Title: Book of Dust - La Belle Sauvage and The Secret Commonwealth
Author: Pullman, Philip
Published by: David Fickling Books (Penguin Books)
Year: 2017; 2020
First published: David Fickling Books (Penguin Books) 2017; 2019
Date reviewed: 11.24
ISBN: 978-0-385-60441-3; 987-0-241-37335-4
The first two volumes in the trilogy "The Book of Dust"

These are the first two books of Pullman’s second trilogy about Lyra, the mysterious substance called ‘Dust’ and the attempts of the powerful and sinister Magisterium to suppress all knowledge of it. The third book hasn’t yet been published. The two books are set in Lyra’s world which was introduced in the first trilogy, ‘His Dark Materials’ but this time there is no crossing over into other worlds.

The first book, ‘La Belle Sauvage’, tells Lyra’s origin story; her birth, parents, and how as a baby she came to be accepted into ‘academic asylum’ in Oxford’s Jordan College. Some characters from ‘His Dark Materials’ appear as they were some eleven years before those events; other important characters are introduced for the first time.

The second book, ‘The Secret Commonwealth’, takes up Lyra’s story about ten years after Dark Materials. Now she is a 21-year-old student at St Sophia’s College in Oxford, but she has changed as she grew older and she and her daemon Pan are hardly on speaking terms. Meanwhile the power of the Magisterium is growing and Lyra’s life is at risk, though she doesn’t realise this at first. Many of the characters who have been part of her earlier life are caught up in her story.

Pullman is a great story-teller and both books carry the reader along at a brisk pace. I found it easy to gulp them both down in big chunks over a short time. Although ‘La Belle Sauvage’ has its darker moments, ‘The Secret Commonwealth’ is much darker and more violent than anything before; enough I suspect to keep it off the ‘young adult fiction’ library shelves where ‘La Belle Sauvage’ is sometimes filed.

As for the outcome and any resolution, we must wait for the third and final book due, according to the author, in late 2024 (or, I suspect, more probably in 2025).