Last Saturday I was praising the comfort offered the reader by Philip Pullman in La Belle Sauvage. That was before I reached the second half of the story and the great flood navigated by Malcolm and Alice and baby Lyra. There's precious little comfort on offer in the second part of the novel, but plenty of visceral discomfort and an overwhelming sense of threat, such even though you know Lyra has to survive to play out His Dark Materials you're fairly dubious that she will make it beyond eight months of age.
Pullman is brilliant at suggesting the real heroism of Malcolm and the wonderfully surprising Alice lies in just how genuinely terrified and depressed they are by what is expected of them and yet do what is needed in a way that seems entirely realistic. The sequence in which Malcolm throws up as a result of the terror he feels is one of the most convincing evocations of physical fear I've ever read.
I didn't want the story to finish, but I'm glad it did.
Oh, and the illustrations by Chris Wormell are stone cold perfect.
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