Next month, the television adaptation of Philip Pullman's peerless fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials hits OSN and to say it's one of the television events of the year is probably an understatement. This engrossing chronicle of two children on a quest to find the awful truth behind the disappearance of their peers is so rich in fantasy, ideas, humanity and adventure that the disastrous flop of the 2007 film starring Nicole Kidman only served to harden the idea that Pullman writes with almost unparalleled depth and nuance. A series with several seasons will hopefully be able to capture his craft far better than a 113-minute movie.
So it's in this atmosphere of renewed interest in Pullman's world of witches, "gyptians", armoured polar bears and parallel universes that the second book in his connected trilogy The Book of Dust has landed.
Pullman says the intention was for the trilogy to be an "equal", rather than a prequel or sequel, but to all intents and purposes, The Secret Commonwealth is a follow-up. Seven years have passed since the end of His Dark Materials and our savage hero Lyra has grown up … a bit. We find her more or less where we always find her to start with: in a college in Oxford, contending with the malevolent Magisterium, a repressive religious force hell-bent on consolidating its power.
A grown-up Lyra is a fascinating proposition, if only because it does confirm that Pullman's books have never been "for children", even if they've won children's book prizes. There has always been the sense that Pullman is as interested in discussing organised religion, science and philosophy as he is depicting characters rushing to aerodocks to travel across Brytain on Zeppelins and drinking hot chocolate.
Now, the shackles are off. Innocence has been well and truly lost – one of the basic tenets of His Dark Materials. Lyra has to contend with money issues, relationships and, somewhat shockingly, narrowly avoids a gang rape. The very first chapter has mysterious men committing the murder of a botanist on an Oxford canal towpath.
The murder is witnessed by Pantalaimon, Lyra's daemon. For those uninitiated in the His Dark Materials multiverse, the daemon is closest to the physical manifestation of a person's soul, spirit or inner-self, taking the form of a creature. It's surely Pullman's greatest creative idea, a beautiful way of looking anew at the characters we create for ourselves.
But the reason Pan sees the murder and Lyra does not, is immediately key to this book and this world; daemons are meant to be inseparable from their humans, but the events of the previous trilogy have meant this pine marten and young woman have become so. They learn that, somewhere in the Middle East, there may be a ruined city in the desert inhabited by daemons who have been separated in this way.
In fact, heartbreakingly, given what they have been through previously, Lyra and Pan have fallen out. “You used to be optimistic,” he says. “You used to think that whatever we did would turn out well. Now you’re cautious, you’re anxious … you’re pessimistic.”
Lyra, of course, is like anyone grappling with adulthood; vulnerable, unsure of herself, prone to misjudgement, sceptical. So when she finds a note from Pan saying "gone to look for your imagination", it sets her off on a quest to the Middle East to try and solve the murder and find her daemon. Meanwhile, Malcolm, her saviour from previous book La Belle Sauvage, is sent off to find out more about the strange roses that only grow in the desert, but whose essence appears key to understanding "Dust" – the particle that explains consciousness that the Magisterium wants to control. Naturally, too, they're all being tracked by spies and Machiavellian forces who want to destroy them.
Lyra journeys through Prague to Turkey and eventually Syria, and it’s hugely exciting to see a writer of Pullman’s brilliance take on these locations without ever resorting to cliche.
And perhaps because of the geographical spread, it certainly feels as if Pullman is keener to comment on our world as it stumbles into the third decade of the 21st century. There's always been a great suspicion of organised religion in the author's books, and here, the "brotherhood of the holy purpose" take on the role of the fundamentalists, as a refugee crisis takes hold and big Pharma lurks in the background.
“Anxiety was everywhere, built into the very molecules of the world,” Pullman writes – and if sometimes the authorial hand is a bit too apparent, it’s a rare thing indeed for a book this thrilling, this fantastical, to have so much that’s so urgent to say about our world.
Which is why people who loved the original His Dark Materials series as children or young adults, will surely love The Secret Commonwealth. Because, like Lyra, they too have grown up. For everyone else it's confirmation that genre should be put to one side. Philip Pullman is one of the finest novelists in the English language, full stop.
