The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman: magic, adventures and love

The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth

Author: Philip Pullman

ISBN-13: 978-0241373330

Publisher: David Fickling Books with Penguin

Guideline Price: £20

Twenty years have passed since the events of La Belle Sauvage (2018), the first instalment in Philip Pullman’s new trilogy set in the same universe as his award-winning and seminal His Dark Materials (1995-2000). In The Book of Dust, Volume One, we saw the infant Lyra Belacqua embark on a journey that would change her world, when Malcolm Polstead and his daemon Asta braved waves and intrigue to bring her to safety.

It is seven years since the closing scene of The Amber Spyglass, where readers left Lyra Silvertongue and her true love Will Parry on a park bench in Oxford’s Botanic Gardens.

Now, the Lyra we knew is older. She has grown up and is now in her second year at Oxford College. Malcolm, the boy who saved her, has grown up too, now a man guided always by his sense of duty and justice. When Lyra’s daemon Pantalaimon witnesses a murder, they are bound together again in a journey that will take them across the world and beyond; through Europe and into Asia, searching for a demon-haunted city and the secret of the mystery surrounding the Dust.

Readers and critics alike waited almost 18 years for the first instalment in Pullman’s new trilogy, La Belle Sauvage. It is a testament to the extraordinary imaginative power of His Dark Materials that such a wait only served to whet the appetite of its intended audience. The wait for The Secret Commonwealth was nowhere near as arduous but the appetite for its release was no less fierce.

Pullman is a consummate and gifted storyteller and his narrative skill and linguistic dexterity are on full display here. As Lyra faces darker and more complex threats, she herself is revealed to be more and more complex. Hard to read and jadedly cynical, she frequently causes her daemon Pantalaimon to despair that she has lost not only her imagination but the spirit and individuality that once shone in her so fiercely.

Her existential struggle to care about herself and her world is used by Pullman to ask the reader to look at our modern, global society and the kind of people we need to be to make a difference in a time when language, truth, community and integrity grow more and more vulnerable. William Blake shines as Pullman’s literary hero, a beacon of emotion and spirituality in a world driven mad by base illogicality.

There is always a temptation for critics and reviewers to place novels firmly in either the children’s literature or adult fiction camp, and this has already begun to happen with The Secret Commonwealth. Because Lyra Silvertongue is no longer a child, that must mean that her story is no longer for children.

As she finds herself having to negotiate a more complex path through a hostile world, of course her adventures should only be consumed by adults, because only adults could understand such things. Not only is this a pointless endeavour – readers have, and always will, read what they want to read, regardless of age banding categories and publishing marketing campaigns – it is also extraordinarily reductive.

By branding a book as adult fiction, it is theoretically removed from the sphere of children’s culture; “you’ll enjoy it when you’re older”. I say theoretically because books written for adults have been making their way into the hands of children since the printing press was invented. If anything, writers should aspire to produce literature for children because these books have to work so much harder than their adult fiction counterparts.

A children’s book must mean something. A children’s book must grow with the child that reads it, providing new insight, new inspiration, new meaning with every reading. A children’s book must offer the reader a way to look at the world that supports them to grow into knowledge of themselves and others. Children’s books have to be extraordinary because children are extraordinary. Why else do adults read the Harry Potter series as though it were written for them, if not to remember what it was like to be a child with the power to change the world?

While Pullman’s publishers have been quick to state that Volume Two of the Book of Dust is not suitable for younger readers, it is clear that Pullman is writing for those who were enchanted by His Dark Materials as children, and for those children who have yet to be enchanted by the series.

Following Lyra into young adulthood allows the series as a whole to grow with the individuals who read it. This means that The Secret Commonwealth is a book for children and young adults in the best of ways; in the troubled times in which we continue to find ourselves, it champions the importance of knowing oneself, and of using that knowledge to care for the ones we love. In order to live in the world, we need magic, we need adventures, and we need love. The Second Volume in The Book of Dust fulfils all of these needs, and more. For those too young to read it now, it stands as a future inheritance for those yet to discover the essential magic of His Dark Materials.