Philip Pullman isn’t done building new worlds
WHEN PHILIP PULLMAN WAS 10 YEARS OLD, HE witnessed a vision that has stayed with him ever since. The year was 1956, and he was living in South Australia, where his stepfather was a pilot with Britain’s Royal Air Force. The River Murray floods that year had left huge parts of the region underwater, and he remembers being driven out to see it. “It was astonishing,” the 70-year-old British author says now. “It was an immense mass, as wide as the sea, of gray water whipped up by a cold wind. The power of it. It was an impression that never left me.”
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. Released between 1995 and 2000, the three novels that launched the franchise entered the canon of young-adult fiction and, alongside the Harry Potter series, stands as an
