Clara’s Verdict
When Philip Pullman announced The Book of Dust, there was a particular quality to the anticipation among readers of His Dark Materials: cautious, almost superstitious. Sequels and prequels to beloved trilogies have a habit of diminishing rather than extending what made the original work. La Belle Sauvage – book 1 of The Book of Dust – doesn’t diminish anything. It expands the world laterally rather than retreading it, introduces a protagonist worthy of the tradition, and gives us Michael Sheen narrating. The audiobook won the British Book Awards Audiobook of the Year 2018, and Sheen’s performance was described by The Bookseller as “the best piece of narration I’ve ever heard.” That assessment is not, in my view, an overstatement.
Audible rating: 4.6/5 (24 ratings)
About the Audiobook
Malcolm Polstead is eleven years old and lives at the Trout Inn near Oxford. Across the River Thames is Godstow Priory, where the nuns have taken in an unusual guest: a baby called Lyra Belacqua. This is set a decade before the events of Northern Lights – a prequel in the most expansive sense, less concerned with explaining Lyra’s origins than with exploring the world she’ll eventually inhabit. Malcolm’s canoe, La Belle Sauvage, becomes the vehicle for an extraordinary journey as floodwaters transform the landscape and forces hostile to the child converge around the Priory.
What Pullman does here is expand the imaginative geography of Lyra’s world while maintaining the qualities that make His Dark Materials so compelling: the moral seriousness, the delight in ideas, the absolute conviction that children’s inner lives are as rich and complicated as adults’. Malcolm is a wonderful protagonist – curious, capable, frightened in the right ways – and the relationship between his world and Lyra’s is handled with the oblique skill of a writer who knows exactly what he’s doing.
The Narration
Michael Sheen’s narration is, genuinely, one of the great audiobook performances. He narrated His Dark Materials in a BBC full-cast production, and brings that same depth of engagement to this solo reading. The Bookseller’s description – “his voice is impressive, from the crisp, definitive consonants of its higher registers to the rumbly bass notes Sheen summons when some menace enters the scene” – is accurate. What distinguishes Sheen from most celebrity narrators is that he’s clearly a reader of Pullman’s work, not merely an actor performing it: the interpretive choices come from genuine understanding of the text’s emotional and intellectual stakes. Also awarded Best Solo Narration at the New York Festival Radio Awards.
What Readers Say
Rated 4.6/5 across 24 Audible ratings. One reviewer wrote at length about the anticipation: “For a long time, Pullman hinted that he was writing a second trilogy – finally, in 2017, we had it. I was hugely excited and it didn’t disappoint.” Another called Sheen’s performance “a polished performance” (with cheerful acknowledgement of the pun) and described listening while driving as ideal. A third found it “brilliant – explained a lot about the series I had previously read. Also a thrilling adventure, quite gripping and exciting.” The consensus across multiple years of reviews is consistent: this is Pullman at close to his best, and Sheen doing something exceptional with the material.
Who Should Listen?
Readers of His Dark Materials who haven’t yet come to The Book of Dust – this is the obvious starting point and is enormously rewarding. Those new to Pullman’s work should arguably read Northern Lights first, since knowing Lyra’s story adds a layer of poignancy to Malcolm’s that can’t be replicated going in cold. The audiobook is outstanding for listeners of all ages – Pullman’s original trilogy is notionally children’s fiction and is emphatically literature for everyone, and so is this. Michael Sheen’s narration is, in itself, a reason to choose the audio version over the text.
Listen to La Belle Sauvage on Audible UK – British Book Awards Audiobook of the Year 2018, narrated by Michael Sheen.
