Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Three daemons in a boat

La Belle Sauvage is a terrific read. But if you lose God, you lose the greatest drama of all

Philip Pullman’s new k, the prequel to his Northern Lights series — the one north Oxford academics very much prefer to Harry Potter — is an intriguing work. It’s notionally set some time near our own, but the world it evokes is the 1950s and 1960s England of the author’s youth. The hero, Malcolm Polstead, is the only child of an innkeeper — that timeless calling — and the inn

was an old stone-built rambling comfortable sort of place. There was a terrace above the river, where peacocks (one called Norman and the other Barry) stalked among the drinkers…There was a saloon where the gentry, if college scholars count as gentry, took their ale and smoked their pipes; there was a public bar where watermen and farm labourers sat by the fire or played darts, or stood at the bar gossiping… There was a kitchen where the landlord’s wife cooked a great joint every day…

Let me at it! We’re in an Oxford, then, that would have been perfectly familiar to Pullman’s bête noir, C.S. Lewis, and is infused with the comfortable Englishness that’s such an appealing stratum in the Harry Potter ks. In fact, there are few stories with such an enticing selection of English pub grub: sausage and mash, spiced parsnip soup, stewed apple, sirloin of beef, home-fried potatoes…yum.

But of course it’s an alternative world, one aspect of which is that the Reformation has not happened, and: ‘over the misty levels of Port Meadow, there stood the priory of Godstow, where the gentle nuns went about their holy business…’ (a nice historic touch). And, as anyone familiar with the Northern Lights trilogy knows, that world is threatened by the spectre of the Magisterium — the Vatican, confusingly relocated to Geneva — and specifically by the contemporary Inquisition, the CCD, or Court of Consistorial Discipline, a cross between the Stasi and the Gestapo.

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