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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He enlists the help of a young alethometrist, Olivier Bonneville (son of Gerard Bonneville) to find Lyra, but Bonneville defies him and sets off without authority. 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.

Malcolm is 11 years older than Lyra and spent nearly all of La Belle Sauvage caring for her while she was a baby; now, he is a professor and she is a student, and also he was briefly her teacher when she was 15. In a book full of strange happenings, turning Lyra into an enthusiast of a philosopher who is, for essentially, an Ayn Rand surrogate, by the way, is one of the strangest.

It is seven years since readers left Lyra and the love of her young life, Will Parry, on a park bench in Oxford's Botanic Gardens at the end of the ground-breaking, bestselling His Dark Materials sequence. Blake would certainly have concurred with Pullman’s satire on showily rationalistic philosophy, a scepticism so complete that it deadens the soul. But she cannot retreat into her books, as she soon realises that she remains a person of interest to the Magisterium. Pan insists that the books Lyra is reading have blinded her to the essential non-rational elements of life, while Lyra angrily scorns any appeal to emotion. This declaration sounds permissive (you can believe whatever you like) but is in fact stern (you should listen harder to the logic of your instinctual beliefs).

Pullman maintains this series is about the nature of Dust, but the relationships between dæmon and human os such a prominent theme, carried on from La Belle Sauvage (Bonneville's treatment of his own dæmon still haunts), that perhaps The Book of Dæmon would have been a more appropriate title. He spent part of his childhood in Australia, where he first met the wonders of comics, and grew to love Superman and Batman in particular. First, there’s Marcel Delamare, Lyra’s estranged uncle who blames her for the death of her mother, his sister, the diabolical Mrs. It's not perfect by any means - you get the feeling that Pullman is so intimately entwined with the myriad strands of the universe that he's created that he struggles to let anything go - and there is an insertion into the narrative of an element from one of the mini spin off books he wrote that feels a little clumsy - even if the eventual pay off is one of those jaw dropping imaginative feats that we've come to expect from him. The 2024 election cycle is here, and Vox is one of the last places readers can access free, accurate, and transparent information.

La Belle Sauvage, the first volume of "equal" trilogy, worked in two ways: first, as a gentle re-introduction into the world, then, later, as a jolt to the system. And an enormous part of that pull is thanks to Lyra, who felt like a thoroughly modern heroine in 2000 and continues to feel like one now, nearly two decades later. This is another paragraph Book Description: 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. Asked an awkward question by a suspicious stranger, she fails to produce the fearless lies she would once have managed, and thinks to herself that “now she just lacked inventiveness, or energy, or chutzpah”.