More mayoral election fever

Once Upon a Time in the North is not to be confused with The Book of Dust, the big book which Philip Pullman has been promising for some time in interviews about His Dark Materials trilogy and what happens next. It is, instead, a short, elegant, simple story about what happened between two of his best-loved characters — the Texan aeronaut and the talking polar bear — a long time before the events of Northern Lights (1995). And while the title pays tribute to a classic western, and the story itself, although set in an Arctic port, has about it more than a whiff of cowboy gunshot, this little volume nonetheless bears defiant witness to the untranslatable glories of print as a medium. Admirers of Pullman, still reeling from the appalling film The Golden Compass — last year’s sugary shocker of a Christmas schlocker — will be happily reminded of what it was that drew them in to begin with.