The Book of Dust Book Review: Pullman Returned and the Flood Took My Breath Away

Rating: ★★★★★

"The Book of Dust" Book Review:

Seventeen years. Philip Pullman made us wait seventeen years after The Amber Spyglass to return to Lyra's world. And then he came back with a flood.

The Book of Dust (La Belle Sauvage) is a prequel. Lyra is a baby, placed in the care of the nuns at Godstow Priory. Malcolm Polstead is eleven, the son of innkeepers, curious and brave and utterly ordinary in the way that Pullman's best characters are ordinary — which is to say, not at all. Malcolm's daemon Asta hasn't settled yet. He works at the inn, spies on the scholars who drink there, and becomes increasingly aware that the Magisterium's Consistorial Court of Discipline is tightening its grip.

When a biblical flood engulfs the Thames Valley — not a realistic flood but a mythic one, the kind of flood that transforms the landscape into something fairytale and dangerous — Malcolm takes baby Lyra in his canoe (La Belle Sauvage, named after a tavern) and makes a harrowing journey through flooded countryside to bring her to safety at Jordan College. Alice Parslow, a sharp-tongued teenager who works at the inn, joins him. The villain is Gerard Bonneville, a man with a hyena daemon whose pursuit of Lyra is genuinely frightening.

Pullman's prose has deepened. The flood sequences are among the most beautiful writing of his career — the water transforming familiar Oxford into something primordial, ancient, and wild. The faerie encounters during the flood feel like they belong in a different, older tradition, and Pullman weaves them into his mythology with the confidence of a writer who has been thinking about this world for decades.

Michael Sheen narrates the audiobook, and his Welsh warmth is perfect for the pastoral English setting and the mythic undertones.

Five stars. Pullman returned to this world and proved he still had something essential to say about it. The flood sequence alone is worth the seventeen-year wait.

If You Liked The Book of Dust, Try:

• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame — English river life rendered with the same pastoral beauty. Pullman is clearly in conversation with this tradition.

• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke — Another story about a vast, flooded world and a person trying to protect something precious inside it.

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke — English magic, English rain, and the same conviction that the mundane and the miraculous coexist.

From Luke Stoffel's Bookshelf

If you enjoyed this book review, check out The Stardust Pirates — a queer YA horror where, like Malcolm, a young person must carry something precious through dangerous water, set on a Philippine island where the flood is siren magic and the canoe is the only thing between you and drowning. Learn More: The Stardust Pirates

The Stardust Pirates by Luke Stoffel