God is dead—and Philip Pullman killed him. So claimed Protestants and Catholics alike when Pullman completed his beloved fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials, in 2000, and again when New Line Cinema released the film adaptation of the trilogy’s first volume, The Golden Compass, in 2007. “Pullman’s unholy fantasy ensnared me and nearly swallowed me whole,” Stephen Ross of the Christian Research Institute complained in 2007. “Only by God’s grace through my privileged training in the scriptures and Christian apologetics did I emerge from the experience without doubting the truth of the Christian worldview.” For the book’s supporters, this was praise indeed.

Ross’s chief points of contention with Pullman’s book—that the characters murder God and consort with beings called “daemons”—fueled pious right-wing tirades for years, even though they are based on misreadings. Pullman’s child heroes, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, don’t kill God; an angel calling himself the Authority dies when they attempt to free him. Daemons are animal spirits meant to represent the essential characteristics—what we might traditionally call the soul—of their human companions. But accuracy can be detrimental when waging a culture war, and so Pullman’s critics inadvertently proved his larger argument. His great foe is not Christianity, per se. It’s fanaticism.

LA BELLE SAUVAGE by Philip Pullman Knopf, 464 pp., $22.99

In this respect, his new novel, La Belle Sauvage, is not an addition to Lyra’s universe as much as it’s a clarification of themes that were first explored in His Dark Materials. Once again, the heroes are children; adults are either complicated moral actors or outright villains. The Magisterium, Pullman’s proxy Roman Catholic Church, is tightening its stranglehold on intellectual pursuits in response to a world-changing scientific discovery. Its agents—inquisitors in all but name—are determined to find and kidnap an infant Lyra, who is already a subject of prophecy and import. Separately, a madman targets her for his own reasons and she is rescued, eventually, by the book’s young protagonist, Malcolm Polstead, and his companion Alice Parslow. The trio embark on a treacherous river adventure in the novel’s titular boat, and find refuge thanks to a combination of endurance and luck.

Many familiar characters are back: In addition to Lyra and her daemon Pan, her explorer father Lord Asriel and her villainous mother Marisa Coulter make appearances. So does Dust, an elementary particle attracted to human consciousness and associated, in the teachings of the Magisterium, with original sin. And there is an alethiometer, the eponymous golden compass that communicates with Dust to reveal the truth to those who know how to read it. That we greet these elements of the story as welcome familiars, rather than tired points in the great constellation of Pullman’s universe, is a testament to his gifts as a storyteller. None of his characters are caricatures: There are good nuns and dastardly ones, courageous academics and those willing to sacrifice innocents for what they perceive to be the public good.

Pullman has said that The Book of Dust, of which La Belle Sauvage is the first volume, examines the “question of consciousness, perhaps the oldest philosophical question of all: Are we matter? Or are we spirit and matter? What is consciousness if there is no spirit?” The discovery of Dust throws the Magisterium into dangerous panic, and sets up a related question: What moral responsibility does consciousness bestow upon us?