A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

This is an extremely weird book. The first half reminded me of some of my favorite parts of The Golden Compass, and the second half reminded me of some of my least favorite parts of The Amber Spyglass.

I was in the series for daemons, armored bears, dimensional travel, Lyra lying, the alethiometer, witches, and Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter as fascinating bad guys. But mostly I was in it for daemons. I was not in the series for theology, politics, the Magisterium, God, angels, the weird surreal tone of the last book, Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter as heroic antiheroes, or Dust. I feel like Dust got explained about a billion times and every time it was explained, I understood it less.

In La Belle Sauvage, Malcolm is an eleven-year-old boy who’s the child of innkeepers on a river by a nunnery. When he finds a secret message, he befriends Hannah Relf, a scholar of the alethiometer who is also a spy, and begins working in her spy network. Meanwhile, his school is getting taken over by the religious equivalent of the Hitler Youth, and the nuns take in a baby named Lyra. Malcolm, who is friendly with the nuns (they’re very nice nuns) adores baby Lyra and vows to do anything to protect her.

La Belle Sauvage is his canoe, which a local boy kept repainting as La Belle Sausage until Malcolm beat him up. IMO, the book would have been greatly improved if 1) they had been forced to have their dramatic adventures in La Belle Sausage since that is literally the only funny moment in the entire book, and 2) Malcolm never hits anyone ever.

Everything involving him and violence is supposed to be deep but ends up your basic "in hard times hard men must make hard choices which are always violent, and that's totally fine because their violence is always necessary to protect helpless females and also they feel bad about the ~violence within them~."

Remember the other thing I really liked about The Golden Compass? Lyra getting to be a weird little girl who's semi-feral and lies and doesn't get punished for it and is the heroine? And then in later books, she gets tamed and a boy appears to do manly stuff? Yeah. We're now three to one on books in the series which are all about heroic manly boys protecting girls vs books about weird feral girls protecting themselves.

This book is very difficult to discuss without spoilers for the second book, The Secret Commonwealth, which I'd already heard about and which literally did spoil a significant aspect of the book for me. If you want to know…

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That being said, I really enjoyed the first half of the book. It’s got a leisurely pace but I found it very compelling reading. Then a flood occurs, and the book goes from pastoral/political fantasy to a kind of surreal fever dream interspersed with lots and lots of diaper changes. (Teenage Lyra would be so embarassed by the existence of this book.)

It also completely drops most of the characters and plotlines from the first half with no closure whatsoever, to the point of never learning whether major characters survived or not. Book 2 takes place 20 years later, so it’s not a cliffhanger that will pick up in the next book, it’s a “you might or might not get some kind of summarized version of what happened to them” in the next book.

There is a lot of unpleasant sexual violence against adults and children in this book, including my least favorite thing, a completely gratuitous rape that serves only to motivate a male character. The rest of my complaints are spoilery.

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This book was so frustrating. A lot of the early parts were really very good. And then there was the rest of it. Just what this series and fiction in general really needed: more rape.

The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage (Book of Dust, Volume 1)