![]() ![]() ![]() But is there a richer, more complex conceit in modern fiction than Pullman’s daemons – animal companions that are both a projection of yourself and a guide, both soul and guardian angel? What could be more obvious than an animal companion – every Disney film has one. The babyhood of your most beloved character is a worryingly obvious place to start a prequel, but one of the marks of Pullman’s genius is that he can take the obvious and make it blaze. The book, the first in a three-part prequel to His Dark Materials, tells the story of the infant Lyra, who is placed in the care of some competent, kindly sisters at Godstow and who has to be rescued from her enemies and from a catastrophic flood by their resourceful odd-job boy, Malcolm. La Belle Sauvage opens with an even greater surprise. ![]() I remember getting that Tomocomo feeling when I first opened CS Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and saw that there were islands and unknown lands beyond Narnia. The mark of a great fictional universe is that it is bigger than the story, that there is something beyond the map in the endpapers. ![]()
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