The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2)
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • DON’T MISS THE EPIC FINALE TO THE BOOK OF DUST: THE ROSE FIELD, AVAILABLE NOW!
Return to the world of His Dark Materials and discover what comes next for Lyra, “one of fantasy’s most indelible heroines” (The New York Times Magazine).
“A big novel full of big ideas, big characters, and big sorrows . . . This book feels like a response to the darkness in our time.”—NPR
Lyra Silvertongue thought that the adventures of her youth were long behind her, but when her daemon, Pantalaimon, witnesses a brutal murder, they are suddenly caught up in crimes that carry unsettling echoes from their past.
But Lyra at twenty is very different from Lyra at thirteen. The lies she used to spin with ease no longer come, she and Pan are at odds, and her ability to trust—most of all in herself—has been shattered. On the run, Lyra finds a surprising new ally in Malcolm Polstead. Lyra and Malcolm will travel far beyond the confines of Oxford, across Europe and into the Levant, searching for a city haunted by daemons, and a desert said to hold the mystery of Dust.
To find the truth, Lyra will have to reconnect with the girl she once was and face dangers that will challenge everything she knows about her world.
Look for the entire trilogy of THE BOOK OF DUST:
La Belle Sauvage • The Secret Commonwealth • The Rose Field
And Lyra’s adventures begin in HIS DARK MATERIALS:
The Golden Compass • The Subtle Knife • The Amber Spyglass
Return to the world of His Dark Materials and discover what comes next for Lyra, “one of fantasy’s most indelible heroines” (The New York Times Magazine).
“A big novel full of big ideas, big characters, and big sorrows . . . This book feels like a response to the darkness in our time.”—NPR
Lyra Silvertongue thought that the adventures of her youth were long behind her, but when her daemon, Pantalaimon, witnesses a brutal murder, they are suddenly caught up in crimes that carry unsettling echoes from their past.
But Lyra at twenty is very different from Lyra at thirteen. The lies she used to spin with ease no longer come, she and Pan are at odds, and her ability to trust—most of all in herself—has been shattered. On the run, Lyra finds a surprising new ally in Malcolm Polstead. Lyra and Malcolm will travel far beyond the confines of Oxford, across Europe and into the Levant, searching for a city haunted by daemons, and a desert said to hold the mystery of Dust.
To find the truth, Lyra will have to reconnect with the girl she once was and face dangers that will challenge everything she knows about her world.
Look for the entire trilogy of THE BOOK OF DUST:
La Belle Sauvage • The Secret Commonwealth • The Rose Field
And Lyra’s adventures begin in HIS DARK MATERIALS:
The Golden Compass • The Subtle Knife • The Amber Spyglass
BUY THE BOOK
Community Reviews
Oh boy. Where do I start. (SPOILERS ahead, you've been warned).
What in the actual fuck, Mr. Pullman?
His Dark Materials is my favourite series ever and I've been waiting for this book ever since i was 13 years old when i first read the trilogy, so you can see how this comes as such a huge disappointment.
-this book is extremely problematic. Malcolm, the child protagonist of La Belle Sauvage is all grown up and he has feelingsTM for Lyra (he's 11 years old her elder) whom he taught when she was a 13/14 years old student. He mentions how he longed to cradle her face between his hands and kiss her mouth. Ew? Also Lyra has this sudden epiphany where she realizes that she's into older dudes because she subconsciously didn't want to betray Will's memory. (I could have done also without the passage where Lyra admits that she didn't do anything sexual with Will in the mulefa world and that they simply kissed when Farder Coram reveals how he regrets having left them alone then. Some things are better off not discussed). The whole plotpoint of Lyra and Malcolm being destined to be together like the mythical couple of the book found in Hassall's rucksack is reminiscent of the prophecy of the original trilogy which paints Lyra as Eve, the temptress, and Will as Adam, the tempted, so it seems like Mr. Pullman is into recycling these days and he threw Lyra into yet another man's arms. Lyra's brief childhood romance with Will felt right and sweet and the rightful completion of two books worth of character development (its ending, although heartbreaking, was right too); Pullman pushing these two characters together felt just rushed and more importantly wrong on all levels.
Also there are some other passages where Pullman unnecessarily sexualizes a character: when Bonneville is being interrogated by Malcolm and the latter remarks how Bonneville is trying to please/impress him since he's an older man (again with the older men) or when Alice is being interrogated by the Master and the CCD men and she oversexualizes her appearance to keep her cool.
And let's not get into the total unnecessary attempted rape scene at the near end which left a bad taste in my mouth. The whole book was unexpectedly violent: I can't for the life of me recall if at the end of book 4 it's made clear that Alice has been raped by Bonneville Sr. (as a child), but if it wasn't, it is now, which makes that two female characters who have dealt with sexual assault in the same book. Why oh why Mr. Pullman, what kind of Freud complex do you have.
-i feel like Pullman's editor didn't really do his job and left some chapters that we could have done without and didn't really move the plot along, like the one where the armed men take Malcolm and the rose growers as hostages, or the ones in Prague. I can't remember earlier ones since i struggled so much to read this book that it took me more than two weeks.
-the whole reason why Lyra and Pan have been fighting is eminently stupid. Lyra read a fictional book where daemons don't exist and whose author is a hardcore sceptic and an essay along the same lines and suddenly she's changed, she's lost her imagination and that's reason enough to fight with her daemon. This was badly executed since it doesn't come off to the reader as a valid enough reason for their altercations and later separation.
-i had the sensation that Pullman felt like he was being really smart and subtle drawing the parallel of the refugees caused by the mountain men and the very real refugees in souther Europe nowadays but i found it also badly executed and kind of forced.
-I can see how as a child Lyra relies on the help of many strangers in order to fulfill her destiny, but how, as a 21 year old woman, does she trust every single fricking person she comes across with, even more so since she's on the run from a secret organisation whose only aim is to do her harm?! This is just bad writing.
-It was very brief but in the later chapters Lyra wears a niqab in order to blend in and not to draw attention to herself, and the way Pullman portrayed it (“It felt nullifying”) is the usual western point of view that considers the hijab, niqab etc. as degrading. It isn't really my place to properly talk about it but I wish someone more knowledgeable on the subject did.
-and finally, even if I'm sure I forgot maaany little things that irked while reading, let's get to the plot itself: what was its purpose? Was there really a plot at all????
The story kicks off when Pan bears witness to a man's murder who entrusts with his dying breath the contents of his rucksack to Pan and Lyra. The whole rose enigma first appears as the main focus of the whole book and it tries to stay relevant until the end but it doesn't really have a purpose to Lyra's story when we get to the point where she and Pan have a final row and the latter leaves to search for her lost imagination.
Now, If I was Lyra, I would have made the logical assumption that my daemon had gone to Brande's or Talbot's to confront them (oh can we talk about how the entire scene of Pan's confrontation with Brande and his supposed daughter was just confusing) about the books that had caused my imagination to disappear, so I would have gone to Geneva to look for my daemon.
Lyra decides for some reason that Pan must be east bound to the Blue Hotel where lost daemons supposedly all go, so there she goes as well. The rest of the book is about her traveling east to look for this mythical city whose location isn't really known and Malcolm's parallel journey to the place (whose name I forgot) where the special roses are grown and where daemons can't go. The end. The book is a sequence of Lyra's and Malcolms's encounters with those willing to help them, peppered with the scenes of those who are trying to hinder their progress.
I thought the rose oil would be the new dust, that is the engine which drives the whole story but it came up short and it isn't given its proper focus.
Finally, I'll mention how far-fetched it is that her uncle went to great lenghts to create a whole new all-powerful organisation only to get his hands on his beloved late sister's daughter to get his revenge. Uhm what.
So yeah, that was it. I can't believe I waited this long for this pile of misogynistic crap.
What in the actual fuck, Mr. Pullman?
His Dark Materials is my favourite series ever and I've been waiting for this book ever since i was 13 years old when i first read the trilogy, so you can see how this comes as such a huge disappointment.
-this book is extremely problematic. Malcolm, the child protagonist of La Belle Sauvage is all grown up and he has feelingsTM for Lyra (he's 11 years old her elder) whom he taught when she was a 13/14 years old student. He mentions how he longed to cradle her face between his hands and kiss her mouth. Ew? Also Lyra has this sudden epiphany where she realizes that she's into older dudes because she subconsciously didn't want to betray Will's memory. (I could have done also without the passage where Lyra admits that she didn't do anything sexual with Will in the mulefa world and that they simply kissed when Farder Coram reveals how he regrets having left them alone then. Some things are better off not discussed). The whole plotpoint of Lyra and Malcolm being destined to be together like the mythical couple of the book found in Hassall's rucksack is reminiscent of the prophecy of the original trilogy which paints Lyra as Eve, the temptress, and Will as Adam, the tempted, so it seems like Mr. Pullman is into recycling these days and he threw Lyra into yet another man's arms. Lyra's brief childhood romance with Will felt right and sweet and the rightful completion of two books worth of character development (its ending, although heartbreaking, was right too); Pullman pushing these two characters together felt just rushed and more importantly wrong on all levels.
Also there are some other passages where Pullman unnecessarily sexualizes a character: when Bonneville is being interrogated by Malcolm and the latter remarks how Bonneville is trying to please/impress him since he's an older man (again with the older men) or when Alice is being interrogated by the Master and the CCD men and she oversexualizes her appearance to keep her cool.
And let's not get into the total unnecessary attempted rape scene at the near end which left a bad taste in my mouth. The whole book was unexpectedly violent: I can't for the life of me recall if at the end of book 4 it's made clear that Alice has been raped by Bonneville Sr. (as a child), but if it wasn't, it is now, which makes that two female characters who have dealt with sexual assault in the same book. Why oh why Mr. Pullman, what kind of Freud complex do you have.
-i feel like Pullman's editor didn't really do his job and left some chapters that we could have done without and didn't really move the plot along, like the one where the armed men take Malcolm and the rose growers as hostages, or the ones in Prague. I can't remember earlier ones since i struggled so much to read this book that it took me more than two weeks.
-the whole reason why Lyra and Pan have been fighting is eminently stupid. Lyra read a fictional book where daemons don't exist and whose author is a hardcore sceptic and an essay along the same lines and suddenly she's changed, she's lost her imagination and that's reason enough to fight with her daemon. This was badly executed since it doesn't come off to the reader as a valid enough reason for their altercations and later separation.
-i had the sensation that Pullman felt like he was being really smart and subtle drawing the parallel of the refugees caused by the mountain men and the very real refugees in souther Europe nowadays but i found it also badly executed and kind of forced.
-I can see how as a child Lyra relies on the help of many strangers in order to fulfill her destiny, but how, as a 21 year old woman, does she trust every single fricking person she comes across with, even more so since she's on the run from a secret organisation whose only aim is to do her harm?! This is just bad writing.
-It was very brief but in the later chapters Lyra wears a niqab in order to blend in and not to draw attention to herself, and the way Pullman portrayed it (“It felt nullifying”) is the usual western point of view that considers the hijab, niqab etc. as degrading. It isn't really my place to properly talk about it but I wish someone more knowledgeable on the subject did.
-and finally, even if I'm sure I forgot maaany little things that irked while reading, let's get to the plot itself: what was its purpose? Was there really a plot at all????
The story kicks off when Pan bears witness to a man's murder who entrusts with his dying breath the contents of his rucksack to Pan and Lyra. The whole rose enigma first appears as the main focus of the whole book and it tries to stay relevant until the end but it doesn't really have a purpose to Lyra's story when we get to the point where she and Pan have a final row and the latter leaves to search for her lost imagination.
Now, If I was Lyra, I would have made the logical assumption that my daemon had gone to Brande's or Talbot's to confront them (oh can we talk about how the entire scene of Pan's confrontation with Brande and his supposed daughter was just confusing) about the books that had caused my imagination to disappear, so I would have gone to Geneva to look for my daemon.
Lyra decides for some reason that Pan must be east bound to the Blue Hotel where lost daemons supposedly all go, so there she goes as well. The rest of the book is about her traveling east to look for this mythical city whose location isn't really known and Malcolm's parallel journey to the place (whose name I forgot) where the special roses are grown and where daemons can't go. The end. The book is a sequence of Lyra's and Malcolms's encounters with those willing to help them, peppered with the scenes of those who are trying to hinder their progress.
I thought the rose oil would be the new dust, that is the engine which drives the whole story but it came up short and it isn't given its proper focus.
Finally, I'll mention how far-fetched it is that her uncle went to great lenghts to create a whole new all-powerful organisation only to get his hands on his beloved late sister's daughter to get his revenge. Uhm what.
So yeah, that was it. I can't believe I waited this long for this pile of misogynistic crap.
Always a pleasure to read such an accomplished author. His prose pulls you right in and over the cliffhanger...
This was excellently good and horribly sad, and I made the mistake of catching up on the HBO His Dark Materials episodes while I was reading it, so that by the time I finished both I was in deep despair, thinking people are horrible, growing up is horrible, everything is horrible. But I loved it anyway and anxiously await the next.
This was excellently good and horribly sad, and I made the mistake of catching up on the HBO His Dark Materials episodes while I was reading it, so that by the time I finished both I was in deep despair, thinking people are horrible, growing up is horrible, everything is horrible. But I loved it anyway and anxiously await the next.
My daughter and I have enjoyed reading our way through first the Dark Materials Trilogy and now this Book of Dust trilogy. We devoured the first book in this series (La Belle Sauvage) which takes a deeper look into Lyra’s past, and how she came to be raised in Jordan College, Oxford. It also introduces the reader to Malcolm Polsted who is a worthy and likable main character alongside Lyra. This second book, however, proceeds in a much less appealing direction. It is really heavy going (even more so than usual) and much more politically and religiously themed. It was harder to engage with the plot, which in fact consisted of many slowly developing, and confusing subplots. The story also seemed over-saturated with characters and settings as Lyra travel thousands of miles across the globe. For some reason, this made it much harder to care about any of them, or what was happening. Lyra is an adult in this book, and this was less appealing somehow. My daughter - age ten- was quite unsettled by the developments in the relationship between Lyra and her daemon, Pan, and we were both very keen for Pullman to reintroduce some of the previous major characters but we remained unrewarded in that department. We now have to wait for the final installment which is, I believe, still being written. But, I’m happy to take a break and try something different for a while, to be honest. Perhaps by the time it is published, I will care enough to find out how this trilogy concludes...
The characters relationship drove me crazy.
It's been several years since I read the book. And all I remember is my frustration with Lyra for being sh*tty to Pan... 7 is a pretty generous rating :/
But what's more, Mr. Pullman... where is the next book? It was supposed to come out in 2024... there was some news that it's completed, so c'mon! I wanna finish the story!!
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