Towards the end of the long, eventful and hazardous journey Lyra Belacqua makes during the course of The Secret Commonwealth, she meets a man called Abdel Ionides, a merchant. Lyra has travelled east and east, far from Oxford, far from anywhere she knows, carried by fear and sorrow and longing. It would do a disservice to disclose the reason for her travels, or what she seeks; but no one who knows Lyra would doubt her sense of purpose. Ionides offers to guide her but warns her of the dangers they will face. “We shall be treading on the borders of the invisible, trespassing in the realm of the uncanny,” he tells her, and demands a high price for his help. But Lyra haggles, for she is unfazed by what he describes. “I have spent weeks of my life in the presence of the invisible and the uncanny,” she replies. “They are not strange to me.”
Nor are they strange to the readers who have become devoted followers of her remarkable adventures. We first met her, a fierce girl of around 12, in Northern Lights, the book that introduced readers not only to Lyra but to Pullman’s vivid, alternative steampunk universe, one that runs at an angle to our own. His Oxford is recognisable yet strange: there is no Jordan College in today’s city. In Pullman’s world there are anbaric lights instead of electric ones; chocolatl is a favoured drink and images appear in photograms. Most strikingly, human beings have daemons, animal-spirits which reflect and challenge the people to whom they belong. To add to the autumn excitement brought about by the publication of The Secret Commonwealth, Pullman’s world will be made visible on-screen in November in the BBC’s much-anticipated adaptation of the trilogy known as His Dark Materials, a much welcome reboot following the 2007 release of The Golden Compass, an unsatisfying film adaptation of Northern Lights.
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