It is cruel to us, this world of publishing. It makes us wait two years for a book, the reading of which is the work of a frenzied day and then the waiting begins again.
Here is is then, the second Book of Dust, the long-awaited, much anticipated sequel to La Belle Sauvage review. And it is a veritable Empire Strikes Back of a novel - a dark, fascinating, disturbing interlude between the heroic adventure of an innocent boy... and the promise of an epic final showdown between good and evil.
It´s quite different from what came before. As with the Dark Materials trilogy, the leap between books one and two is a leap between adolescence and adulthood. The triumph of La Belle Sauvage, to some extent, was in its beautiful, dramatic and honest but (largely) quite simple storytelling. The Secret Commonwealth, which in part feels like a travelogue as Lyra Silvertongue and others make their way across land and sea from Oxford to Aleppo, is really a journey of self-exploration, full of philosophy, mysticism and psychology as well as something of a rip through Brexitland as Pullman explores the underpinnings and strategies of authoritarianism.
It´s too simple to call it a coming of age story, not least because both Lyra (in the first trilogy, 10 years prior to the events in this book) and Malcolm Polstead (in La Belle Sauvage, 10 years prior to that) have already experienced such trials. This is far more adult than that, delving into that uncomfortable and disorientating feeling that most will have when their lives become unmoored from the certainties they have previously lived with.
It´s not an easy book to review without giving spoilers but it largely follows the quest of Lyra, now 20 and an undergraduate in her home town of Oxford, and Malcolm, a Professor at the University, as they separately head east. Both are following a trail laid at first by the murder of a botanist on an Oxford canal bank, witnessed by Lyra´s daemon Pan. They both are also in search of something precious they have lost. Each is also, in their own way, engaged in the business of Oakley Street, the secretive government department set up to counter the malign influence and of the all-powerful Magisterium. In the lands to which they are headed, the once thriving business of rose-growing and the production of its oil is being disrupted by violent incidents, possibly at the Magisterium´s behest.
The Secret Commonwealth is grand in ambition and scale, deeply atmospheric, rich in detail and, as we have become used to with Pullman, it lavishes care and attention on the development of characters. As with all previous installments in this story, I suspect a second reading will enrich it, and I plan to do that.
And that will have to keep us occupied while Mr Pullman completes the cycle.