The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman review – Lyra grows up

In the second volume of the Book of Dust trilogy, Lyra is a student on the trail of a dangerous mystery, and Pullman’s target is as much intolerant rationality as intolerant theismWe all get older, and so do our books. Two years ago, Philip Pullman met the challenge of returning to the world of His Dark Materials by going back in time. La Belle Sauvage, the first volume of his planned trilogy The Book of Dust, was a prequel, telling how, as a baby, Lyra Belacqua was saved from the deadly agents of the Magisterium, the authoritarian church that is always seeking to extend its powers. Her rescuer was the heroic but thoroughly human Malcolm, an 11-year-old living with his parents in a pub on the river outside Oxford. Now, in The Secret Commonwealth, the second volume of The Book of Dust, Pullman does something riskier: he jumps forward 20 years – a decade on from the memorably sad, satisfyingly inevitable ending of The Amber Spyglass – to give us the story of Lyra as a young adult.Now she is a student in that familiar-yet-strange Oxford of Pullman’s alternative world. (This book stays in that world and never crosses to our own.) She has become very intellectual and a little solemn and has fallen out with her daemon, Pantalaimon. But she cannot retreat into her books, as she soon realises that she remains a person of interest to the Magisterium. The book’s gripping opening chapter moves between sinister machinations among leaders of the church in Geneva, and a clumsy murder in night-time Oxford. The murder victim, Lyra discovers, is a botanist – mystical botanical lore is at the heart of this tale. He had recently returned from a research trip to Central Asia where, we strongly suspect, we will eventually be led. Continue reading…
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