2006 Reading List - Philip Pullman: Galatea (1978)

[enitharmon]

Very strange! A young musician travels to South America in search of his missing wife and becomes embroiled with an ex-Nazi and his zombie slaves, a city debilitated by ghosts, angels, erotic spirits made of electricity, intelligent automata, and a sinister foe who is at once a business consultant, an astrologer and a werewolf.

It's all rather cold, soulless and unappealing. It's hard to like the rather priggish protagonist and I never really cared whether he found his wife or not. But it's fascinating to see how so many ideas that bore such luscious fruit in His Dark Materials had their first flowering here.

This book is an American first edition of Pullman's first published novel, and I am offering it for auction on eBay.