Three daemons in a boat

Philip Pullman’s new k, the prequel to his Northern Lights series — the one north Oxford academics very much prefer to Harry Potter — is an intriguing work. It’s notionally set some time near our own, but the world it evokes is the 1950s and 1960s England of the author’s youth. The hero, Malcolm Polstead, is the only child of an innkeeper — that timeless calling — and the inn

was an old stone-built rambling comfortable sort of place. There was a terrace above the river, where peacocks (one called Norman and the other Barry) stalked among the drinkers…There was a saloon where the gentry, if college scholars count as gentry, took their ale and smoked their pipes; there was a public bar where watermen and farm labourers sat by the fire or played darts, or stood at the bar gossiping… There was a kitchen where the landlord’s wife cooked a great joint every day…