Twenty-two years on from Northern Lights—aka The Golden Compass—the first volume of a trilogy that’s since sold more than twenty-two million copies, Phillip Pullman has announced that the much-discussed Book of Dust is, if not done, then damn near complete. But contrary to earlier speculation, it’s not a prequel. Or even a sequel. According to the author, it is, in fact, “an ‘equel.’ It doesn’t stand before or after His Dark Materials, but beside it.”
Wait, you what? Well, Pullman, apparently, had always wanted to tell the story of how Lyra Belacqua, the hero at the heart of His Dark Materials, came to be living at Jordan College, where the first book of said series starts, and in thinking about it, he “discovered a long story that began when she was a baby and will end when she’s grown up.” A long story that, in short, begins before Northern Lights, and ends after the events of The Amber Spyglass.
Thus, The Book of Dust is not, as proposed so long ago, a companion piece to the original trilogy at all, but a whole new trilogy—the first volume of which will be released later this year.
Although it is as yet untitled, book one of The Book of Dust is slated for publication on October 19 everywhere, by way of Penguin Random House Children’s and David Fickling Books in the UK. Per The Bookseller:
The first volume is set 10 years before Northern Lights and centres on the popular character Lyra Belacqua, starting at the beginning of her story and returning 20 years later. Alethiometers, daemons and the Magisterium feature but the book also introduces new characters including a new hero. The title is set between Oxford and London, in the same parallel Britain (or Brytain) from His Dark Materials trilogy.
That “new hero” is probably “‘an ordinary boy’ (a boy we have seen in an earlier part of Lyra’s story, if we were paying attention) who, with Lyra, is caught up in a ‘terrifying adventure that takes him into a new world.’”
But like His Dark Materials before it, elements of which were intended to be read as “an analogy of consciousness,” The Book of Dust aims to be more than a mere story. “The idea of Dust suffused His Dark Materials,” is how Pullman put it. “Little by little through that story the idea of what Dust was became clearer and clearer, but I always wanted to return to it and discover more.” Here, then, is what he’s found:
“Questions about that mysterious and troubling substance were already causing strife 10 years before His Dark Materials, and at the centre of The Book of Dust is the struggle between a despotic and totalitarian organisation, which wants to stifle speculation and enquiry, and those who believe thought and speech should be free.
“The story I’m telling in this book is more about […] William Blake’s vision, his idea of a fiercely reductive way of seeing things: it’s right or wrong; it’s black or white. He said that was far too limiting and we should bring out truer human vision when we see things, surround them all with a sort of penumbra of imagination and memories and hopes and expectations and fears and all these things.”
The Book of Dust, then, is “an attack on the reductionism, the merciless reductionism, of doctrines with a single answer.” But in the event that that’s a bit heady for you, take heart in the fact that it’s also the long-awaited expansion of a narrative near and dear to the hearts of many readers indeed. As David Fickling himself said, “it is a really important book for now, not in an intellectual way, but in a storytelling way.”
So… roll on October, right?
Niall Alexander is an extra-curricular English teacher who reads and writes about all things weird and wonderful for The Speculative Scotsman, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com. He lives with about a bazillion books, his better half and a certain sleekit wee beastie in the central belt of bonnie Scotland.
You would not believe the noise of excitement I made when I read this.
I’m absolutely thrilled that Pullman has decided to expand upon the world(s) he created in His Dark Materials. May The Book of Dust be as wondrous as those that came before it!
I hope that Pullman can manage to sustain the awesomeness this time around. Northern Lights was so amazing, and then each subsequent book in the series was just a little worse, until The Amber Spyglass was just a mess that sacrificed narrative logic for polemics. Hopefully starting anew will be a return to greatness, not a continuation of the downward slide.
I really loved this series as a high schooler…we should do a re-read! For me it didn’t matter that we probably disagreed on some fundamental things; I didn’t always agree with his points/conclusions/premises but the world building and characters were fantastic.
TGC was amazing, TSK equally so, both of which I’ve read a couple times. But with TAS all I remember of it is being confused and I’ve never gone back and explored it again. Maybe it’s time for a complete re-read. Very excited for this.
A re-read say a few months before the publishing of this book would be a good idea. I understand why people feel TAS is more polemical than narrative but that’s partially because some of this world-building was left till then. I felt the bigger problem was that some of the solutions felt tacked on and pulled out of thin air, whereas the problem solving in the first two books felt more organic, than simply a plot device by a weary writer (again, I’m not sure that’s how I would categorize it in all fairness, but I do think why people find the third book lacking is not as simple as it might appear).
As an aside, this re-read (and future re-reads) do not necessarily need to be one chapter per week. Sometimes, those can feel very padded.