A summary in prose, written skillfully and carefully by A+ student, in which the main events are narrated in chronological order. Easy to read and extremely helpful for us busy people.
Once Upon a Time in the North
-Phillip Pullman
(without unimportant details)
FIRST DAY
-Lee Scoresby is a 24 Texan man who carries a pistol around. He got his air balloon gambling
in Texas, so he isn´t educated on how to be an aeronaut. His air balloon isn´t well oiled either,
so he parks at the nearest place, that being Novy Odense. He goes to register his balloon and
finds out there isn´t a police force in Novy Odense, but instead there only exists the Customs
and Revenues Office. As he walks through town, he notices there are a lot of bears on the
sidewalks. He also notices there´s tension not only between bears and humans, but also
between these two groups and the Customs and Revenues officers.
-He enters a “cheap-looking bar” hoping to get some food, in which there´s a quarrel
happening. The one causing this trouble is a red-haired, around 50-year-old man called Captain
Van Breda, who was drunk and complaining about his cargo not being released. It is mentioned
that he hasn´t paid the fees necessary. After ordering some food, Scoresby meets a “thin,
hungry-looking man” called Oskar Sigurdsson, who is a poet and journalist. He mentions there
is a mayoral election going on, in which there are two candidates, one being Poliakov, who is
“in the verge of a great career” and will “put the town on the map”. It is also mentioned that
Poliakov has an anti-bear campaign in the works. Lee asks about the bear situation since he
isn´t used to seeing them, to which Sigurdsson replies saying that the bears were once a very
noble and respectable species with a great culture, but that now they´re “drunkards, scavengers,
vagrants, degraded specimens who steal, drink, lie and cheat”. He says that bears make their
own armor as they grow, and that the armors nowadays are less delicate and worse quality than
the older ones, etc. Their conversation is interrupted because the bartender got fed up with
Van Breda´s complaining, so he got a large stick and was about to hit him when Lee got in
between and saved Van Breda.
-After that, Lee gets a room at some residence, and looks for a job nearby, unsuccessfully.
Later, as he´s having dinner with the rest of the people living there, he gets to know them.
There were three people, one being Ms. Lund, the young, cold librarian, and another being
Mikhail Vassiliev, the economist, and finally a random photographer. After dinner, the
economist Vassiliev invites Lee to accompany him to the town hall, where Poliakov would be
giving a speech, and Lee accepts. As they get there, they see Sigurdsson, so Lee joins him
instead. He gets introduced to Poliakov´s dumb 18-year-old daughter, Olga Poliakova, and
Lee is attracted to her. Apparently, Poliakov was a Senator, but he got fired because of some
financial issues, and he didn´t like being reminded of it. Lee notices a lot of armed people, so
he assumes they´re all Customs and Revenues Officers, but we later learn that they are actually
the security arm of Larsen Manganese, a large private oil mining company with which Poliakov
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