The Secret Commonwealth

Pullman's second volume in the sequel trilogy to His Dark Materials, The Secret Commonwealth is, like the Lyra depicted within its pages, very much all grown up. Whereas La Belle Sauvage, the first book, was dreamlike and fantastical, almost mythic in it's scope, The Secret Commonwealth is darker, crueler and rooted in a world beset by violence and unrest.
Lyra is a student at Oxford as the books opens, still studying the Alethiometer (although not as instinctively as she did when younger) and increasingly at odds with her daemon (a sort of conscience made manifest) Pantalaimon, who thinks she has “lost her imagination” through reading the works of avant garde philosophers. When Pantalaimon witnesses a murder it sets in motion a dangerous tide of events that turns Lyra's world upside down. She becomes the target of the unwelcome attentions of the CCD, the secret police of the Magisterium (this world's version of the Catholic Church) and argues so much with Pantalaimon that he leaves her to go and “find her imagination”.
Devastated, Lyra must trust in the help of the shadowy intelligence service known as Oakley Street, even as dark forces close in and she has to flee for her life as well as to find her daemon. Helped by Professor Malcolm Polstead (the same Malcolm from La Belle Sauvage who had rescued her as a baby) and the Gyptians, Lyra sets off on a perilous journey across Europe and into a Middle East beset by troubles.
Meanwhile the Magisterium's whizz kid Alethiometer reader, Olivier Bonneville, is on her trail, reporting to Marcel Delamare, Lyra's power hungry uncle. Bonneville is the son of the crazed Bonneville from the first book, whom Malcolm had killed, and his heart is full of vengeance.
Pullman traces the separate journeys of Lyra, Pantalaimon, Polstead and Bonneville as they converge on a place known only as “The Blue Hotel” somewhere near Aleppo in Syria, where it is said daemons separated from their humans live. The world depicted here teeters on the edge of chaos, with the Magisterium and a shadowy corporation known as Thuringia Potash vying for control of a special type of Rosewater derived from roses grown in the desert of Kamarkan, which enables the user to “see” particles of Dust. Rose growers have their garden destroyed, are driven from their homes and livelihoods. Refugees flee the area. Soldiers patrol everywhere.
This is a big book, but it never feels like a long read. It is very much a “page turner' which is testament to Pullman's skill as a writer. There is violence and cruelty here, and the book is in no way a “children's novel”. The themes are adult, dealing with power, vengeance, religion and capitalism. Lyra suffers on her journey and by the end of the book she is barely holding it together. The book ends with the words “to be continued”. I await the final book in the trilogy with bated breath.
Highly recommended.