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Simon

The Book of Dust

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Philip Pullman has at last announced The Book of Dust, which turns out to be a full trilogy running alongside His Dark Materials - volume 1 will be published on October 19th. A very welcome surprise.

 

More details from The Guardian and NPR.

 

This news is quite timely for me, as I've just embarked on a re-reading of His Dark Materials (including the little companion books Once Upon A Time In The North and Lyra's Oxford for the first time). I loved the trilogy as a youngster, reading them as they came out.

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This is tremendous news. Aside from that rather odd little novella about Jesus, and one or two other short things, it's been a very long time since Pullman had a new book out. I'm excited to see what becomes of this.

 

I too enjoyed the His Dark Materials trilogy, and it would be nice to reread them before this comes out. In particular I remember The Subtle Knife as being tremendously strange and affecting, though I don't know that I could wade through The Amber Spyglass again, good as I'm sure it was at the time...

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I've read the first half of this and it's great so far.



I think Pullman's tilted version of our world - not just its alternative history and language like ‘anbaric’ rather than ‘electric’, but the social and political setup being an echo of our own too - has rarely been stronger or sharper. The most insidious, unpleasant elements of that (public libraries have been done away with, there’s a network of child spies funded by the state and couched in religious rhetoric) obviously have their deliberate parallels but feel tightly wound around the plot in a way that they perhaps weren't in The Amber Spyglass. 

 

So far it doesn't seem to require a thorough recall of everything that happened in His Dark Materials, although obviously it will help if you know who Lord Asriel and Lyra are.

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I think I might wait until all of them are out, then reread the original trilogy (and the other bits and pieces from the universe, if I can get them) before hitting these. Glad to hear it's good, though!

 

I wonder if that BBC tv adaptation is still going to happen. Apparently it was supposed to be out this year but is still in pre-production.

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