A review by nessynoname
La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman

challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.5

The first half of the book I was on board with. It sets up a very grounded story of a callow young boy becoming involved with spywork in a time of tenuous ideological conflict, quite in league with what one might come to expect having read Pullman’s His Dark Materials series. I think someone else described the 2nd half of the book something like a whimsical Homerian Odyssey, random vignettes brushing with supernatural beings and scenarios and then moving on, and, yeah, that would be one of the more charitable ways to put it. The two halves are quite disparate to an IMO distractable degree. 

In the first half of the book, I thought the subplot of the Consistorial Court recruiting literal schoolchildren to be their morality police, and the way it upended the dynamics of the school, was really fascinating. At the same time, I found Pullman’s signature anti-organized religion message kind of heavy handed this time. For the life of me I do not recall the adherents of the Church in Lyra’s World being explicitly specified as Christians/followers of Jesus in the entirity of the His Dark Materials series, (the Magisterium is the name of a real-world office of the Catholic Church so the writing is kind of on the wall about it, but stay with me.) Obviously, they would be Christians by name in Will’s World because Will’s World is our world but I somehow thought Lyra’s world lacked the Christ figure. That is apparently not the case and I found it kind of jarring to hear Malcolm recite real world Bible stories and for an entire subplot of the church sanctioning a league of morality police school children encouraged to snitch on their own sinful heathan families so they could prove their love and loyalty to Jesus. 

Another hurdle for me was the whiplash of trying to figure out what the actual age rating of this book is. La Belle Sauvage is darker and interacts with more mature topics by orders of magnitude over His Dark Materials. Even though I was still sort of hung up on my ‘edgy middle readers’ framework of this world (the age rating of the original HDM,) discovering the book was actually categorized with a YA rating temporarily assuaged me when I was reading about the subtle political maneuverings of a spy organization and the dense lessons of philosophy Dr. Relf imparts on Malcolm, and then also, you know, the religiously brainwashed child spies. Then I got to the pedophillic sex criminal who wants to steal and infant from a pair of 11-year-olds I was just very bewildered and sort of aghast. I don’t want to think of myself as a pearl-clutcher, but I honestly think these topics would be murky even in an adult novel. Forget the young adult audience, Bonneville made *me* uncomfortable, and not in the way that is a compliment to a written villain. 

And then, as was said, the 2nd half, when the flood begins and the two children and their infant charge paddle around in a canoe, evading a murderer/rapist, and also have run ins with bizarre, dream-like fairytale beings that don’t really have any explained basis in the worldbuilding? They just kind of happen? I don’t know. The 2nd half really started to lose me. I had trouble paying attention and understanding what was going on. There is one final coup de grace right at the end during the climax where there is a not explicitly stated and pretty well implied rape scene (at the very least a scene of physical assault with sexual undertones) immediately followed up by a murder and my brain just kind of blue screened. I’m just really not sure what to think. 

The first half is a really solid and intriguing narrative with some interesting things to say, just with some bizarrely heavy topics sprinkled in, and then the 2nd half just kind of goes off the rails. Yeesh. 

Expand filter menu Content Warnings