As Lyra grows up, Philip Pullman’s materials grow darker

Two years after Philip Pullman published La Belle Sauvage, the prequel to His Dark Materials trilogy, we have its long-awaited sequel, The Secret Commonwealth. Set ten years after the end of The Amber Spyglass, it follows the further adventures of Lyra, now a 21-year-old student at St Sophia’s College. Oxford. No longer a child, orphaned and (as she is about to discover) penniless, she has bigger problems even than her yearning for Will. She is estranged from her daemon, Pantalaimon (or Pan).

Part of Pullman’s striking originality lies in his conception of a world like and unlike our own, in which human souls are visible as animals. Everybody must stay close to theirs, but Lyra has learnt to separate from Pan — something that makes her a terrifying freak. While apart from her one night, Pan witnesses the murder of a botanist, recently returned from the ‘Near East’, where fanatics are destroying its unique roses. The two set off to find out why.

Alas, the passionate, dreamy child who once read her truth-telling alethiometer through grace has changed. Two books extolling reason have left a marked impression on the adult Lyra. It’s the kind of thing that (like denying Narnia) afflicts many child protagonists as they grow up, and in consequence, Pan leaves her a short way into Lyra’s new adventure. ‘GONE TO LOOK FOR YOUR IMAGINATION,’ he says in a parting note; and so Lyra’s most urgent quest is to be reunited with him.

She is one of the great heroines of children’s literature, the direct descendant of Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden and Joan Aiken’s Dido Twite. Despite her fluent lying, she is, we were told in His Dark Materials, without imagination. Yet what precisely is imagination? What is Dust?

Pullman tackles this as he plunges us into Lyra’s adult psyche, describing the discomfiture of the male gaze and the terror of near rape with assurance.