The #1 New York Times Bestseller!Return to the world of His Dark Materials—now an HBO original series starring Dafne Keen, Ruth Wilson, Andrew Scott, and Lin-Manuel Miranda—in the second volume of Philip Pullman’s new bestselling masterwork The Book of Dust. The windows between the many worlds have been sealed and the momentous adventures of Lyra Silvertongue’s youth are long behind her—or so … youth are long behind her—or so she thought. Lyra is now a twenty-year-old undergraduate at St. Sophia’s College and intrigue is swirling around her once more. Her daemon Pantalaimon is witness to a brutal murder, and the dying man entrusts them with secrets that carry echoes from their past.
The more Lyra is drawn into these mysteries, the less she is sure of. Even the events of her own past come into question when she learns of Malcolm Polstead’s role in bringing her to Jordan College.
Now Lyra and Malcolm will travel far beyond the confines of Oxford, across Europe and into the Levant, searching for a city haunted by daemons, and a desert said to hold the truth of Dust. The dangers they face will challenge everything they thought they knew about the world, and about themselves.
Praise for The Book of Dust
“It’s a stunning achievement, this universe Pullman has created and continues to build on.” —The New York Times
“Pullman’s writing is simple, unpretentious, beautiful, true. The conclusion to The Book of Dust can’t come soon enough.”—The Washington Post
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I enjoyed this quite a bit, even more than La Belle Sauvage (book 1 in this second trilogy). This one has again the huge scope and cast of characters more reminiscent of His Dark Materials. And unlike La Belle Sauvage, the Lyra in this one is not an infant and it’s a treat to encounter her again and now an adult.
Not quite as believable as the other books in the series… Expecting the reader to accept some pretty big coincidences/turns of events
The Secret of Commenwealth is the second book in the new trilogy by Philip Pullman, The book of Dust.
Years as past since the event in the last book of His Dark Materials. Lyra is now twenty years old. The relationship between Lyra and her daemons, Pan, is not doing really well. Since now they can seperate, Pan is leaving sometime at night. On one night, he witness a murder which gonna lead both him and Lyra on a dangerous path. Pan will leave Lyra to find her imagination that he accused her to have lost. Lyra will also leave to find him and that will take her far behond Oxford, in search for a lost city haunted by daemons.
I have really love this book and looking foward for the next one in this trilogy. Sad about whats going on between Lyra and Pan and hope for them to be reunite once again and to mend their relationship.
I was ecstatic to hear that Philip Pullman was releasing a follow up trilogy to His Dark Materials, three of my all-time favorite books. The second new volume, The Secret Commonwealth, continues Lyra’s story some years after the end of The Amber Spyglass, as she nears adulthood, and takes us on a series of heartbreaking and thrilling adventures. If you’re a fan of the first trilogy, or enjoyed the start of the series on HBO, I can’t recommend the Book of Dust enough, and can’t wait to read the final volume.
I liked this book, but I didn’t like it as much as I’d hoped.
What’s to like: The overall story is intriguing and did leave me wanting to read the next book in the series.
What I didn’t like: The arguments between Pan and Lyra get old REALLY fast. I know they serve a purpose, but there are so many of them it just gets repetitive and starts to lose its punch. Also, there’s overly long bits of people just thinking, thinking, thinking that felt like it could have been tightened up. I suppose it all boils down to the pacing of the book being really off which made it less enjoyable to read than I’d expected.
It’s hard to convey just how excited I was when I found out that Philip was writing a sequel to his wildly successful and influential His Dark Materials. I’d loved those books so much, and the prospect of returning to the world–to say nothing of once again following the adventures of Lyra and Pantalaimon–was almost too much.
And then La Belle Sauvage was published, and it was everything I wanted. Though set several years before the events of The Golden Compass, it was just so wonderful and enchanting to be back in the same quasi-Victorian novel of that first book, and to see the tumultuous events that led up to Lyra being granted sanctuary at Jordan College.
I absolutely loved the first book and, if possible, I loved the sequel even more.
The Secret Commonwealth takes place several years after the events of His Dark Materials. Lyra is now a student at Oxford, though she has increasingly found herself in conflict with her beloved dæmon Pantalaimon, who believes that she has lost her powers of imagination. Meanwhile, the Magisterium is up to its old tricks, with the sinister and cunning Marcel Delamare manipulating events and attempting to find Lyra. And then there is Malcolm Polstead, a Scholar at Oxford and part of a secret service organization known as Oakley Street, who attempts to both help Lyra and work against the repressions of the Magisterium.
One gets the feeling reading this book that Pullman is, to a degree, writing the story that he first envisioned when he finished The Golden Compass. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who felt that the story sort of went off the rails a bit in both The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, which are so different from the first book that it’s sometimes hard to remember you’re reading part of the same series. (Let me be clear. I LOVED those books, but they were also not at all what I thought they were going to be when I finished The Golden Compass). Here, however, we stay strictly within Lyra’s world, and I personally loved that aspect of it.
The Secret Commonwealth is a bit more sprawling than other entries in the series, and we actually get to learn a bit more about what makes the Magisterium tick, largely through the perspective of Marcel Delamare. (We also get some fascinating glimpses into his personal connections to Lyra). I actually enjoyed these parts of the book quite a lot, not just because I love it when we hear from the villains (though I love that) but also because we learn a little bit about the history of this sprawling and increasingly repressive organization.
As with His Dark Materials, The Secret Commonwealth contends with some of the most pressing issues of our time. While, of course, much of Pullman’s biting criticism is reserved for organized religion and its dogmatism, he also gets in a few well-aimed digs at postmodernism, moral relativism, and rigid rationality. In terms of its critique of religion, Pullman has also expanded the range a bit, and the inclusion of “men from the mountains,” who happen to be from the Middle East and are repressive, dogmatic, and violent, seems sometimes to be a bit too on the nose in its correlation to certain groups in that area (their resemblance to ISIS is surely not an accident).
For all of its criticisms, however, the book is essentially an act of humanism. Pullman has a profound faith in the essential goodness of human nature, and there is no better illustration of this than the character of Lyra. Though she has grown up quite a bit from when we last saw her, there is much about her that accords with what we learned about her in His Dark Materials. She is still impulsive and brave and sometimes foolhardy, but she is also deeply sympathetic as a character, and she has a drive to be kind to others less fortunate than herself.
Yet Lyra can also be tremendously frustrating, and her growing rift with Pan is the greatest example of this. By the time that the novel takes place, she’s been falling into the trap of those new thinkers who argue either that there is no meaning to the world or that one should only use logic and reason. Though Pan tries to talk her out of this, she is so much under their sway that they end up fighting more often than not. And, as the novel makes clear, the events of the previous trilogy continue to cast a long shadow, particularly her decision to leave him beyond in the Land of the Dead.
By the end of The Secret Commonwealth we are presented with almost as many questions as we have answers. One of the narrative cruxes of the novel involves a certain variety of rose, which may provide some sort of elevated form of consciousness, and while many of the characters talk about it, it remains unclear exactly what it is or why the Magisterium wants it. We also don’t quite know much about the legendary city that Lyra seeks, except that it is supposedly the abode of dæmons who have been separated from their people. Assuredly, many of these–though probably not all–will be resolved by the end of the final volume.
All told, The Secret Commonwealth reveals that Pullman is still a master storyteller, writing at the height of his powers. I found myself absolutely enchanted by the story from the first page to the last, and as always this is a world that you can truly lose yourself in. The novel, at least for me, was a very quick read. While I wanted to take my time and savour it, I ultimately finished it far too quickly. I have a bad feeling that it’s going to be quite a while until we see the concluding volume. Sigh. Looks like it might be time to re-read the original trilogy again.
The second edition of Pullman’s prequel trilogy to his Dark Materials series is equally excellent to the first. I cannot wait for the third and will be hopeful that he will continue to write in this full-formed universe.
This is the second book in The Book of Dust trilogy, but as the events of the first book took place twenty years earlier, everything feels new. The characters have grown and have lived full lives in the interim. Even Lyra has come far since the events of the first trilogy. She’s an adult now, with all the joys and problems that brings. Mostly problems: there’s no money to support her anymore and the atmosphere in her college has turned hostile to her. Even Pan is acting up — or is it her.
Events in Oxford push Lyra, Pan, and Malcom to separate quests through Europe towards Near-East where answers to philosophical questions about daemons might be found. Their journeys aren’t easy, although Malcom seems to sail through the troubles fairly unscathed. And the bad guys of the Church are at their heels the whole time, each with their own agendas.
There’s a large background plot about dust that Lyra and Malcom are being drawn into, if slowly. Just when the book reaches the point where we might finally get some answers, it ends, leaving the biggest questions for the last book. I must say though, that the world is in such a state that I don’t see how everything can be solved in 700 pages.
I enjoyed this book as much as I have all the earlier ones. The larger plot was slow to unfold, but there was a lot going on in the characters’ lives, with their separate point of view chapters, which kept the pace good. This isn’t a ‘children’s’ book anymore; Lyra is an adult and so she views the world with adult eyes. The philosophical questions she ponders, and the violence and threat of rape she faces, are decidedly darker and more complicated than what has been in earlier books. There were some clumsy additions too, like a mention of periods, which — like in real life — start at the worst possible moment. But I liked the darker tones introduced and I will absolutely read the next book too.