The Secret Commonwealth: The Book of Dust Volume Two: From the world of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials - now a major BBC series (The book of dust, 2)

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But she cannot retreat into her books, as she soon realises that she remains a person of interest to the Magisterium. She is forced to move by Werner Hammond, the new Master of Jordan College, and protects Hassall's belongings from the Magisterium agents who ransack her rooms. Pantalaimon confronts the author Gottfried Brande at his home in Wittenberg, but is forced to leave when Brande pointedly ignores him.

The second volume of Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust sees Lyra, now twenty 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. Pullman is such a gifted story teller that what it lacked in novelty was more than made up for in the telling of the tale. Indeed, Pullman is more tempted to draw parallels with our world’s discontents than he has ever been. When an act of terrible violence breaks the peace of the Oxford night, Lyra and Pan's relationship reaches a crisis and they are drawn, far from home, into the dangerous factions of a world they had no idea existed. It is twenty 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.

One man who suffers from a melancholy like Lyra’s tells her that he looks for his dæmon everywhere he goes, that he is haunted by a dread “that I will see her with a man who is me, who is my double. Strauss keeps this information from the Magisterium, as they will certainly consider the rose industry to be heretical. When an act of terrible violence breaks the peace of the Oxford night, Lyra and Pan’s relationship reaches a crisis and they are drawn, far from home, into the dangerous factions of a world they had no idea existed.

expecting somehow for their random acts to bring about a specific result - but then part of that is the whole concept of the "secret commonwealth", which starts to feel quite pseudo-religious in its concept of a higher purpose or being. Pan insists that the books Lyra is reading have blinded her to the essential non-rational elements of life, while Lyra angrily scorns any appeal to emotion. Malcolm, whose help Lyra soon recruits, has grown into an eccentric young academic with a tendresse for Lyra, his former student, that is distinctly adult.He then narrowly misses catching up with Lyra, who has been disguised with the help of Bud and Anita Schlesinger. Here we get a good deal of ecclesiastical power politics, with the deliciously Machiavellian Marcel Delamere eliminating rivals and concentrating power in his own hands. I found it highly thought-provoking and after a relatively slow first half, the story accelerates - and keeps going - becoming a real page turner. He is best known for the His Dark Materials trilogy (Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass), which has been named one of the top 100 novels of all time by Newsweek.

The Secret Commonwealth begins years after the events of His Dark Materials, and Lyra is 20 years old now, a college student. Brande has published a huge novel written in a prose purged of all figurative language, which proposes that daemons are illusions: it has become a vogue throughout Europe. It features Lyra Silvertongue as a twenty-year-old undergraduate, [3] travelling to Central Asia via the Levant. The main negative I had with the book was the way people spear off randomly in different directions, often internationally.

On arrival, she hires a guide, Abdel Ionides, to take her through the desert to the isolated area of ruins known as the Blue Hotel. Photograph: BBC/Bad Wolf/HBO View image in fullscreen Dafne Keen as Lyra Belacqua in the BBC series of His Dark Materials, 2019.