It is 20 years since the events of La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust Volume One unfolded and saw the baby Lyra Belacqua begin her life-changing journey.
It is seven years since listeners left Lyra and the love of her young life, Will Parry, on a park bench in Oxford’s Botanic Gardens at the end of the ground-breaking, best-selling His Dark Materials sequence.
Now, in The Secret Commonwealth, we meet Lyra Silvertongue. And she is no longer a child….
The second volume of Sir Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust sees Lyra, now 20 years old, and her daemon Pantalaimon, forced to navigate their relationship in a way they could never have imagined, and drawn into the complex and dangerous factions of a world that they had no idea existed. Pulled along on his own journey too is Malcolm: once a boy with a boat and a mission to save a baby from the flood, now a man with a strong sense of duty and a desire to do what is right.
Theirs is a world at once familiar and extraordinary, and they must travel far beyond the edges of Oxford, across Europe and into Asia, in search for what is lost – a city haunted by daemons, a secret at the heart of a desert, and the mystery of the elusive Dust.
The Secret Commonwealth is truly a book for our times – a powerful adventure and a thought-provoking look at what it is to understand yourself, to grow up and make sense of the world around you. This is storytelling at its very best from one of our greatest writers.
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[Pantalaimon, the daemon of Lyra Belacqua, not called Lyra Silvertongue, lay along the window will of Lyra’s little study-bedroom in St Sophia’s College in a state as far from thought as he could get]
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[Audible Studios, 3 October 2019, audiobook, 19 hours 43 minutes, bought from @audibleuk, narrated by Michael Sheen]
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I didn’t think Pullman could beat the brilliance of La Belle Sauvage which blew my mind when I read it earlier this year. I should have known better. The Secret Commonwealth is even better and I cannot wait to read the conclusion to The Book of Dust. Lyra and Pantalaimon are very different here than they are at the conclusion of The Amber Spyglass. I was surprised by how much they’ve changed though I shouldn’t really have been. Seven years passed after all. The bond between Lyra and Pantalaimon seems to be changed and damaged forever thanks to their forced separation when Lyra and Will had to enter the land of the dead. It was painful to listen to them fighting and being so awful to each other. It was great to see Malcom from La Belle Sauvage again, now 20 years older. There’s so much to love here and there’s a lot that shocked me as well, the changes enforced by those in charge that strip Lyra of her home and the safety of Jordan’s College, the paranoia and suspicion threatening anyone who poses even a remote threat or has an opinion. I was stunned by some many events that unfolded. The ending almost dislocated my jaw and I cannot wait for the series finale.
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