“I’m going to give it to the Bodleian Library,” he adds, referring to the University of Oxford’s research library.
‘If I don’t cut my hair, this book will be all right.’” He still has the hair, he says, stashed away in a Ziploc bag. “It was superstition,” he says, “or a bargain with the muse or something. While he was writing La Belle Sauvage, he vowed not to cut his hair until he was finished. But there’s a streak of eccentricity too. He strikes an avuncular, professorial figure at home in his low-ceilinged cottage just outside of Oxford. In person, Pullman doesn’t seem much like a threat to the moral order. “Atheism for kids,” the Catholic League announced in 2007, “that is what Philip Pullman sells.” In the following two years the trilogy was among the country’s most frequently challenged books, according to the American Library Association, as anxious parents attempted to have it removed from public and school libraries. These heretical themes saw the books condemned by church groups in the U.S., especially after the 2007 movie adaptation of the first volume, The Golden Compass, brought them wider attention.
The final book ends with Pullman’s heroine, Lyra, unwittingly restaging the fall of man and setting out to create a “Republic of Heaven,” a principled democracy rather than a dictatorship under the authority of God. The villains are the forces of organized religion, and the heroes seek to challenge and overturn the order of the monotheistic universe. The books also wrestle with weighty metaphysical themes, influenced by the poetry of William Blake and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. His Dark Materials is mostly set in a parallel universe where the supernatural is everyday ageless witches exist alongside warrior polar bears and every human has a “daemon,” a kind of spirit animal with which it shares a soul. In 2003, Pullman’s fellow Brits voted the entire trilogy their third favorite book of all time, after The Lord of the Rings and Pride and Prejudice. Released between 19, the three novels that launched the franchise entered the canon of young-adult fiction and, alongside the Harry Potter series, stands as an early example of the cross-generational appeal of the genre. It’s this memory that inspired the flood at the center of La Belle Sauvage, the first volume of the Book of Dust, Pullman’s new trilogy set in the universe of his fantasy series His Dark Materials.
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