The Book of Dust – Interesting Literature

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews the second volume in Philip Pullman’s trilogy, The Book of Dust

The first volume of Philip Pullman’s ‘equel’, The Book of Dust, got off to a slow start, although La Belle Sauvage showed the His Dark Materials author’s skill at handling big themes in an engaging narrative. Things moved at an almost glacial pace for much of the first half of the novel, but we gradually came to learn how young Malcolm Polstead’s chance discovery of an acorn containing a secret message dragged him into a world of intrigue, religious authoritarianism, and danger, part of which centred on the baby named Lyra Belacqua.

Now, in the second volume of the trilogy, The Secret Commonwealth: The Book of Dust Volume Two (Book of Dust 2), Lyra Belacqua has grown up – not into the young girl who was the heroine of His Dark Materials, but into

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys the first volume of Philip Pullman’s new trilogy The Book of Dust

In Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time, a physicist takes issue with a modern author, arguing that ‘Shakespeare would have grasped wave functions’ and John Donne ‘would have understood complementarity and relative time’. In writing about these new scientific developments of the twentieth century, ‘they would have educated their audiences too.’ But modern writers, for McEwan’s scientist, are too obsessed with developments in the arts at the cost of the exciting discoveries and debates going on in other fields of human endeavour.

The Less Deceived: Philip Pullman’s The Secret Commonwealth

Daemons and Dust: Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage