For those who fell under the spell of Philip Pullman's masterful "His Dark Materials" trilogy, it was an experience as rich and heady as a gulp of the narrative's well-aged Tokay wine.
The plot takes off at a ferocious pace, with a spunky but barely educated orphan, Lyra, matching wits with brilliant scientist and explorer Lord Asriel at Jordan College in Oxford, where she is being raised by a cohort of elderly male scholars.
The backdrop of the story is a battle between an ominous papal-like Magisterium that seeks to control the populace through spies and thought police, and the independent thinkers investigating a rare substance called Dust.
Pullman returns to this world with "The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage," the first of a prequel trilogy to his earlier series.
The story has a long, slow buildup as we meet 11-year-old Malcolm, who works at his parents' pub upriver from Oxford; teenage Alice, their surly kitchen help; and the nuns at a nearby priory who are sheltering a mysterious infant.
But ominous clouds are gathering. Various parties want to get their hands on the infant Lyra, who is the subject of a powerful prophecy. The Magisterium is increasing its reach with a new group of student informants, the League of Alexander, who take control at Malcolm's school.
Malcolm witnesses an arrest by agents of the Magisterium and is drawn into a world of scholars and spies, all bent on discovering the secret of the mysterious Dust.
When a 500-year storm unleashes the Thames, he has to make a quick decision to snatch Lyra and escape with Alice in his canoe from a violent man and his terrifying daemon, an injured hyena.
