La Belle Sauvage
Nov. 17th, 2017 07:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraPossibly unpopular opinion: I wasn't into it.
To back up, this is the first book of Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust trilogy, in which he returns to the world of the His Dark Materials trilogy. This one is set 11ish years before Golden Compass, when Lyra is a baby; the next one apparently picks up when Lyra is 20.
I am, in general, skeptical of the thing where authors go back to their best-known/best-loved/best-selling series some years later after long gaps, where they revisit stories they had wrapped up and concluded but now want to reopen and reinterpret. At best, you get Tehanu, which I was really angry about when I read it around the 8th grade but have come to understand better as an adult, or Jane Yolen's Dragon's Heart, which was... fine? I guess? but 20 years too late for when I was passionate about the characters. Well, 15 years late. Well, okay, I was still pretty excited, but I can hardly remember now anything that actually happened in it, not the way I remember the first three. At worst you get The One-Armed Queen, Jane Yolen again, WHY, or the Ender's Shadow books, which, like, you know what, I'm not even going to be like "I guess Card needed to pay his mortgage" because fuck him, lose your house, asshole. ANNNyways. I found the end of Amber Spyglass extraordinarily painful and slightly cheating, in that Pullman clearly Wanted That Ending and (in my reading) was willing to somewhat undermine some of his own message up to that point to force it. But it is what it is, I got my feelings about that one out of my system ten years ago very very early in the 30fic project (Lyra's was the fourth story I finished) and I've gone on to happily enjoy many creative daemonverse AUs in fanfic which have continued to explore the trope. I even wrote one, actually. It was fun.
Given all that, it's possible that I should have just let Book of Dust be something that happened somewhere I wasn't, much like Cursed Child or the recent X-Files or anything else that I would have once found inexplicable that I wasn't rushing to consume. (There seem to be... more and more of those as time goes on. Something I didn't used to know about aging.) But for whatever reason I gave it a high priority on my to-read spreadsheet and put myself in the request queue and then there it was, available for download, so.
Actual very spoilery thoughts about this book behind the spoiler cut. Uh, content warning for sexual violence against a minor.
So, like I said, I just wasn't into it, pretty much from the start. Malcolm the plucky boy hero who has to do all of the canoe-paddling and Alice who has to do all of the baby-changing and they even *talk* about that, but Malcolm's just like "I don't know howwww", until finally in the last sequence we get to "one or the other of them attended to Lyra. Sometimes Malcolm didn't know whether it was him doing it or it was Alice." which, like, given the statistics on how dudes estimate their share of the childcare, probably means it was still mostly Alice, and it's definitely Alice the last two times on the last island. And, like, I like that there's a book with a baby that takes seriously the very real endless repetitive need to feed and change the baby! That this is a major component of the plot! But, what, it was too transgressive to have an 11 year old boy change an infant girl's diaper? We can see him kill but not caregive? Here is an argument: Malcolm changing Lyra's diaper would have been entirely non-problematic if Malcolm had maintained his childhood presexuality, but because Pullman had to shoehorn in this unfortunate sexual awakening development, Malcolm can't see infant vulva because it would have been unavoidably creepy in that context.
More about that. So, I really love Lyra and Will's sexual awakening at the end of Amber Spyglass, especially the UK edition which makes it more clear; it feels very sweet and age-appropriate (and plot-appropriate) to me. 11 year old Malcolm discovering attraction to 16 year old Alice, after Alice has talked about wanting to be attractive to Bonneville, with the threat of Bonneville as a sexual predator hanging over all this - which actually then HAPPENS when Bonneville rapes Alice, which Malcolm kills him to stop - and then Alice gives her big speech at the end about how much stronger Malcolm is than she is (when it's always been Alice who is so beautifully ready to cut someone/fire the gun/etc), and what he's done to keep them safe (like, she doesn't even get to be furious that she's been raped, she has to be grateful that she got rescued) and then she's all holding his hand at the end - the whole thing just seemed ugly and unnecessary and *random*, like, why *did* studying Dust turn this apparently-previously-not-like-that scientist dude into a rapist? We don't know! Are we going to find out in some later book? Hope not!
I also didn't feel like the fairies and the river gods and whatnot added anything to the worldbuilding of Lyra's world in Pullman's multiverse. I mean, okay, I do like a good magical crossnursing as part of a heroic origin (Romulus and Remus; all the animals feeding the baby in the first part of Spindle's End; please give me other examples) so Lyra getting breast-fed fairy milk and blessed by a river god is all fine I guess as part of the "why is this one random kid so fricking special" business. But I didn't really feel like they clicked with or fleshed out anything from the first trilogy. The League of St. Alexander and Office of Child Protection being so powerful here in the timeline also sort of undercut the novelty and terror of the kidnappings of the Oblation Board later on; I guess in one way, "hey things like that don't just spring out of nowhere they're part of a long ongoing continuum of abuses and oppression" is a perfectly reasonable point but, to keep using this word, it felt very unnecessary to the original story, and there wasn't enough here for me to make it stand on its own as its own story. So, yeah. I'll be curious to see whether there are people who sometimes share my book opinions who did like it, which, like, the basic idea of the whole canoe-in-the-flood half of the book is *solid*, it's vivid and has some good episodes of adventure! I think if it had just been that I would have liked it more.
To back up, this is the first book of Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust trilogy, in which he returns to the world of the His Dark Materials trilogy. This one is set 11ish years before Golden Compass, when Lyra is a baby; the next one apparently picks up when Lyra is 20.
I am, in general, skeptical of the thing where authors go back to their best-known/best-loved/best-selling series some years later after long gaps, where they revisit stories they had wrapped up and concluded but now want to reopen and reinterpret. At best, you get Tehanu, which I was really angry about when I read it around the 8th grade but have come to understand better as an adult, or Jane Yolen's Dragon's Heart, which was... fine? I guess? but 20 years too late for when I was passionate about the characters. Well, 15 years late. Well, okay, I was still pretty excited, but I can hardly remember now anything that actually happened in it, not the way I remember the first three. At worst you get The One-Armed Queen, Jane Yolen again, WHY, or the Ender's Shadow books, which, like, you know what, I'm not even going to be like "I guess Card needed to pay his mortgage" because fuck him, lose your house, asshole. ANNNyways. I found the end of Amber Spyglass extraordinarily painful and slightly cheating, in that Pullman clearly Wanted That Ending and (in my reading) was willing to somewhat undermine some of his own message up to that point to force it. But it is what it is, I got my feelings about that one out of my system ten years ago very very early in the 30fic project (Lyra's was the fourth story I finished) and I've gone on to happily enjoy many creative daemonverse AUs in fanfic which have continued to explore the trope. I even wrote one, actually. It was fun.
Given all that, it's possible that I should have just let Book of Dust be something that happened somewhere I wasn't, much like Cursed Child or the recent X-Files or anything else that I would have once found inexplicable that I wasn't rushing to consume. (There seem to be... more and more of those as time goes on. Something I didn't used to know about aging.) But for whatever reason I gave it a high priority on my to-read spreadsheet and put myself in the request queue and then there it was, available for download, so.
Actual very spoilery thoughts about this book behind the spoiler cut. Uh, content warning for sexual violence against a minor.
So, like I said, I just wasn't into it, pretty much from the start. Malcolm the plucky boy hero who has to do all of the canoe-paddling and Alice who has to do all of the baby-changing and they even *talk* about that, but Malcolm's just like "I don't know howwww", until finally in the last sequence we get to "one or the other of them attended to Lyra. Sometimes Malcolm didn't know whether it was him doing it or it was Alice." which, like, given the statistics on how dudes estimate their share of the childcare, probably means it was still mostly Alice, and it's definitely Alice the last two times on the last island. And, like, I like that there's a book with a baby that takes seriously the very real endless repetitive need to feed and change the baby! That this is a major component of the plot! But, what, it was too transgressive to have an 11 year old boy change an infant girl's diaper? We can see him kill but not caregive? Here is an argument: Malcolm changing Lyra's diaper would have been entirely non-problematic if Malcolm had maintained his childhood presexuality, but because Pullman had to shoehorn in this unfortunate sexual awakening development, Malcolm can't see infant vulva because it would have been unavoidably creepy in that context.
More about that. So, I really love Lyra and Will's sexual awakening at the end of Amber Spyglass, especially the UK edition which makes it more clear; it feels very sweet and age-appropriate (and plot-appropriate) to me. 11 year old Malcolm discovering attraction to 16 year old Alice, after Alice has talked about wanting to be attractive to Bonneville, with the threat of Bonneville as a sexual predator hanging over all this - which actually then HAPPENS when Bonneville rapes Alice, which Malcolm kills him to stop - and then Alice gives her big speech at the end about how much stronger Malcolm is than she is (when it's always been Alice who is so beautifully ready to cut someone/fire the gun/etc), and what he's done to keep them safe (like, she doesn't even get to be furious that she's been raped, she has to be grateful that she got rescued) and then she's all holding his hand at the end - the whole thing just seemed ugly and unnecessary and *random*, like, why *did* studying Dust turn this apparently-previously-not-like-that scientist dude into a rapist? We don't know! Are we going to find out in some later book? Hope not!
I also didn't feel like the fairies and the river gods and whatnot added anything to the worldbuilding of Lyra's world in Pullman's multiverse. I mean, okay, I do like a good magical crossnursing as part of a heroic origin (Romulus and Remus; all the animals feeding the baby in the first part of Spindle's End; please give me other examples) so Lyra getting breast-fed fairy milk and blessed by a river god is all fine I guess as part of the "why is this one random kid so fricking special" business. But I didn't really feel like they clicked with or fleshed out anything from the first trilogy. The League of St. Alexander and Office of Child Protection being so powerful here in the timeline also sort of undercut the novelty and terror of the kidnappings of the Oblation Board later on; I guess in one way, "hey things like that don't just spring out of nowhere they're part of a long ongoing continuum of abuses and oppression" is a perfectly reasonable point but, to keep using this word, it felt very unnecessary to the original story, and there wasn't enough here for me to make it stand on its own as its own story. So, yeah. I'll be curious to see whether there are people who sometimes share my book opinions who did like it, which, like, the basic idea of the whole canoe-in-the-flood half of the book is *solid*, it's vivid and has some good episodes of adventure! I think if it had just been that I would have liked it more.
