The Book of Dust Trilogy by Philip Pullman
Philip Pullman wrote the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials (beginning with The Golden Compass) back in the late nineties. These books center on a young girl, Lyra Belacqua, living in an alternate reality England where every human is born with a shapeshifting animal companion known as a daemon.
In the His Dark Materials trilogy, readers follow Lyra’s story as she thwarts the Magisterium, a religious-organization-turned-government that controls society by suppressing knowledge. Lyra meets a boy from our world who possesses a knife capable of cutting through the invisible veils between dimensions. The two of them travel to other realities, trying to understand what binds these worlds together – a substance known as Dust.
I loved these books when I was young, so you can imagine my delight when, in 2017, Philip Pullman began another trilogy, THE BOOK OF DUST, still focused on Lyra’s story, but with a wider lens.
Volume one, LA BELLE SAUVAGE, details the events that brought Lyra to Jordan College – Lyra’s father left her as a ward of Jordan when she was an infant. The protagonist of this novel is Malcolm Polstead, an eleven-year-old boy whose parents run an inn three miles from Oxford.
He spends his time paddling his canoe, proudly referred to as La Belle Sauvage, up and down the river. He runs errands for his family and the nuns living in a priory on the opposite bank. The nuns have taken in a baby – Lyra – and when her father visits the inn, Malcolm takes him to visit the priory.
Soon, the whole region begins experiencing heavy rainfall, which swells the river and destroys the priory. Luckily Malcolm and Alice, a teenager working at the inn, are able to rescue Lyra just as the river begins to flood.
Malcolm and Alice get Lyra into La Belle Sauvage and the three of them begin flowing down river. They intend to take Lyra to Jordan College in Oxford, but the current is too strong. Instead, they follow the river to London – where Lyra’s father lives. Along the way the group have many misadventures, and multiple encounters with a dangerous man who is after Lyra.
Volume two, THE SECRET COMMONWEALTH, picks up Lyra’s story after the events of the original trilogy. Lyra is now a twenty-year-old undergraduate at a ladies college in Oxford.
Lyra and her daemon, Pan, are having difficulty adjusting back to a normal life after their adventures. One of the last places that Will and Lyra visited was the world of the dead – a place where no daemon can follow. Lyra had to leave Pan behind, and neither of them has truly come to terms with that trauma.
The physical result of the separation is their ability to leave one another’s side – a feat impossible for most humans and their daemons. Pan takes advantage of this to storm off on his own whenever he and Lyra get into a fight. On one of these excursions, he witnesses a murder.
The dying man entrusts Pan with a key to a locker, inside he and Lyra find a journal that tells of a building deep in the desert where they grow a special rose that grants the ability to see Dust. The journal says that daemons are not allowed to go to this building, and describes how people who want to go in must separate from their daemons.
Pan wants to know more about these mysteries, but Lyra would rather keep her head down and deal with more practical concerns. She and Pan get into another argument, this time about the ways that Lyra has changed since they returned from their adventures. The next morning he is gone, and Lyra finds a note that says “gone to look for your imagination.”
But a human without a daemon, or a daemon without a human, is never completely safe. Other daemons can sense that something is off with Lyra, and it makes their humans nervous. Lyra will have to call on friends both old and new to find Pan and bring him home.
The third volume in the trilogy is in the works right now, and there is very little information about it. But the library has copies of La Belle Sauvage and The Secret Commonwealth, if you would like to join me as I eagerly anticipate the conclusion of THE BOOK OF DUST.
