The name “Jesus” only comes up in TAS, and it’s from Mary Malone. (Talking to Lyra — no mention of whether Lyra recognizes the name.) Nobody ever mentions Christmas or Easter, either.

The Magisterium is explicitly Christian — TGC has Lyra mention someone being “baptized as a Christian.” (After that, the term disappears until, again, Mary in TAS uses it.) So this felt like a worldbuilding point, that their doctrine specifically de-emphasizes Jesus. No obligatory prayers, no lip service to “what would Jesus do,” no framing their actions in terms of “following the Word of Christ,” no references at all.

…And now we’re in LBS, and this random person is telling a group of elementary-school kids “of course this is a Proper Country where we follow the Good Word about Jesus,” like of course that’s a common thing they’ve all heard of.

Is this difference also a worldbuilding point? Or is it a Doylist thing where, in writing HDM, Pullman wasn’t ready to antagonize Jesus’ fans that directly, and now he is?

(So far, no idea! TBD if anything in future chapters will make it clearer.)

[Post-reread note: They did not make it clearer.]

Chapters 10-11:

Lors Asriel! HDM readers know in a few years he’ll murder a kid Malcolm’s age for a military advantage, but here, Malcolm doesn’t pick up anything sinister at all. Personal charisma on full blast. Don’t remember if Malcolm ever learns different, or not.

[Post-reread note: Well, not in this book, at least.]

Stray daemon details that caught my eye:

• The shop teacher’s woodpecker daemon drills holes in scrap wood as a nervous tic
• Malcolm’s unsettled Aster can take chimera forms, like an owl with duck feathers, but only experiments with that when nobody else is watching
• Hyena daemon urinates in the road, while looking at Malcolm. Makes him feel so dirty/violated that he’s too embarrassed to tell anyone until his next meeting with Hannah

Are we supposed to believe daemons have been doing that (just, you know, normally in private) all along? Not sure I buy it.

[Post-reread note: There’s an upcoming journey with baby Lyra in which Malcolm is constantly aware of how often she needs to be fed and changed. The idea of feeding/changing Pan is never even mentioned. So, yeah, I don’t think it’s a general daemon bodily function. I think it’s is a skill this specific daemon has cultivated to freak people out.]

Chapters 12-13:

Oh, huh. Argument at Malcolm’s family pub, the phrase “scientific management of resources” gets thrown around. A slip from Pullman, or was “experimental theology” supposed to be a term from Church-controlled circles, not common in the general public?

[Post-reread note: For now, I think it was just a slip from Pullman.]

Argument is about the upcoming plot-point flood.

Seems worth noting that the “modern, scientific” proponents are all characters who are going to be proven wrong. The Right Understanding comes from “the ancient wisdom of the gyptians who know how to read the signs” and “one guy’s granny.”

Hannah gets access to a contraband alethiometer! From the description, this is the one Lyra will eventually get.

Contrast to the Bodleian Library one she was using officially. Don’t think I realized there were different models before this. With only 6 ever made, I figured they were a matching set.

The Bodleian one has full-color symbols! The stolen one has plain black ink lineart.

Idle theorizing: all 6 were originally made with black lineart, but that faceplate was damaged and replaced at some point. The new artist either was told to paint the new symbols fancier, or just had fun with it.

End of this latest chapter refers to Bonneville (the guy with the hyena daemon) as “a physicist.”

So much for my half-baked theory that maybe “experimental theology” was a replacement term for “physics” specifically.

Chapters 14-15:

Higher-up spies encourage Hannah to keep talking with (from their POV) this random 11-year-old, but it gets in-universe justified in a way that works for me. (…I mean narratively, not ethically.)

Alice (teen kitchen worker) calls Lyra a “little flirt” for giggling at Malcolm. Not creepy on its own, that’s a joke people make about babies…but knowing that Pullman is planning future Lyra/Malcolm, with more explicitly-creepy stuff in the lead-up…yeah, this is a retroactive big oof.

Malcolm gets to meet Mrs. Coulter! Unlike with Asriel, he gets a bad vibe off her immediately. Well, she’s on track to murder a lot more children than Asriel will, so maybe it’s fair.

(Also, Asriel shows care for Lyra, which biases Malcolm toward him instantly.)

Part 1 ends (at the 54% mark) with the predicted Big Flood hitting. Alice, Malcolm, and Lyra get stranded together in a boat.

Everything I remember being “meh” about this book is on their river journey. Plunging apprehensively onward…

Chapter 16:

Worldbuilding detail: pharmacies are marked with a green cross. (Not sure from context if it’s just a palette-swapped ➕️, or an actual ✝️.)

The dynamic between Alice and Malcolm is really good here. Grudging teamwork.

Malcolm and Aster see a drowned body during the flooding, and wonder “what happens to daemons when you die?”

Surprised they wouldn’t know. Even with no deaths in their close family, surely it’s a thing children are taught about? (They’ve been reading murder mysteries! It never came up?)

Different chat a few chapters ago, they saw Pan turning into a mole, and wondered how a baby daemon knows how to turn into a creature they’ve never actually seen.

That I liked, because it doesn’t seem like there’s a clear, generally-known answer. One adult daemon offered “You just feel mole-y.”

Chapter 17:

Mention of a prophecy about “a boy” that might be Malcolm.

Feels like overkill? Like “he can’t just be a normal person caught up in Lyra’s cosmic destiny, he’s gotta be special too.” (Don’t remember if there’s payoff for this later. Might like it more if it’s good. TBD.)

[Post-reread note: There was not.]

Chapter 18:

Not much to say here except “go Alice.” Previously seen decking Bonneville with a chair, now she gets off a gun at him.

Bonneville mentions “experimental theology” to Malcolm. Guess he doesn’t use “science”…?

Malcolm has been seeing flecks/lights that Hannah thinks are migraine auras. He misheard it as “auroras”. Unsubtle hint that this is Dust’s way of guiding him? Hasn’t been plot-pivotal yet, so we’ll see.

[Post-reread note: It was not.]

Chapter 19:

Reappearance of a trusted ally I forgot was coming back at all! Surprised and delighted.

Kitten!Pan kneads Malcolm’s hand as he rocks Lyra. He thinks “she’s too young to know it’s taboo,” but I expect it’d hurt if she didn’t feel so comfy and cared-for with him.

Earlier hints of “things in the river” now expanded with examples: mermaids, Father Thames, “old gods.”

I know we meet some of these in later chapters. And, look, I’m good with Lyra’s world having more fantastical beings than we already saw. But it sure would be weird if, after all HDM, the message of LBS was “sure, the Magisterium is evil and their god sucks, but science also sucks and will lead you astray, the truth is in following the right religion and trusting the better gods.”

Don’t remember if that’s how it actually ends! Just noting, as of now, the vibes feel odd.

[Post-reread note: Good news, I don’t think that was the message. The possibly-god-ish creatures we meet are no more or less trustworthy than other people.]

Chapter 20:

Evil Magisterium group kidnapped Lyra, after a St. Alexander kid in the refugee group tipped them off. Malcolm hates him, which is fair, but his own family are also so awful to him that I get why he was won over in the first place. Praise and affirmation for a kid who isn’t getting any at home is one heck of a drug.

The daring rescue is quite good! The Alice-Malcolm teamwork is really flourishing by now.

Malcolm’s “aurora” pops up again, but only to highlight the place they were already going. Finding Lyra is all their own ingenuity.

Chapter 21:

Last quarter of the book, and now things get outright magical.

Washing up on the island of a mystery woman with a cloud of butterflies. Malcolm first assumes one of them is her daemon, then wonders if, somehow, all of them are. Hey, I’ve written that fic.

A bag they took off Bonneville has…an alethiometer inside. Malcolm figures it’s the famous missing one.

Explains how conveniently Bonneville always caught up to them! And maybe why he was so convinced that “kidnapping Lyra” was the key to fixing his life in the first place.

They leave the alethiometer with the probably-faerie woman. So I guess from now on it’ll be Missing For Real forever.

At least it’s a more poetic end than “the kids drop it in the water and it gets crushed in the flood.” Getting some One Ring vibes here. It won’t get lost when it doesn’t want to.

Chapter 22:

Oh, they didn’t trade the alethiometer to the faerie, just its nice box? Huh. That’s less poetic, but a savvier move from Malcolm, so good for him.

New batch of probably-faeries, in fancy dress, in the garden of a fancy-but-unreachable manor. They each have a bird, which might or might not be daemons.

Really like the setup of “desolate ruins, hidden just outside the beautiful tranquil sphere of the garden.” Classic Fairyland worldbuilding.

…And Bonneville isn’t dead, again. Ugh.

Unless this is a faerie-thing taking his shape? Others are taking shapes of people familiar to Alice+Malcolm, including at least one who’s dead. Although I don’t remember him being that…and it’s enough of a satisfying twist, I feel like I would?

[Post-reread note: No luck, this is just Bonneville.]

This might retroactively ruin my “oh, nice, the alethiometer justifies how conveniently he always caught up with them” satisfaction.

Will the narrative give him a new justification for this round? TBD.

[Post-reread note: It did not.]

Chapter 23:

Meeting a giant in the water, talking him into opening a set of gates. Fully fairy-tale logic here, with Little Nemo type imagery. This team could make it through the Phantom Tollbooth or survive the Labyrinth, easy.

They figure this guy is the minor god of some tributary, since he works for Father Thames, god of the Thames. Logical enough.

Also, part of their scheme is making him believe Lyra is a princess. Not clear if he’s just gullible, or she has supernatural Princess Vibes that he can sense.

Back in normal reality, a witch! Most human person they’ve met all day, but with her Arctic-tern daemon not in range at first, poor Malcolm assumes otherwise.

(Briefly wonders if her branch of cloud-pine is her daemon. …I’ve written that fic too.)

Okay, I know from HDM why the witches would have an interest in Lyra. What I’m not sure of is, why didn’t this one try to either (depending on clan) guide her to safety, or kill her?

She shields them with what H2G2 would call a Somebody Else’s Problem field, but then just flies off again. Hmm.

[Post-reread note: Yeah, this never gets resolved or comes up again. Why even put her in the book??]

Chapter 24:

Alice swiped a bunch of food from the faerie garden party, and the whole crew eats some now. I’m surprised it’s still food-shaped, outside that sphere of magic influence. They’re not hesitant to eat it, hm.

I didn’t mention before, but the faerie woman with the butterflies breastfed Lyra, and Malcolm+Alice were immediately suspicious. So they have some idea of the dangers of eating unseelie food…

[Post-reread note: Yeah, this goes nowhere.]

Getting foreshadowing now that Bonneville is a ghost, which would be fine by me!

…Nope, he’s alive, hyena daemon and all. Dammit.

Malcolm, almost in these words: “I need an adult”

Valid, buddy.

Anyway, we’re trying to murder him again, and this time the hyena vanishes, so I guess it finally took. About time.

Bonneville grabbed Alice’s daemon to force her to follow him, so Malcolm followed to help, while his own daemon stayed to guard Lyra. Forced to endure the distance pain because they had no one else to rely on. That was a good heroic sequence there!

Mixed feelings about the rest. Alice already beat this guy twice, and yet he gets to keep coming back, until the boy character takes him on? Malcolm succeeds with an oar when Alice couldn’t with An Actual Gun? Not my favorite twist.

There’s been an air of SA around Bonneville for a while. He got shunned from academia over an unspecified sex crime, which got mentioned so much that I figured it was setting up a dramatic reveal of the details, but now it seems like maybe not?

Point is, it’s not unexpected that he tries to assault Alice. (Vague about the extent of it, since Malcolm’s POV doesn’t fully process what he sees.)

But before now, all his creepiness was a means to the end of kidnapping Lyra. And here it seems like he forgets all about Lyra, his main goal is to assault Alice.

We know why Lyra was worth a massive multi-day boat chase: she’s Mrs. Coulter’s baby, and he wanted her influence on his side.

But why is Alice worth that?

There’s no nice way to put this, sorry in advance: why not go after any of the thousand closer teenage girls who would be easier targets? This is so much work to attack a specific girl! Predators are lazy!

I can sure imagine it being about “revenge for those two times she nearly killed him.”

But: He doesn’t show that. There’s no “haha, now you’ll be sorry for everything you did to me!” type gloating. Can’t think of anything that foreshadowed his priority-switch away from Lyra. This is just me retconning in a reason, not the book giving one.

One chapter left to go.

The list of “points I expect this book to leave unresolved” has gotten pretty long. On first read, I remember thinking they were left hanging for the sequel to pick up! They…were not.

Here goes nothing…

Chapter 25, thread 1:

I do like that they’ve washed up in a graveyard this time. Coffins in a stone mausoleum give them justifiably-still-dry wood to build fires with.

Malcolm apologizes a lot to the skeletons. Good kid.

…It’s just occurring to me that I would’ve loved a reveal that the hints about ghosts were foreshadowing “the ghosts of the graveyard, moved and affirmed by Malcolm’s respect, rise up to help him kill Bonneville.”

Doubly so if this was Ghost Bonneville, seeking revenge on Alice for killing him. That unfinished business could have guided him after Alice, and Malcolm would need the supernatural help of the graveyard ghosts to kill him double-plus-dead.

Feeling a little cheated we didn’t get this now, ngl :(

Back on the morning after the flood, Hannah deduced that Malcolm would try to take Lyra to Asriel’s address.

Good payoff: her allies have had boats looking for the canoe ever since. They even found Asriel first, got him in a boat, and so they found the canoe on the water! Probably would’ve fallen apart before the kids reached him, so instead, he reaches them. Moments before a Magisterium boat does, even! A good dramatic rescue scene.

Bad lack-of-payoff: Did Hannah’s cool secret alethiometer come to anything at all?

She didn’t use it to figure out where Malcolm was going, she just deduced that from the evidence + how well she knows Malcolm.

[Post-reread note: I didn’t comment at the time, but this was in chapter 17. Which is also Hannah’s last appearance in the book. She gets mentioned in chapters 18 and 22, but never shows up on-page again.]

To be clear, I like that bit! Their friendship is genuine and important. Giving it that kind of plot payoff was good!

But there was never a different plot point that she did need the alethiometer for.

There was also plenty of setup about how difficult it is. It takes a lot of study and cross-referencing. Hannah doesn’t have the magical intuition that Lyra does.

So you could’ve made the payoff out of that instead. It answered something for her, she’s poring over the books looking at the symbols…and we, the readers, can connect them all to the bizarre events of Malcolm and Alice’s Excellent Unseelie Adventure. But Hannah doesn’t have that context. At last, she despairs. “I can’t do it! This is out of my league! It’s so obscure and complicated, only a genius could figure it out.”

[Cue Lyra’s leitmotif from HDM playing in the background.]

Heck, drop the whole Special Bonus Witch Prophecy, let Hannah deduce “a boy is going on a journey carrying a treasure” from the symbols she reads. She just can’t interpret anything more helpful, like “pick him up at this date and time.”

Oh, and! About that prophecy! Why didn’t it say “a boy and a girl”?

Alice was integral to Lyra surviving this trip. She did half the carrying! What gives, prophets? Behind every man is an unacknowledged woman, even in a witch prophecy??

Chapter 25, thread 2:

Alice gets to yell at Lord Asriel about how great Malcolm is, so don’t you dare disrespect everything he’s done.

I like this! Well-earned!

Alice has never hesitated to tell off Malcolm when she has a problem with him. So this reversal, telling off someone else in his defense, is really fulfilling. And you know she means it.

From here they get to Jordan College, via Asriel flying a gyropter. (Helicopter.) I’m retroactively surprised Malcolm+Alice haven’t heard any before. Wouldn’t they be used for rescues? And to survey the flood damage?

They gyropters also have earmuff/microphone setups to communicate over the rotors. Which has me retroactively wondering why nobody else has used radio. Not to communicate, not for news reports, not to play music in the pub…

I was vaguely assuming the tech didn’t exist here! Now…huh.

Asriel basically dumps the kids at Jordan (literally, the last scene is Malcolm collapsing on their carpet) and immediately biffs off to the North. A+ parenting, right there.

Most of this journey has been “washing up at a sanctuary, feeling safe for a short time, then having to flee”, so it’s a little anticlimactic to end on “but THIS time it’ll be fine, no worries, roll credits.”

I’d feel better if Hannah was here to greet them! Which would also salve the lack of Hannah in the back half of the book. She got a few scenes, chapters ago, then totally disappeared. Unsatisfying.

(And just imagine if Hannah had brought Malcolm+Alice’s parents! We didn’t actually meet Alice’s before, but we met Malcolm’s, and surely all of them deserve that reunion!)

One more anticlimax: Asriel tells the kids “never talk about this, not with anyone but each other, then you’ll be safe.”

Not buying that at all.

Their school is full of junior Magisterium spies. Teachers were getting fired. A local guy stood up to Church agents at the pub once, then he and his family had to flee the district.

The town knows which kids went missing during the flood. And which one had a canoe.

What stops the Church from kidnapping these kids the minute they get home, and forcing the intel out of them?

…on a more upbeat note, why not give the kids clearance to talk about it with a whole circle of specific adults Asriel trusts? Farder Coram counts. Hannah deserves to.

It took support, intel, and prep from several sympathetic adults to get these kids through the flood. If we ended with Asriel setting up a group of supporters to get them through whatever danger the Church brings down next, I’d feel reassured!

But nope.

So that’s La Belle Sauvage. Really strong start! Faceplanted in a whole lot of ways by the end.

Might need a new thread for the “and ANOTHER thing that never got resolved–!” reactions that will undoubtedly hit me over the rest of the night.

(TSC is checked out. Will start that some time soon.)

#HisDarkMaterials

Re-listen Liveblog: La Belle Sauvage

Doing a re-listen of books 1-2 in the Book of Dust trilogy, since book 3 just came out.

I just finished the first one, La Belle Sauvage, liveblogging it on Mastodon and on Bluesky, Here’s a roundup post.

(I haven’t read this book since it came out in 2017, and I deliberately didn’t reread my original 2017 reaction post to LBS until now. Feel free to look through both, see which things I had different reactions about, and how many times I just noticed the same thing twice.)

La Belle Sauvage, chapters 1-3:

This starts off so strong. Like Lyra opening TGC, Malcolm is an active, curious, fun kid! We get a ton of worldbuilding through the places he explores, and a ton more through “noticing what the adults pointedly aren’t telling him.”

Not sure how well a reader could follow the background mystery if you didn’t know all the names and references from HDM. But if you have, it’s really juicy. Malcolm obvs has no idea, and it’s great how he fills the gaps with wild speculation.

Our one glimpse of baby Lyra so far was super charming.

Chapter 4:

Detour into the POV of Farder Coram.

In retrospect, a lot of this is an excuse to recap things we know from HDM, but the writing is engaging enough that it’s hard to mind.

[Note after rereading my original reaction post: Huh, this annoyed me a lot more the first time around. Apparently it gets a lot more tolerable when you haven’t been deep in the original HDM recently.]

Chapters 5-6:

Hannah Relf, and the whole field of “alethiometry as a serious academic discipline” that she belongs to, is barely in HDM. Really cool to see it showcased with her younger self in action here.

The way Malcolm gets roped into her spycraft is a little contrived, but I’ll allow it. Hannah’s ongoing stress about the morality of it helps.

(Made more sense when adults were recruiting Lyra, she wasn’t just an unusually-sharp 11-year-old, they also knew she was part of an Important Prophecy.)

The first titles Hannah lends Malcolm turn out to be “The Body in the Library” and “A Brief History of Time.”

Anybody out there written “HDM AU of Agatha Christie”? It’s canon now.

Chapters 7-9:

Getting into the League of St. Alexander plot now, and, oof, still hits hard. An upsettingly realistic story of a group of kids being manipulated into turning on each other, and on the actually-supportive adults in their lives.

Reminds me of the school sections in Nona the Ninth. There’s high-stakes politics and espionage happening around them, people are getting killed, we have a small group of good teachers trying their best to get normal lessons to the kids in spite of it all, and the whole thing is from the POV of the kids, who aren’t officially being told much, but they know something is up. Lots of urgently passing rumors, on the level of “well, my dad says he heard such-and-such, so I reckon that means…”

Very different setups, but still, lots of parallels! And both good.

Oh, one more thing!

This St. Alexander appears to be an in-universe creation, but the Church official who tells his story also talks to the kids about Jesus – not in detail, just mentions of things like, their job is to spread The Love Of Jesus(TM).

I checked out the HDM ebooks just to text-search them. The name “Christ” never comes up. The name “Jesus” only comes up in TAS, and it’s from Mary Malone. (Talking to Lyra — no mention of whether Lyra recognizes the name.) Nobody ever mentions Christmas or Easter, either.

The Magisterium is explicitly Christian — TGC has Lyra mention someone being “baptized as a Christian.” (After that, the term disappears until, again, Mary in TAS uses it.) So this felt like a worldbuilding point, that their doctrine specifically de-emphasizes Jesus. No obligatory prayers, no lip service to “what would Jesus do,” no framing their actions in terms of “following the Word of Christ,” no references at all.

…And now we’re in LBS, and this random person is telling a group of elementary-school kids “of course this is a Proper Country where we follow the Good Word about Jesus,” like of course that’s a common thing they’ve all heard of.

Is this difference also a worldbuilding point? Or is it a Doylist thing where, in writing HDM, Pullman wasn’t ready to antagonize Jesus’ fans that directly, and now he is?

(So far, no idea! TBD if anything in future chapters will make it clearer.)

[Post-reread note: They did not make it clearer.]

Chapters 10-11:

Lors Asriel! HDM readers know in a few years he’ll murder a kid Malcolm’s age for a military advantage, but here, Malcolm doesn’t pick up anything sinister at all. Personal charisma on full blast. Don’t remember if Malcolm ever learns different, or not.

[Post-reread note: Well, not in this book, at least.]

Stray daemon details that caught my eye:

• The shop teacher’s woodpecker daemon drills holes in scrap wood as a nervous tic
• Malcolm’s unsettled Aster can take chimera forms, like an owl with duck feathers, but only experiments with that when nobody else is watching
• Hyena daemon urinates in the road, while looking at Malcolm. Makes him feel so dirty/violated that he’s too embarrassed to tell anyone until his next meeting with Hannah

Are we supposed to believe daemons have been doing that (just, you know, normally in private) all along? Not sure I buy it.

[Post-reread note: There’s an upcoming journey with baby Lyra in which Malcolm is constantly aware of how often she needs to be fed and changed. The idea of feeding/changing Pan is never even mentioned. So, yeah, I don’t think it’s a general daemon bodily function. I think it’s is a skill this specific daemon has cultivated to freak people out.]

Chapters 12-13:

Oh, huh. Argument at Malcolm’s family pub, the phrase “scientific management of resources” gets thrown around. A slip from Pullman, or was “experimental theology” supposed to be a term from Church-controlled circles, not common in the general public?

[Post-reread note: For now, I think it was just a slip from Pullman.]

Argument is about the upcoming plot-point flood.

Seems worth noting that the “modern, scientific” proponents are all characters who are going to be proven wrong. The Right Understanding comes from “the ancient wisdom of the gyptians who know how to read the signs” and “one guy’s granny.”

Hannah gets access to a contraband alethiometer! From the description, this is the one Lyra will eventually get.

Contrast to the Bodleian Library one she was using officially. Don’t think I realized there were different models before this. With only 6 ever made, I figured they were a matching set.

The Bodleian one has full-color symbols! The stolen one has plain black ink lineart.

Idle theorizing: all 6 were originally made with black lineart, but that faceplate was damaged and replaced at some point. The new artist either was told to paint the new symbols fancier, or just had fun with it.

End of this latest chapter refers to Bonneville (the guy with the hyena daemon) as “a physicist.”

So much for my half-baked theory that maybe “experimental theology” was a replacement term for “physics” specifically.

Chapters 14-15:

Higher-up spies encourage Hannah to keep talking with (from their POV) this random 11-year-old, but it gets in-universe justified in a way that works for me. (…I mean narratively, not ethically.)

Alice (teen kitchen worker) calls Lyra a “little flirt” for giggling at Malcolm. Not creepy on its own, that’s a joke people make about babies…but knowing that Pullman is planning future Lyra/Malcolm, with more explicitly-creepy stuff in the lead-up…yeah, this is a retroactive big oof.

Malcolm gets to meet Mrs. Coulter! Unlike with Asriel, he gets a bad vibe off her immediately. Well, she’s on track to murder a lot more children than Asriel will, so maybe it’s fair.

(Also, Asriel shows care for Lyra, which biases Malcolm toward him instantly.)

Part 1 ends (at the 54% mark) with the predicted Big Flood hitting. Alice, Malcolm, and Lyra get stranded together in a boat.

Everything I remember being “meh” about this book is on their river journey. Plunging apprehensively onward…

Chapter 16:

Worldbuilding detail: pharmacies are marked with a green cross. (Not sure from context if it’s just a palette-swapped ➕️, or an actual ✝️.)

The dynamic between Alice and Malcolm is really good here. Grudging teamwork.

Malcolm and Aster see a drowned body during the flooding, and wonder “what happens to daemons when you die?”

Surprised they wouldn’t know. Even with no deaths in their close family, surely it’s a thing children are taught about? (They’ve been reading murder mysteries! It never came up?)

Different chat a few chapters ago, they saw Pan turning into a mole, and wondered how a baby daemon knows how to turn into a creature they’ve never actually seen.

That I liked, because it doesn’t seem like there’s a clear, generally-known answer. One adult daemon offered “You just feel mole-y.”

Chapter 17:

Mention of a prophecy about “a boy” that might be Malcolm.

Feels like overkill? Like “he can’t just be a normal person caught up in Lyra’s cosmic destiny, he’s gotta be special too.” (Don’t remember if there’s payoff for this later. Might like it more if it’s good. TBD.)

[Post-reread note: There was not.]

Chapter 18:

Not much to say here except “go Alice.” Previously seen decking Bonneville with a chair, now she gets off a gun at him.

Bonneville mentions “experimental theology” to Malcolm. Guess he doesn’t use “science”…?

Malcolm has been seeing flecks/lights that Hannah thinks are migraine auras. He misheard it as “auroras”. Unsubtle hint that this is Dust’s way of guiding him? Hasn’t been plot-pivotal yet, so we’ll see.

[Post-reread note: It was not.]

Chapter 19:

Reappearance of a trusted ally I forgot was coming back at all! Surprised and delighted.

Kitten!Pan kneads Malcolm’s hand as he rocks Lyra. He thinks “she’s too young to know it’s taboo,” but I expect it’d hurt if she didn’t feel so comfy and cared-for with him.

Earlier hints of “things in the river” now expanded with examples: mermaids, Father Thames, “old gods.”

I know we meet some of these in later chapters. And, look, I’m good with Lyra’s world having more fantastical beings than we already saw. But it sure would be weird if, after all HDM, the message of LBS was “sure, the Magisterium is evil and their god sucks, but science also sucks and will lead you astray, the truth is in following the right religion and trusting the better gods.”

Don’t remember if that’s how it actually ends! Just noting, as of now, the vibes feel odd.

[Post-reread note: Good news, I don’t think that was the message. The possibly-god-ish creatures we meet are no more or less trustworthy than other people.]

Chapter 20:

Evil Magisterium group kidnapped Lyra, after a St. Alexander kid in the refugee group tipped them off. Malcolm hates him, which is fair, but his own family are also so awful to him that I get why he was won over in the first place. Praise and affirmation for a kid who isn’t getting any at home is one heck of a drug.

The daring rescue is quite good! The Alice-Malcolm teamwork is really flourishing by now.

Malcolm’s “aurora” pops up again, but only to highlight the place they were already going. Finding Lyra is all their own ingenuity.

Chapter 21:

Last quarter of the book, and now things get outright magical.

Washing up on the island of a mystery woman with a cloud of butterflies. Malcolm first assumes one of them is her daemon, then wonders if, somehow, all of them are. Hey, I’ve written that fic.

A bag they took off Bonneville has…an alethiometer inside. Malcolm figures it’s the famous missing one.

Explains how conveniently Bonneville always caught up to them! And maybe why he was so convinced that “kidnapping Lyra” was the key to fixing his life in the first place.

They leave the alethiometer with the probably-faerie woman. So I guess from now on it’ll be Missing For Real forever.

At least it’s a more poetic end than “the kids drop it in the water and it gets crushed in the flood.” Getting some One Ring vibes here. It won’t get lost when it doesn’t want to.

Chapter 22:

Oh, they didn’t trade the alethiometer to the faerie, just its nice box? Huh. That’s less poetic, but a savvier move from Malcolm, so good for him.

New batch of probably-faeries, in fancy dress, in the garden of a fancy-but-unreachable manor. They each have a bird, which might or might not be daemons.

Really like the setup of “desolate ruins, hidden just outside the beautiful tranquil sphere of the garden.” Classic Fairyland worldbuilding.

…And Bonneville isn’t dead, again. Ugh.

Unless this is a faerie-thing taking his shape? Others are taking shapes of people familiar to Alice+Malcolm, including at least one who’s dead. Although I don’t remember him being that…and it’s enough of a satisfying twist, I feel like I would?

[Post-reread note: No luck, this is just Bonneville.]

This might retroactively ruin my “oh, nice, the alethiometer justifies how conveniently he always caught up with them” satisfaction.

Will the narrative give him a new justification for this round? TBD.

[Post-reread note: It did not.]

Chapter 23:

Meeting a giant in the water, talking him into opening a set of gates. Fully fairy-tale logic here, with Little Nemo type imagery. This team could make it through the Phantom Tollbooth or survive the Labyrinth, easy.

They figure this guy is the minor god of some tributary, since he works for Father Thames, god of the Thames. Logical enough.

Also, part of their scheme is making him believe Lyra is a princess. Not clear if he’s just gullible, or she has supernatural Princess Vibes that he can sense.

Back in normal reality, a witch! Most human person they’ve met all day, but with her Arctic-tern daemon not in range at first, poor Malcolm assumes otherwise.

(Briefly wonders if her branch of cloud-pine is her daemon. …I’ve written that fic too.)

Okay, I know from HDM why the witches would have an interest in Lyra. What I’m not sure of is, why didn’t this one try to either (depending on clan) guide her to safety, or kill her?

She shields them with what H2G2 would call a Somebody Else’s Problem field, but then just flies off again. Hmm.

[Post-reread note: Yeah, this never gets resolved or comes up again. Why even put her in the book??]

Chapter 24:

Alice swiped a bunch of food from the faerie garden party, and the whole crew eats some now. I’m surprised it’s still food-shaped, outside that sphere of magic influence. They’re not hesitant to eat it, hm.

I didn’t mention before, but the faerie woman with the butterflies breastfed Lyra, and Malcolm+Alice were immediately suspicious. So they have some idea of the dangers of eating unseelie food…

[Post-reread note: Yeah, this goes nowhere.]

Getting foreshadowing now that Bonneville is a ghost, which would be fine by me!

…Nope, he’s alive, hyena daemon and all. Dammit.

Malcolm, almost in these words: “I need an adult”

Valid, buddy.

Anyway, we’re trying to murder him again, and this time the hyena vanishes, so I guess it finally took. About time.

Bonneville grabbed Alice’s daemon to force her to follow him, so Malcolm followed to help, while his own daemon stayed to guard Lyra. Forced to endure the distance pain because they had no one else to rely on. That was a good heroic sequence there!

Mixed feelings about the rest. Alice already beat this guy twice, and yet he gets to keep coming back, until the boy character takes him on? Malcolm succeeds with an oar when Alice couldn’t with An Actual Gun? Not my favorite twist.

There’s been an air of SA around Bonneville for a while. He got shunned from academia over an unspecified sex crime, which got mentioned so much that I figured it was setting up a dramatic reveal of the details, but now it seems like maybe not?

Point is, it’s not unexpected that he tries to assault Alice. (Vague about the extent of it, since Malcolm’s POV doesn’t fully process what he sees.)

But before now, all his creepiness was a means to the end of kidnapping Lyra. And here it seems like he forgets all about Lyra, his main goal is to assault Alice.

We know why Lyra was worth a massive multi-day boat chase: she’s Mrs. Coulter’s baby, and he wanted her influence on his side.

But why is Alice worth that?

There’s no nice way to put this, sorry in advance: why not go after any of the thousand closer teenage girls who would be easier targets? This is so much work to attack a specific girl! Predators are lazy!

I can sure imagine it being about “revenge for those two times she nearly killed him.”

But: He doesn’t show that. There’s no “haha, now you’ll be sorry for everything you did to me!” type gloating. Can’t think of anything that foreshadowed his priority-switch away from Lyra. This is just me retconning in a reason, not the book giving one.

One chapter left to go.

The list of “points I expect this book to leave unresolved” has gotten pretty long. On first read, I remember thinking they were left hanging for the sequel to pick up! They…were not.

Here goes nothing…

Chapter 25, thread 1:

I do like that they’ve washed up in a graveyard this time. Coffins in a stone mausoleum give them justifiably-still-dry wood to build fires with.

Malcolm apologizes a lot to the skeletons. Good kid.

…It’s just occurring to me that I would’ve loved a reveal that the hints about ghosts were foreshadowing “the ghosts of the graveyard, moved and affirmed by Malcolm’s respect, rise up to help him kill Bonneville.”

Doubly so if this was Ghost Bonneville, seeking revenge on Alice for killing him. That unfinished business could have guided him after Alice, and Malcolm would need the supernatural help of the graveyard ghosts to kill him double-plus-dead.

Feeling a little cheated we didn’t get this now, ngl :(

Back on the morning after the flood, Hannah deduced that Malcolm would try to take Lyra to Asriel’s address.

Good payoff: her allies have had boats looking for the canoe ever since. They even found Asriel first, got him in a boat, and so they found the canoe on the water! Probably would’ve fallen apart before the kids reached him, so instead, he reaches them. Moments before a Magisterium boat does, even! A good dramatic rescue scene.

Bad lack-of-payoff: Did Hannah’s cool secret alethiometer come to anything at all?

She didn’t use it to figure out where Malcolm was going, she just deduced that from the evidence + how well she knows Malcolm.

[Post-reread note: I didn’t comment at the time, but this was in chapter 17. Which is also Hannah’s last appearance in the book. She gets mentioned in chapters 18 and 22, but never shows up on-page again.]

To be clear, I like that bit! Their friendship is genuine and important. Giving it that kind of plot payoff was good!

But there was never a different plot point that she did need the alethiometer for.

There was also plenty of setup about how difficult it is. It takes a lot of study and cross-referencing. Hannah doesn’t have the magical intuition that Lyra does.

So you could’ve made the payoff out of that instead. It answered something for her, she’s poring over the books looking at the symbols…and we, the readers, can connect them all to the bizarre events of Malcolm and Alice’s Excellent Unseelie Adventure. But Hannah doesn’t have that context. At last, she despairs. “I can’t do it! This is out of my league! It’s so obscure and complicated, only a genius could figure it out.”

[Cue Lyra’s leitmotif from HDM playing in the background.]

Heck, drop the whole Special Bonus Witch Prophecy, let Hannah deduce “a boy is going on a journey carrying a treasure” from the symbols she reads. She just can’t interpret anything more helpful, like “pick him up at this date and time.”

Oh, and! About that prophecy! Why didn’t it say “a boy and a girl”?

Alice was integral to Lyra surviving this trip. She did half the carrying! What gives, prophets? Behind every man is an unacknowledged woman, even in a witch prophecy??

Chapter 25, thread 2:

Alice gets to yell at Lord Asriel about how great Malcolm is, so don’t you dare disrespect everything he’s done.

I like this! Well-earned!

Alice has never hesitated to tell off Malcolm when she has a problem with him. So this reversal, telling off someone else in his defense, is really fulfilling. And you know she means it.

From here they get to Jordan College, via Asriel flying a gyropter. (Helicopter.) I’m retroactively surprised Malcolm+Alice haven’t heard any before. Wouldn’t they be used for rescues? And to survey the flood damage?

They gyropters also have earmuff/microphone setups to communicate over the rotors. Which has me retroactively wondering why nobody else has used radio. Not to communicate, not for news reports, not to play music in the pub…

I was vaguely assuming the tech didn’t exist here! Now…huh.

Asriel basically dumps the kids at Jordan (literally, the last scene is Malcolm collapsing on their carpet) and immediately biffs off to the North. A+ parenting, right there.

Most of this journey has been “washing up at a sanctuary, feeling safe for a short time, then having to flee”, so it’s a little anticlimactic to end on “but THIS time it’ll be fine, no worries, roll credits.”

I’d feel better if Hannah was here to greet them! Which would also salve the lack of Hannah in the back half of the book. She got a few scenes, chapters ago, then totally disappeared. Unsatisfying.

(And just imagine if Hannah had brought Malcolm+Alice’s parents! We didn’t actually meet Alice’s before, but we met Malcolm’s, and surely all of them deserve that reunion!)

One more anticlimax: Asriel tells the kids “never talk about this, not with anyone but each other, then you’ll be safe.”

Not buying that at all.

Their school is full of junior Magisterium spies. Teachers were getting fired. A local guy stood up to Church agents at the pub once, then he and his family had to flee the district.

The town knows which kids went missing during the flood. And which one had a canoe.

What stops the Church from kidnapping these kids the minute they get home, and forcing the intel out of them?

…on a more upbeat note, why not give the kids clearance to talk about it with a whole circle of specific adults Asriel trusts? Farder Coram counts. Hannah deserves to.

It took support, intel, and prep from several sympathetic adults to get these kids through the flood. If we ended with Asriel setting up a group of supporters to get them through whatever danger the Church brings down next, I’d feel reassured!

But nope.

So that’s La Belle Sauvage. Really strong start! Faceplanted in a whole lot of ways by the end.

Might need a new thread for the “and ANOTHER thing that never got resolved–!” reactions that will undoubtedly hit me over the rest of the night.

(TSC is checked out. Will start that some time soon.)

#HisDarkMaterials

Re-listen Liveblog: La Belle Sauvage

Doing a re-listen of books 1-2 in the Book of Dust trilogy, since book 3 just came out.

I just finished the first one, La Belle Sauvage, liveblogging it on Mastodon and on Bluesky, Here’s a roundup post.

(I haven’t read this book since it came out in 2017, and I deliberately didn’t reread my original 2017 reaction post to LBS until now. Feel free to look through both, see which things I had different reactions about, and how many times I just noticed the same thing twice.)

La Belle Sauvage, chapters 1-3:

This starts off so strong. Like Lyra opening TGC, Malcolm is an active, curious, fun kid! We get a ton of worldbuilding through the places he explores, and a ton more through “noticing what the adults pointedly aren’t telling him.”

Not sure how well a reader could follow the background mystery if you didn’t know all the names and references from HDM. But if you have, it’s really juicy. Malcolm obvs has no idea, and it’s great how he fills the gaps with wild speculation.

Our one glimpse of baby Lyra so far was super charming.

Chapter 4:

Detour into the POV of Farder Coram.

In retrospect, a lot of this is an excuse to recap things we know from HDM, but the writing is engaging enough that it’s hard to mind.

[Note after rereading my original reaction post: Huh, this annoyed me a lot more the first time around. Apparently it gets a lot more tolerable when you haven’t been deep in the original HDM recently.]

Chapters 5-6:

Hannah Relf, and the whole field of “alethiometry as a serious academic discipline” that she belongs to, is barely in HDM. Really cool to see it showcased with her younger self in action here.

The way Malcolm gets roped into her spycraft is a little contrived, but I’ll allow it. Hannah’s ongoing stress about the morality of it helps.

(Made more sense when adults were recruiting Lyra, she wasn’t just an unusually-sharp 11-year-old, they also knew she was part of an Important Prophecy.)

The first titles Hannah lends Malcolm turn out to be “The Body in the Library” and “A Brief History of Time.”

Anybody out there written “HDM AU of Agatha Christie”? It’s canon now.

Chapters 7-9:

Getting into the League of St. Alexander plot now, and, oof, still hits hard. An upsettingly realistic story of a group of kids being manipulated into turning on each other, and on the actually-supportive adults in their lives.

Reminds me of the school sections in Nona the Ninth. There’s high-stakes politics and espionage happening around them, people are getting killed, we have a small group of good teachers trying their best to get normal lessons to the kids in spite of it all, and the whole thing is from the POV of the kids, who aren’t officially being told much, but they know something is up. Lots of urgently passing rumors, on the level of “well, my dad says he heard such-and-such, so I reckon that means…”

Very different setups, but still, lots of parallels! And both good.

Oh, one more thing!

This St. Alexander appears to be an in-universe creation, but the Church official who tells his story also talks to the kids about Jesus – not in detail, just mentions of things like, their job is to spread The Love Of Jesus(TM).

I checked out the HDM ebooks just to text-search them. The name “Christ” never comes up. The name “Jesus” only comes up in TAS, and it’s from Mary Malone. (Talking to Lyra — no mention of whether Lyra recognizes the name.) Nobody ever mentions Christmas or Easter, either.

The Magisterium is explicitly Christian — TGC has Lyra mention someone being “baptized as a Christian.” (After that, the term disappears until, again, Mary in TAS uses it.) So this felt like a worldbuilding point, that their doctrine specifically de-emphasizes Jesus. No obligatory prayers, no lip service to “what would Jesus do,” no framing their actions in terms of “following the Word of Christ,” no references at all.

…And now we’re in LBS, and this random person is telling a group of elementary-school kids “of course this is a Proper Country where we follow the Good Word about Jesus,” like of course that’s a common thing they’ve all heard of.

Is this difference also a worldbuilding point? Or is it a Doylist thing where, in writing HDM, Pullman wasn’t ready to antagonize Jesus’ fans that directly, and now he is?

(So far, no idea! TBD if anything in future chapters will make it clearer.)

[Post-reread note: They did not make it clearer.]

Chapters 10-11:

Lors Asriel! HDM readers know in a few years he’ll murder a kid Malcolm’s age for a military advantage, but here, Malcolm doesn’t pick up anything sinister at all. Personal charisma on full blast. Don’t remember if Malcolm ever learns different, or not.

[Post-reread note: Well, not in this book, at least.]

Stray daemon details that caught my eye:

• The shop teacher’s woodpecker daemon drills holes in scrap wood as a nervous tic
• Malcolm’s unsettled Aster can take chimera forms, like an owl with duck feathers, but only experiments with that when nobody else is watching
• Hyena daemon urinates in the road, while looking at Malcolm. Makes him feel so dirty/violated that he’s too embarrassed to tell anyone until his next meeting with Hannah

Are we supposed to believe daemons have been doing that (just, you know, normally in private) all along? Not sure I buy it.

[Post-reread note: There’s an upcoming journey with baby Lyra in which Malcolm is constantly aware of how often she needs to be fed and changed. The idea of feeding/changing Pan is never even mentioned. So, yeah, I don’t think it’s a general daemon bodily function. I think it’s is a skill this specific daemon has cultivated to freak people out.]

Chapters 12-13:

Oh, huh. Argument at Malcolm’s family pub, the phrase “scientific management of resources” gets thrown around. A slip from Pullman, or was “experimental theology” supposed to be a term from Church-controlled circles, not common in the general public?

[Post-reread note: For now, I think it was just a slip from Pullman.]

Argument is about the upcoming plot-point flood.

Seems worth noting that the “modern, scientific” proponents are all characters who are going to be proven wrong. The Right Understanding comes from “the ancient wisdom of the gyptians who know how to read the signs” and “one guy’s granny.”

Hannah gets access to a contraband alethiometer! From the description, this is the one Lyra will eventually get.

Contrast to the Bodleian Library one she was using officially. Don’t think I realized there were different models before this. With only 6 ever made, I figured they were a matching set.

The Bodleian one has full-color symbols! The stolen one has plain black ink lineart.

Idle theorizing: all 6 were originally made with black lineart, but that faceplate was damaged and replaced at some point. The new artist either was told to paint the new symbols fancier, or just had fun with it.

End of this latest chapter refers to Bonneville (the guy with the hyena daemon) as “a physicist.”

So much for my half-baked theory that maybe “experimental theology” was a replacement term for “physics” specifically.

Chapters 14-15:

Higher-up spies encourage Hannah to keep talking with (from their POV) this random 11-year-old, but it gets in-universe justified in a way that works for me. (…I mean narratively, not ethically.)

Alice (teen kitchen worker) calls Lyra a “little flirt” for giggling at Malcolm. Not creepy on its own, that’s a joke people make about babies…but knowing that Pullman is planning future Lyra/Malcolm, with more explicitly-creepy stuff in the lead-up…yeah, this is a retroactive big oof.

Malcolm gets to meet Mrs. Coulter! Unlike with Asriel, he gets a bad vibe off her immediately. Well, she’s on track to murder a lot more children than Asriel will, so maybe it’s fair.

(Also, Asriel shows care for Lyra, which biases Malcolm toward him instantly.)

Part 1 ends (at the 54% mark) with the predicted Big Flood hitting. Alice, Malcolm, and Lyra get stranded together in a boat.

Everything I remember being “meh” about this book is on their river journey. Plunging apprehensively onward…

Chapter 16:

Worldbuilding detail: pharmacies are marked with a green cross. (Not sure from context if it’s just a palette-swapped ➕️, or an actual ✝️.)

The dynamic between Alice and Malcolm is really good here. Grudging teamwork.

Malcolm and Aster see a drowned body during the flooding, and wonder “what happens to daemons when you die?”

Surprised they wouldn’t know. Even with no deaths in their close family, surely it’s a thing children are taught about? (They’ve been reading murder mysteries! It never came up?)

Different chat a few chapters ago, they saw Pan turning into a mole, and wondered how a baby daemon knows how to turn into a creature they’ve never actually seen.

That I liked, because it doesn’t seem like there’s a clear, generally-known answer. One adult daemon offered “You just feel mole-y.”

Chapter 17:

Mention of a prophecy about “a boy” that might be Malcolm.

Feels like overkill? Like “he can’t just be a normal person caught up in Lyra’s cosmic destiny, he’s gotta be special too.” (Don’t remember if there’s payoff for this later. Might like it more if it’s good. TBD.)

[Post-reread note: There was not.]

Chapter 18:

Not much to say here except “go Alice.” Previously seen decking Bonneville with a chair, now she gets off a gun at him.

Bonneville mentions “experimental theology” to Malcolm. Guess he doesn’t use “science”…?

Malcolm has been seeing flecks/lights that Hannah thinks are migraine auras. He misheard it as “auroras”. Unsubtle hint that this is Dust’s way of guiding him? Hasn’t been plot-pivotal yet, so we’ll see.

[Post-reread note: It was not.]

Chapter 19:

Reappearance of a trusted ally I forgot was coming back at all! Surprised and delighted.

Kitten!Pan kneads Malcolm’s hand as he rocks Lyra. He thinks “she’s too young to know it’s taboo,” but I expect it’d hurt if she didn’t feel so comfy and cared-for with him.

Earlier hints of “things in the river” now expanded with examples: mermaids, Father Thames, “old gods.”

I know we meet some of these in later chapters. And, look, I’m good with Lyra’s world having more fantastical beings than we already saw. But it sure would be weird if, after all HDM, the message of LBS was “sure, the Magisterium is evil and their god sucks, but science also sucks and will lead you astray, the truth is in following the right religion and trusting the better gods.”

Don’t remember if that’s how it actually ends! Just noting, as of now, the vibes feel odd.

[Post-reread note: Good news, I don’t think that was the message. The possibly-god-ish creatures we meet are no more or less trustworthy than other people.]

Chapter 20:

Evil Magisterium group kidnapped Lyra, after a St. Alexander kid in the refugee group tipped them off. Malcolm hates him, which is fair, but his own family are also so awful to him that I get why he was won over in the first place. Praise and affirmation for a kid who isn’t getting any at home is one heck of a drug.

The daring rescue is quite good! The Alice-Malcolm teamwork is really flourishing by now.

Malcolm’s “aurora” pops up again, but only to highlight the place they were already going. Finding Lyra is all their own ingenuity.

Chapter 21:

Last quarter of the book, and now things get outright magical.

Washing up on the island of a mystery woman with a cloud of butterflies. Malcolm first assumes one of them is her daemon, then wonders if, somehow, all of them are. Hey, I’ve written that fic.

A bag they took off Bonneville has…an alethiometer inside. Malcolm figures it’s the famous missing one.

Explains how conveniently Bonneville always caught up to them! And maybe why he was so convinced that “kidnapping Lyra” was the key to fixing his life in the first place.

They leave the alethiometer with the probably-faerie woman. So I guess from now on it’ll be Missing For Real forever.

At least it’s a more poetic end than “the kids drop it in the water and it gets crushed in the flood.” Getting some One Ring vibes here. It won’t get lost when it doesn’t want to.

Chapter 22:

Oh, they didn’t trade the alethiometer to the faerie, just its nice box? Huh. That’s less poetic, but a savvier move from Malcolm, so good for him.

New batch of probably-faeries, in fancy dress, in the garden of a fancy-but-unreachable manor. They each have a bird, which might or might not be daemons.

Really like the setup of “desolate ruins, hidden just outside the beautiful tranquil sphere of the garden.” Classic Fairyland worldbuilding.

…And Bonneville isn’t dead, again. Ugh.

Unless this is a faerie-thing taking his shape? Others are taking shapes of people familiar to Alice+Malcolm, including at least one who’s dead. Although I don’t remember him being that…and it’s enough of a satisfying twist, I feel like I would?

[Post-reread note: No luck, this is just Bonneville.]

This might retroactively ruin my “oh, nice, the alethiometer justifies how conveniently he always caught up with them” satisfaction.

Will the narrative give him a new justification for this round? TBD.

[Post-reread note: It did not.]

Chapter 23:

Meeting a giant in the water, talking him into opening a set of gates. Fully fairy-tale logic here, with Little Nemo type imagery. This team could make it through the Phantom Tollbooth or survive the Labyrinth, easy.

They figure this guy is the minor god of some tributary, since he works for Father Thames, god of the Thames. Logical enough.

Also, part of their scheme is making him believe Lyra is a princess. Not clear if he’s just gullible, or she has supernatural Princess Vibes that he can sense.

Back in normal reality, a witch! Most human person they’ve met all day, but with her Arctic-tern daemon not in range at first, poor Malcolm assumes otherwise.

(Briefly wonders if her branch of cloud-pine is her daemon. …I’ve written that fic too.)

Okay, I know from HDM why the witches would have an interest in Lyra. What I’m not sure of is, why didn’t this one try to either (depending on clan) guide her to safety, or kill her?

She shields them with what H2G2 would call a Somebody Else’s Problem field, but then just flies off again. Hmm.

[Post-reread note: Yeah, this never gets resolved or comes up again. Why even put her in the book??]

Chapter 24:

Alice swiped a bunch of food from the faerie garden party, and the whole crew eats some now. I’m surprised it’s still food-shaped, outside that sphere of magic influence. They’re not hesitant to eat it, hm.

I didn’t mention before, but the faerie woman with the butterflies breastfed Lyra, and Malcolm+Alice were immediately suspicious. So they have some idea of the dangers of eating unseelie food…

[Post-reread note: Yeah, this goes nowhere.]

Getting foreshadowing now that Bonneville is a ghost, which would be fine by me!

…Nope, he’s alive, hyena daemon and all. Dammit.

Malcolm, almost in these words: “I need an adult”

Valid, buddy.

Anyway, we’re trying to murder him again, and this time the hyena vanishes, so I guess it finally took. About time.

Bonneville grabbed Alice’s daemon to force her to follow him, so Malcolm followed to help, while his own daemon stayed to guard Lyra. Forced to endure the distance pain because they had no one else to rely on. That was a good heroic sequence there!

Mixed feelings about the rest. Alice already beat this guy twice, and yet he gets to keep coming back, until the boy character takes him on? Malcolm succeeds with an oar when Alice couldn’t with An Actual Gun? Not my favorite twist.

There’s been an air of SA around Bonneville for a while. He got shunned from academia over an unspecified sex crime, which got mentioned so much that I figured it was setting up a dramatic reveal of the details, but now it seems like maybe not?

Point is, it’s not unexpected that he tries to assault Alice. (Vague about the extent of it, since Malcolm’s POV doesn’t fully process what he sees.)

But before now, all his creepiness was a means to the end of kidnapping Lyra. And here it seems like he forgets all about Lyra, his main goal is to assault Alice.

We know why Lyra was worth a massive multi-day boat chase: she’s Mrs. Coulter’s baby, and he wanted her influence on his side.

But why is Alice worth that?

There’s no nice way to put this, sorry in advance: why not go after any of the thousand closer teenage girls who would be easier targets? This is so much work to attack a specific girl! Predators are lazy!

I can sure imagine it being about “revenge for those two times she nearly killed him.”

But: He doesn’t show that. There’s no “haha, now you’ll be sorry for everything you did to me!” type gloating. Can’t think of anything that foreshadowed his priority-switch away from Lyra. This is just me retconning in a reason, not the book giving one.

One chapter left to go.

The list of “points I expect this book to leave unresolved” has gotten pretty long. On first read, I remember thinking they were left hanging for the sequel to pick up! They…were not.

Here goes nothing…

Chapter 25, thread 1:

I do like that they’ve washed up in a graveyard this time. Coffins in a stone mausoleum give them justifiably-still-dry wood to build fires with.

Malcolm apologizes a lot to the skeletons. Good kid.

…It’s just occurring to me that I would’ve loved a reveal that the hints about ghosts were foreshadowing “the ghosts of the graveyard, moved and affirmed by Malcolm’s respect, rise up to help him kill Bonneville.”

Doubly so if this was Ghost Bonneville, seeking revenge on Alice for killing him. That unfinished business could have guided him after Alice, and Malcolm would need the supernatural help of the graveyard ghosts to kill him double-plus-dead.

Feeling a little cheated we didn’t get this now, ngl :(

Back on the morning after the flood, Hannah deduced that Malcolm would try to take Lyra to Asriel’s address.

Good payoff: her allies have had boats looking for the canoe ever since. They even found Asriel first, got him in a boat, and so they found the canoe on the water! Probably would’ve fallen apart before the kids reached him, so instead, he reaches them. Moments before a Magisterium boat does, even! A good dramatic rescue scene.

Bad lack-of-payoff: Did Hannah’s cool secret alethiometer come to anything at all?

She didn’t use it to figure out where Malcolm was going, she just deduced that from the evidence + how well she knows Malcolm.

[Post-reread note: I didn’t comment at the time, but this was in chapter 17. Which is also Hannah’s last appearance in the book. She gets mentioned in chapters 18 and 22, but never shows up on-page again.]

To be clear, I like that bit! Their friendship is genuine and important. Giving it that kind of plot payoff was good!

But there was never a different plot point that she did need the alethiometer for.

There was also plenty of setup about how difficult it is. It takes a lot of study and cross-referencing. Hannah doesn’t have the magical intuition that Lyra does.

So you could’ve made the payoff out of that instead. It answered something for her, she’s poring over the books looking at the symbols…and we, the readers, can connect them all to the bizarre events of Malcolm and Alice’s Excellent Unseelie Adventure. But Hannah doesn’t have that context. At last, she despairs. “I can’t do it! This is out of my league! It’s so obscure and complicated, only a genius could figure it out.”

[Cue Lyra’s leitmotif from HDM playing in the background.]

Heck, drop the whole Special Bonus Witch Prophecy, let Hannah deduce “a boy is going on a journey carrying a treasure” from the symbols she reads. She just can’t interpret anything more helpful, like “pick him up at this date and time.”

Oh, and! About that prophecy! Why didn’t it say “a boy and a girl”?

Alice was integral to Lyra surviving this trip. She did half the carrying! What gives, prophets? Behind every man is an unacknowledged woman, even in a witch prophecy??

Chapter 25, thread 2:

Alice gets to yell at Lord Asriel about how great Malcolm is, so don’t you dare disrespect everything he’s done.

I like this! Well-earned!

Alice has never hesitated to tell off Malcolm when she has a problem with him. So this reversal, telling off someone else in his defense, is really fulfilling. And you know she means it.

From here they get to Jordan College, via Asriel flying a gyropter. (Helicopter.) I’m retroactively surprised Malcolm+Alice haven’t heard any before. Wouldn’t they be used for rescues? And to survey the flood damage?

They gyropters also have earmuff/microphone setups to communicate over the rotors. Which has me retroactively wondering why nobody else has used radio. Not to communicate, not for news reports, not to play music in the pub…

I was vaguely assuming the tech didn’t exist here! Now…huh.

Asriel basically dumps the kids at Jordan (literally, the last scene is Malcolm collapsing on their carpet) and immediately biffs off to the North. A+ parenting, right there.

Most of this journey has been “washing up at a sanctuary, feeling safe for a short time, then having to flee”, so it’s a little anticlimactic to end on “but THIS time it’ll be fine, no worries, roll credits.”

I’d feel better if Hannah was here to greet them! Which would also salve the lack of Hannah in the back half of the book. She got a few scenes, chapters ago, then totally disappeared. Unsatisfying.

(And just imagine if Hannah had brought Malcolm+Alice’s parents! We didn’t actually meet Alice’s before, but we met Malcolm’s, and surely all of them deserve that reunion!)

One more anticlimax: Asriel tells the kids “never talk about this, not with anyone but each other, then you’ll be safe.”

Not buying that at all.

Their school is full of junior Magisterium spies. Teachers were getting fired. A local guy stood up to Church agents at the pub once, then he and his family had to flee the district.

The town knows which kids went missing during the flood. And which one had a canoe.

What stops the Church from kidnapping these kids the minute they get home, and forcing the intel out of them?

…on a more upbeat note, why not give the kids clearance to talk about it with a whole circle of specific adults Asriel trusts? Farder Coram counts. Hannah deserves to.

It took support, intel, and prep from several sympathetic adults to get these kids through the flood. If we ended with Asriel setting up a group of supporters to get them through whatever danger the Church brings down next, I’d feel reassured!

But nope.

So that’s La Belle Sauvage. Really strong start! Faceplanted in a whole lot of ways by the end.

Might need a new thread for the “and ANOTHER thing that never got resolved–!” reactions that will undoubtedly hit me over the rest of the night.

(TSC is checked out. Will start that some time soon.)

#HisDarkMaterials

Re-listen Liveblog: La Belle Sauvage

Doing a re-listen of books 1-2 in the Book of Dust trilogy, since book 3 just came out.

I just finished the first one, La Belle Sauvage, liveblogging it on Mastodon and on Bluesky, Here’s a roundup post.

(I haven’t read this book since it came out in 2017, and I deliberately didn’t reread my original 2017 reaction post to LBS until now. Feel free to look through both, see which things I had different reactions about, and how many times I just noticed the same thing twice.)

La Belle Sauvage, chapters 1-3:

This starts off so strong. Like Lyra opening TGC, Malcolm is an active, curious, fun kid! We get a ton of worldbuilding through the places he explores, and a ton more through “noticing what the adults pointedly aren’t telling him.”

Not sure how well a reader could follow the background mystery if you didn’t know all the names and references from HDM. But if you have, it’s really juicy. Malcolm obvs has no idea, and it’s great how he fills the gaps with wild speculation.

Our one glimpse of baby Lyra so far was super charming.

Chapter 4:

Detour into the POV of Farder Coram.

In retrospect, a lot of this is an excuse to recap things we know from HDM, but the writing is engaging enough that it’s hard to mind.

[Note after rereading my original reaction post: Huh, this annoyed me a lot more the first time around. Apparently it gets a lot more tolerable when you haven’t been deep in the original HDM recently.]

Chapters 5-6:

Hannah Relf, and the whole field of “alethiometry as a serious academic discipline” that she belongs to, is barely in HDM. Really cool to see it showcased with her younger self in action here.

The way Malcolm gets roped into her spycraft is a little contrived, but I’ll allow it. Hannah’s ongoing stress about the morality of it helps.

(Made more sense when adults were recruiting Lyra, she wasn’t just an unusually-sharp 11-year-old, they also knew she was part of an Important Prophecy.)

The first titles Hannah lends Malcolm turn out to be “The Body in the Library” and “A Brief History of Time.”

Anybody out there written “HDM AU of Agatha Christie”? It’s canon now.

Chapters 7-9:

Getting into the League of St. Alexander plot now, and, oof, still hits hard. An upsettingly realistic story of a group of kids being manipulated into turning on each other, and on the actually-supportive adults in their lives.

Reminds me of the school sections in Nona the Ninth. There’s high-stakes politics and espionage happening around them, people are getting killed, we have a small group of good teachers trying their best to get normal lessons to the kids in spite of it all, and the whole thing is from the POV of the kids, who aren’t officially being told much, but they know something is up. Lots of urgently passing rumors, on the level of “well, my dad says he heard such-and-such, so I reckon that means…”

Very different setups, but still, lots of parallels! And both good.

Oh, one more thing!

This St. Alexander appears to be an in-universe creation, but the Church official who tells his story also talks to the kids about Jesus – not in detail, just mentions of things like, their job is to spread The Love Of Jesus(TM).

I checked out the HDM ebooks just to text-search them. The name “Christ” never comes up. The name “Jesus” only comes up in TAS, and it’s from Mary Malone. (Talking to Lyra — no mention of whether Lyra recognizes the name.) Nobody ever mentions Christmas or Easter, either.

The Magisterium is explicitly Christian — TGC has Lyra mention someone being “baptized as a Christian.” (After that, the term disappears until, again, Mary in TAS uses it.) So this felt like a worldbuilding point, that their doctrine specifically de-emphasizes Jesus. No obligatory prayers, no lip service to “what would Jesus do,” no framing their actions in terms of “following the Word of Christ,” no references at all.

…And now we’re in LBS, and this random person is telling a group of elementary-school kids “of course this is a Proper Country where we follow the Good Word about Jesus,” like of course that’s a common thing they’ve all heard of.

Is this difference also a worldbuilding point? Or is it a Doylist thing where, in writing HDM, Pullman wasn’t ready to antagonize Jesus’ fans that directly, and now he is?

(So far, no idea! TBD if anything in future chapters will make it clearer.)

[Post-reread note: They did not make it clearer.]

Chapters 10-11:

Lors Asriel! HDM readers know in a few years he’ll murder a kid Malcolm’s age for a military advantage, but here, Malcolm doesn’t pick up anything sinister at all. Personal charisma on full blast. Don’t remember if Malcolm ever learns different, or not.

[Post-reread note: Well, not in this book, at least.]

Stray daemon details that caught my eye:

• The shop teacher’s woodpecker daemon drills holes in scrap wood as a nervous tic
• Malcolm’s unsettled Aster can take chimera forms, like an owl with duck feathers, but only experiments with that when nobody else is watching
• Hyena daemon urinates in the road, while looking at Malcolm. Makes him feel so dirty/violated that he’s too embarrassed to tell anyone until his next meeting with Hannah

Are we supposed to believe daemons have been doing that (just, you know, normally in private) all along? Not sure I buy it.

[Post-reread note: There’s an upcoming journey with baby Lyra in which Malcolm is constantly aware of how often she needs to be fed and changed. The idea of feeding/changing Pan is never even mentioned. So, yeah, I don’t think it’s a general daemon bodily function. I think it’s is a skill this specific daemon has cultivated to freak people out.]

Chapters 12-13:

Oh, huh. Argument at Malcolm’s family pub, the phrase “scientific management of resources” gets thrown around. A slip from Pullman, or was “experimental theology” supposed to be a term from Church-controlled circles, not common in the general public?

[Post-reread note: For now, I think it was just a slip from Pullman.]

Argument is about the upcoming plot-point flood.

Seems worth noting that the “modern, scientific” proponents are all characters who are going to be proven wrong. The Right Understanding comes from “the ancient wisdom of the gyptians who know how to read the signs” and “one guy’s granny.”

Hannah gets access to a contraband alethiometer! From the description, this is the one Lyra will eventually get.

Contrast to the Bodleian Library one she was using officially. Don’t think I realized there were different models before this. With only 6 ever made, I figured they were a matching set.

The Bodleian one has full-color symbols! The stolen one has plain black ink lineart.

Idle theorizing: all 6 were originally made with black lineart, but that faceplate was damaged and replaced at some point. The new artist either was told to paint the new symbols fancier, or just had fun with it.

End of this latest chapter refers to Bonneville (the guy with the hyena daemon) as “a physicist.”

So much for my half-baked theory that maybe “experimental theology” was a replacement term for “physics” specifically.

Chapters 14-15:

Higher-up spies encourage Hannah to keep talking with (from their POV) this random 11-year-old, but it gets in-universe justified in a way that works for me. (…I mean narratively, not ethically.)

Alice (teen kitchen worker) calls Lyra a “little flirt” for giggling at Malcolm. Not creepy on its own, that’s a joke people make about babies…but knowing that Pullman is planning future Lyra/Malcolm, with more explicitly-creepy stuff in the lead-up…yeah, this is a retroactive big oof.

Malcolm gets to meet Mrs. Coulter! Unlike with Asriel, he gets a bad vibe off her immediately. Well, she’s on track to murder a lot more children than Asriel will, so maybe it’s fair.

(Also, Asriel shows care for Lyra, which biases Malcolm toward him instantly.)

Part 1 ends (at the 54% mark) with the predicted Big Flood hitting. Alice, Malcolm, and Lyra get stranded together in a boat.

Everything I remember being “meh” about this book is on their river journey. Plunging apprehensively onward…

Chapter 16:

Worldbuilding detail: pharmacies are marked with a green cross. (Not sure from context if it’s just a palette-swapped ➕️, or an actual ✝️.)

The dynamic between Alice and Malcolm is really good here. Grudging teamwork.

Malcolm and Aster see a drowned body during the flooding, and wonder “what happens to daemons when you die?”

Surprised they wouldn’t know. Even with no deaths in their close family, surely it’s a thing children are taught about? (They’ve been reading murder mysteries! It never came up?)

Different chat a few chapters ago, they saw Pan turning into a mole, and wondered how a baby daemon knows how to turn into a creature they’ve never actually seen.

That I liked, because it doesn’t seem like there’s a clear, generally-known answer. One adult daemon offered “You just feel mole-y.”

Chapter 17:

Mention of a prophecy about “a boy” that might be Malcolm.

Feels like overkill? Like “he can’t just be a normal person caught up in Lyra’s cosmic destiny, he’s gotta be special too.” (Don’t remember if there’s payoff for this later. Might like it more if it’s good. TBD.)

[Post-reread note: There was not.]

Chapter 18:

Not much to say here except “go Alice.” Previously seen decking Bonneville with a chair, now she gets off a gun at him.

Bonneville mentions “experimental theology” to Malcolm. Guess he doesn’t use “science”…?

Malcolm has been seeing flecks/lights that Hannah thinks are migraine auras. He misheard it as “auroras”. Unsubtle hint that this is Dust’s way of guiding him? Hasn’t been plot-pivotal yet, so we’ll see.

[Post-reread note: It was not.]

Chapter 19:

Reappearance of a trusted ally I forgot was coming back at all! Surprised and delighted.

Kitten!Pan kneads Malcolm’s hand as he rocks Lyra. He thinks “she’s too young to know it’s taboo,” but I expect it’d hurt if she didn’t feel so comfy and cared-for with him.

Earlier hints of “things in the river” now expanded with examples: mermaids, Father Thames, “old gods.”

I know we meet some of these in later chapters. And, look, I’m good with Lyra’s world having more fantastical beings than we already saw. But it sure would be weird if, after all HDM, the message of LBS was “sure, the Magisterium is evil and their god sucks, but science also sucks and will lead you astray, the truth is in following the right religion and trusting the better gods.”

Don’t remember if that’s how it actually ends! Just noting, as of now, the vibes feel odd.

[Post-reread note: Good news, I don’t think that was the message. The possibly-god-ish creatures we meet are no more or less trustworthy than other people.]

Chapter 20:

Evil Magisterium group kidnapped Lyra, after a St. Alexander kid in the refugee group tipped them off. Malcolm hates him, which is fair, but his own family are also so awful to him that I get why he was won over in the first place. Praise and affirmation for a kid who isn’t getting any at home is one heck of a drug.

The daring rescue is quite good! The Alice-Malcolm teamwork is really flourishing by now.

Malcolm’s “aurora” pops up again, but only to highlight the place they were already going. Finding Lyra is all their own ingenuity.

Chapter 21:

Last quarter of the book, and now things get outright magical.

Washing up on the island of a mystery woman with a cloud of butterflies. Malcolm first assumes one of them is her daemon, then wonders if, somehow, all of them are. Hey, I’ve written that fic.

A bag they took off Bonneville has…an alethiometer inside. Malcolm figures it’s the famous missing one.

Explains how conveniently Bonneville always caught up to them! And maybe why he was so convinced that “kidnapping Lyra” was the key to fixing his life in the first place.

They leave the alethiometer with the probably-faerie woman. So I guess from now on it’ll be Missing For Real forever.

At least it’s a more poetic end than “the kids drop it in the water and it gets crushed in the flood.” Getting some One Ring vibes here. It won’t get lost when it doesn’t want to.

Chapter 22:

Oh, they didn’t trade the alethiometer to the faerie, just its nice box? Huh. That’s less poetic, but a savvier move from Malcolm, so good for him.

New batch of probably-faeries, in fancy dress, in the garden of a fancy-but-unreachable manor. They each have a bird, which might or might not be daemons.

Really like the setup of “desolate ruins, hidden just outside the beautiful tranquil sphere of the garden.” Classic Fairyland worldbuilding.

…And Bonneville isn’t dead, again. Ugh.

Unless this is a faerie-thing taking his shape? Others are taking shapes of people familiar to Alice+Malcolm, including at least one who’s dead. Although I don’t remember him being that…and it’s enough of a satisfying twist, I feel like I would?

[Post-reread note: No luck, this is just Bonneville.]

This might retroactively ruin my “oh, nice, the alethiometer justifies how conveniently he always caught up with them” satisfaction.

Will the narrative give him a new justification for this round? TBD.

[Post-reread note: It did not.]

Chapter 23:

Meeting a giant in the water, talking him into opening a set of gates. Fully fairy-tale logic here, with Little Nemo type imagery. This team could make it through the Phantom Tollbooth or survive the Labyrinth, easy.

They figure this guy is the minor god of some tributary, since he works for Father Thames, god of the Thames. Logical enough.

Also, part of their scheme is making him believe Lyra is a princess. Not clear if he’s just gullible, or she has supernatural Princess Vibes that he can sense.

Back in normal reality, a witch! Most human person they’ve met all day, but with her Arctic-tern daemon not in range at first, poor Malcolm assumes otherwise.

(Briefly wonders if her branch of cloud-pine is her daemon. …I’ve written that fic too.)

Okay, I know from HDM why the witches would have an interest in Lyra. What I’m not sure of is, why didn’t this one try to either (depending on clan) guide her to safety, or kill her?

She shields them with what H2G2 would call a Somebody Else’s Problem field, but then just flies off again. Hmm.

[Post-reread note: Yeah, this never gets resolved or comes up again. Why even put her in the book??]

Chapter 24:

Alice swiped a bunch of food from the faerie garden party, and the whole crew eats some now. I’m surprised it’s still food-shaped, outside that sphere of magic influence. They’re not hesitant to eat it, hm.

I didn’t mention before, but the faerie woman with the butterflies breastfed Lyra, and Malcolm+Alice were immediately suspicious. So they have some idea of the dangers of eating unseelie food…

[Post-reread note: Yeah, this goes nowhere.]

Getting foreshadowing now that Bonneville is a ghost, which would be fine by me!

…Nope, he’s alive, hyena daemon and all. Dammit.

Malcolm, almost in these words: “I need an adult”

Valid, buddy.

Anyway, we’re trying to murder him again, and this time the hyena vanishes, so I guess it finally took. About time.

Bonneville grabbed Alice’s daemon to force her to follow him, so Malcolm followed to help, while his own daemon stayed to guard Lyra. Forced to endure the distance pain because they had no one else to rely on. That was a good heroic sequence there!

Mixed feelings about the rest. Alice already beat this guy twice, and yet he gets to keep coming back, until the boy character takes him on? Malcolm succeeds with an oar when Alice couldn’t with An Actual Gun? Not my favorite twist.

There’s been an air of SA around Bonneville for a while. He got shunned from academia over an unspecified sex crime, which got mentioned so much that I figured it was setting up a dramatic reveal of the details, but now it seems like maybe not?

Point is, it’s not unexpected that he tries to assault Alice. (Vague about the extent of it, since Malcolm’s POV doesn’t fully process what he sees.)

But before now, all his creepiness was a means to the end of kidnapping Lyra. And here it seems like he forgets all about Lyra, his main goal is to assault Alice.

We know why Lyra was worth a massive multi-day boat chase: she’s Mrs. Coulter’s baby, and he wanted her influence on his side.

But why is Alice worth that?

There’s no nice way to put this, sorry in advance: why not go after any of the thousand closer teenage girls who would be easier targets? This is so much work to attack a specific girl! Predators are lazy!

I can sure imagine it being about “revenge for those two times she nearly killed him.”

But: He doesn’t show that. There’s no “haha, now you’ll be sorry for everything you did to me!” type gloating. Can’t think of anything that foreshadowed his priority-switch away from Lyra. This is just me retconning in a reason, not the book giving one.

One chapter left to go.

The list of “points I expect this book to leave unresolved” has gotten pretty long. On first read, I remember thinking they were left hanging for the sequel to pick up! They…were not.

Here goes nothing…

Chapter 25, thread 1:

I do like that they’ve washed up in a graveyard this time. Coffins in a stone mausoleum give them justifiably-still-dry wood to build fires with.

Malcolm apologizes a lot to the skeletons. Good kid.

…It’s just occurring to me that I would’ve loved a reveal that the hints about ghosts were foreshadowing “the ghosts of the graveyard, moved and affirmed by Malcolm’s respect, rise up to help him kill Bonneville.”

Doubly so if this was Ghost Bonneville, seeking revenge on Alice for killing him. That unfinished business could have guided him after Alice, and Malcolm would need the supernatural help of the graveyard ghosts to kill him double-plus-dead.

Feeling a little cheated we didn’t get this now, ngl :(

Back on the morning after the flood, Hannah deduced that Malcolm would try to take Lyra to Asriel’s address.

Good payoff: her allies have had boats looking for the canoe ever since. They even found Asriel first, got him in a boat, and so they found the canoe on the water! Probably would’ve fallen apart before the kids reached him, so instead, he reaches them. Moments before a Magisterium boat does, even! A good dramatic rescue scene.

Bad lack-of-payoff: Did Hannah’s cool secret alethiometer come to anything at all?

She didn’t use it to figure out where Malcolm was going, she just deduced that from the evidence + how well she knows Malcolm.

[Post-reread note: I didn’t comment at the time, but this was in chapter 17. Which is also Hannah’s last appearance in the book. She gets mentioned in chapters 18 and 22, but never shows up on-page again.]

To be clear, I like that bit! Their friendship is genuine and important. Giving it that kind of plot payoff was good!

But there was never a different plot point that she did need the alethiometer for.

There was also plenty of setup about how difficult it is. It takes a lot of study and cross-referencing. Hannah doesn’t have the magical intuition that Lyra does.

So you could’ve made the payoff out of that instead. It answered something for her, she’s poring over the books looking at the symbols…and we, the readers, can connect them all to the bizarre events of Malcolm and Alice’s Excellent Unseelie Adventure. But Hannah doesn’t have that context. At last, she despairs. “I can’t do it! This is out of my league! It’s so obscure and complicated, only a genius could figure it out.”

[Cue Lyra’s leitmotif from HDM playing in the background.]

Heck, drop the whole Special Bonus Witch Prophecy, let Hannah deduce “a boy is going on a journey carrying a treasure” from the symbols she reads. She just can’t interpret anything more helpful, like “pick him up at this date and time.”

Oh, and! About that prophecy! Why didn’t it say “a boy and a girl”?

Alice was integral to Lyra surviving this trip. She did half the carrying! What gives, prophets? Behind every man is an unacknowledged woman, even in a witch prophecy??

Chapter 25, thread 2:

Alice gets to yell at Lord Asriel about how great Malcolm is, so don’t you dare disrespect everything he’s done.

I like this! Well-earned!

Alice has never hesitated to tell off Malcolm when she has a problem with him. So this reversal, telling off someone else in his defense, is really fulfilling. And you know she means it.

From here they get to Jordan College, via Asriel flying a gyropter. (Helicopter.) I’m retroactively surprised Malcolm+Alice haven’t heard any before. Wouldn’t they be used for rescues? And to survey the flood damage?

They gyropters also have earmuff/microphone setups to communicate over the rotors. Which has me retroactively wondering why nobody else has used radio. Not to communicate, not for news reports, not to play music in the pub…

I was vaguely assuming the tech didn’t exist here! Now…huh.

Asriel basically dumps the kids at Jordan (literally, the last scene is Malcolm collapsing on their carpet) and immediately biffs off to the North. A+ parenting, right there.

Most of this journey has been “washing up at a sanctuary, feeling safe for a short time, then having to flee”, so it’s a little anticlimactic to end on “but THIS time it’ll be fine, no worries, roll credits.”

I’d feel better if Hannah was here to greet them! Which would also salve the lack of Hannah in the back half of the book. She got a few scenes, chapters ago, then totally disappeared. Unsatisfying.

(And just imagine if Hannah had brought Malcolm+Alice’s parents! We didn’t actually meet Alice’s before, but we met Malcolm’s, and surely all of them deserve that reunion!)

One more anticlimax: Asriel tells the kids “never talk about this, not with anyone but each other, then you’ll be safe.”

Not buying that at all.

Their school is full of junior Magisterium spies. Teachers were getting fired. A local guy stood up to Church agents at the pub once, then he and his family had to flee the district.

The town knows which kids went missing during the flood. And which one had a canoe.

What stops the Church from kidnapping these kids the minute they get home, and forcing the intel out of them?

…on a more upbeat note, why not give the kids clearance to talk about it with a whole circle of specific adults Asriel trusts? Farder Coram counts. Hannah deserves to.

It took support, intel, and prep from several sympathetic adults to get these kids through the flood. If we ended with Asriel setting up a group of supporters to get them through whatever danger the Church brings down next, I’d feel reassured!

But nope.

So that’s La Belle Sauvage. Really strong start! Faceplanted in a whole lot of ways by the end.

Might need a new thread for the “and ANOTHER thing that never got resolved–!” reactions that will undoubtedly hit me over the rest of the night.

(TSC is checked out. Will start that some time soon.)

#HisDarkMaterials

Review: Truth in fantasy: what Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials taught us over its 30-year run
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/dec/24/philip-pullman-his-dark-materials
#review #book #trilogy #series #fantasy #religion #Pullman #PhilipPullman #HisDarkMaterials #BookOfDust

Review: Truth in fantasy: what Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials taught us over its 30-year run
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/dec/24/philip-pullman-his-dark-materials
#review #book #trilogy #series #fantasy #religion #Pullman #PhilipPullman #HisDarkMaterials #BookOfDust

Review: Truth in fantasy: what Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials taught us over its 30-year run
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/dec/24/philip-pullman-his-dark-materials
#review #book #trilogy #series #fantasy #religion #Pullman #PhilipPullman #HisDarkMaterials #BookOfDust

Review: Truth in fantasy: what Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials taught us over its 30-year run
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/dec/24/philip-pullman-his-dark-materials
#review #book #trilogy #series #fantasy #religion #Pullman #PhilipPullman #HisDarkMaterials #BookOfDust

Review: Truth in fantasy: what Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials taught us over its 30-year run
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/dec/24/philip-pullman-his-dark-materials
#review #book #trilogy #series #fantasy #religion #Pullman #PhilipPullman #HisDarkMaterials #BookOfDust

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#books #bookworm #reading #hisdarkmaterials

Happiness is revisiting books we love, getting new books, sharing new books, writing new books… essentially, books!
#books #bookworm #reading #hisdarkmaterials

Happiness is revisiting books we love, getting new books, sharing new books, writing new books… essentially, books!
#books #bookworm #reading #hisdarkmaterials

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