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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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.

It's more like The Force in Star Wars than the organised religion that Pullman aims his sights at clearly here, as he did in the older trilogy. If rationality can’t see things like the secret commonwealth, it’s because rationality’s vision is limited … We need to imagine as well as measure …” This is Lyra thinking, but it is also rather too clearly Pullman speaking to us. He witnesses the hijacking of a meeting of rose farmers and helps to diffuse the situation by killing their leader. These two stories may seem at odds with one another, but the balance each other well, and pushes us through a 600-page narrative like a speeding train.His English teacher, Miss Enid Jones, was a big influence on him, and he still sends her copies of his books. But soon enough Pullman pulls the rug out from under us yet again as we realize that she has changed. Anita’s investigations into TP, a pharmaceutical company seemingly linked with 'men from the mountains', has resulted in the firebombing of their apartment.

Pullman quickly abandons the familiar, and, much like the flood that takes place in the story, he brings forth a myriad of new elements into his world. Our own refugee crises and confrontations with Islamic fundamentalism (here “the brotherhood of the holy purpose”) have their ready analogies in his fictional universe. The Secret Commonwealth is a 2019 fantasy novel by Philip Pullman, the second volume of his planned trilogy The Book of Dust.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. It felt clear to me that this was aimed at an older audience than His Dark Materials, which is not to say the older books were not an immensely rewarding read for adults. 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. Bonneville, using the nauseating new method of reading the alethiometer, realises that Lyra and Pan are separated. It opens with a contrarian epigraph from Blake: “Everything possible to be believ’d is an image of the truth.